Handel-ed with care

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and conductor Gunther Schuller turned 80 last week. He lives in Boston, but Spokane has a claim on him, too, since Schuller is artistic director of the Northwest Bach Festival and has conducted the Spokane Symphony as its artistic director and at The Festival at Sandpoint.

Schuller is in Spokane to start the Bach Festival early this year, conducting two performances of Handel’s “Messiah” on Friday and Saturday at First Presbyterian Church.

The Bach Festival, in its 28th season, will not officially begin until late January. But the “Messiah” performances were scheduled earlier for both traditional and practical reasons.

“In this country, we have become used to ‘Messiah’ as a Christmas tradition,” Schuller said in a telephone interview last week. “And the players I wanted to use from the Spokane Symphony are already committed to performances with the symphony around the time of the festival.”

Schuller’s Spokane appearances come on the heels of a rash of 80th birthday celebrations that have included a monthlong residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, concerts up and down the East Coast, and symposiums at Harvard, M.I.T. and the New England Conservatory, where Schuller was president for 10 years.

The Library of Congress has named Schuller a “Living Legend” and will host a concert in his honor on Dec. 16 in Washington, D.C.

For his “Messiah” in Spokane, Schuller will use an orchestra of 23 players and a chorus of 24 singers. The soloists – soprano Janet Brown, mezzo-soprano Barbara Rearick, tenor Rockland Osgood and bass-baritone James Maddalena – are familiar to Bach Festival audiences.

“What I look for in the soloists I use for the music we do at the Bach Festival is an absolute purity of quality of the sounds they produce,” Schuller says. “That purity and beauty of the voice is the main projecting element, not just raw volume.”

Handel wrote “Messiah” in 24 days in the summer of 1741. In April 1742, he led its first performance in Dublin using a choir of about 30 and an orchestra roughly the same size.

A massive Handel Commemoration in Westminster Abbey in 1784 used nearly 500 performers under the leadership of three conductors, beginning a steady growth of gigantic “Messiah” performances that sometimes included as many as 3,000 performers. Only since World War II have “Messiah” performances and recordings returned to the scale like that used by Handel.

Schuller’s experience with the piece began at age 12 when he was a boy soprano in New York’s St. Thomas Church.

“I don’t know how many times I sang it then,” he says, “and then in my time at New England Conservatory, I would do huge chunks of it every Christmas.”

In restudying the oratorio for this weekend’s performances, Schuller made some discoveries.

“I’m the eternal learner,” he says, “and I realized a couple of big things in looking at it for these Spokane performances.

“First, the reason that it is and always has been so enormously popular with so many people is its beautiful simplicity – not that it is in any way simplistic. Unlike the many layers of the texture and complex harmonies you find in Bach’s music, Handel has an almost muscular rhythm, much simpler harmonies and melodies that are often just a single line supported by very light, clear accompaniment.

“I was also struck by the great care with which Handel indicated dynamics and tempo,” Schuller says. “Bach does not include very much specific information regarding dynamics and tempo – hardly any. But at every crucial place in ‘Messiah,’ Handel has put a piano or a forte marking and tempo is specified for every chorus and aria.

“It is through close attention to those dynamics that you produce the different colors to the sound that make for those wonderful expressive moods in the orchestra and voices,” Schuller adds. “Unfortunately, not many conductors pay much attention to those, so what you hear most often is something like a shouting match.”

Schuller calls Handel’s “Messiah” a perfect masterpiece.

“It covers so beautifully such a wide spectrum of (the) musical and (the) religious,” he says. “That is a dynamite combination that has caused it to move more people than any other piece of music.”