Handel's 'Messiah'
Holiday masterpiece introduces Philharmonic's new assistant conductor
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Lisa Jablow makes her debut as the Vermont Philharmonic's assistant conductor leading Handel's "Messiah" tonight in Montpelier and Sunday in Barre. STEFAN HARD/TIMES ARGUS |
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By Jim Lowe Times Argus Staff - Published: December 4, 2009
The success of Handel's "Messiah" might well be attributed to great storytelling – and some of the most beautiful music ever written.
"There's a lot of drama in this music," explained Lisa Jablow, the Vermont Philharmonic's new assistant conductor. "I think Handel was very sensitive to creating an atmosphere and a sense to the story being told in each of the separate numbers in the work. And, of course, the text was so wonderful. Even though English was not his native language, he was very tuned into the words he was setting."
Jablow will conduct the Vermont Philharmonic and Chorus in their annual performances of the Christmas portion of George Frederick Handel's "Messiah" – plus the "Hallelujah" Chorus and finale – tonight at 7:30 p.m. at St. Augustine's Catholic Church in Montpelier and Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at the Barre Opera House. The soloists will be soprano Claire Hungerford (replacing Kristen Bures, who withdrew because of illness), mezzo-soprano Wendy Hoffman Farrell, tenor Robert Dockstader and bass Erik Kroncke, joined by a chorus of some 70 voices.
Jablow, a Waterbury resident and senior music faculty member at Johnson State College, was recently named assistant conductor of the Vermont's oldest community orchestra. In addition to assisting Music Director Lou Kosma rehearse the orchestra, and filling in for him in his absence, Jablow is developing a chorus for the orchestra, as well as conducting the annual "Messiah" concerts.
"Messiah" presents all sorts of problems to any conductor. The German-born English citizen Handel (1685-1759) composed the three-and-a-half-hour oratorio, based on the life of Christ, in roughly two and a half weeks, between Aug. 22 and Sept. 14, 1741. (The Philharmonic performance isn't usually much longer than an hour.) Although he incorporated adaptations of some of his previous work, it was certainly a Herculean achievement. "Messiah" was premiered in Dublin, Ireland, in 1742, in London in 1743, and had its American premiere in 1818 in Boston. It has been a huge success ever since and is regularly performed virtually everywhere in the world – making it perhaps the best-known piece of music in history.
However, there is no single definitive version of "Messiah." Handel himself altered, rewrote and added numbers for various performances. During the 19th century, it became the fashion to perform the work with grossly inflated forces. During the 20th century, though, various performing editions have attempted to restore the score closer to its original proportions, tempos and rhythms.
Jablow said that she aims to be as faithful to the score as possible.
"Of course, taking into account considerations of style and historical context," Jablow said. "I'm certainly not going to perform Handel the same way I would perform Shostakovich, for example. There is that balance struck between the black dots that we all see on the page in front of us and the living thing that hits our ears."
But Jablow must consider many options because of the various versions of the work, as well as artistically interpretive choices any conductor has to make. And, for the most part, those decisions apply to the chorus as well as the orchestra.
On Sunday, Jablow began with the orchestra alone.
"I was spending a fair amount of time working on just lessening the sense of attack, of biting into the string, because Baroque bowing was so much lighter than modern bowing," she said, adding "There are basic elements like tuning, phrasing and dynamics."
Bringing the chorus and orchestra together is particularly interesting in "Messiah" because of the style of writing between the instruments, chorus and solo voices.
"There is really no difference," Jablow said. "What I find so interesting is that the vocal writing was so instrumental. Instrumental music came into its own in the Baroque from a vocal model. The first truly instrumental pieces were based on vocal pieces."
As instruments and instrumental writing developed, that balance shifted.
"So that by the time you get to the end of the Baroque – Bach and Handel – they were writing very instrumentally for the voice," Jablow said.
One of the biggest challenges in "Messiah" is its simplicity.
"He wrote a very transparent texture for the instrumental part because he didn't know what he was going to encounter when he would go to Ireland to do the first performance," Jablow said. "So a lot of the choral numbers and the solos have one obbligato violin line which combines all the violins. They have to play all of that together as if it were one person – and then when they are playing in thirds, the problem is compounded exponentially."
And, then, there is the challenge of bringing all the parts together, getting the instruments to phrase with the voices.
"There are places where voices and orchestra have to breathe together and phrase together," she said. "I'm trying, in the limited rehearsal time we have, to bring the instruments into parity with the chorus. At the same time, I'm trying to get the voices to be able to execute their passage work with the same accuracy that the instruments have."
Jablow is an experienced choral conductor. She earned a doctorate in choral conducting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has done additional study at the Aspen School of Music, Tanglewood Festival, Westminster Choir College and the Carnegie Hall Conductors' Workshops under the likes of Pierre Boulez, Robert Shaw and Joseph Flummerfelt.
Still, Jablow is perhaps best known as a soprano soloist, on opera and concert stages, as well as musical theater. She has performed as soloist with New York City Opera, Opera Orchestra of New York, and Milwaukee Symphony. Vermont audiences have seen her with Lost Nation Theater, Vermont Opera Theater, Lamoille County Players, Opera Burlington, Vermont Philharmonic and Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble. She has been the music director of the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra and has guest-conducted the Lamoille Choral Society, the Onion River Chorus, UVM's Catamount Singers and the Burlington Choral Society. She has also served as assistant conductor at Opera Illinois and the Green Mountain Opera Festival and is the former assistant conductor and chorus director of the Pioneer Valley Symphony in western Massachusetts.
In taking over these "Messiah" concerts, which have been going on for nearly all of the orchestra's 50-year-plus history, Jablow faces yet another challenge.
"There has been a series of different people who have been conducting these performances, and each person who's done it did it for a fairly long time," she said. "So, coming in and being the agent of change, I have to be really sensitive to what the players are used to – and yet try to move things in the direction that I feel they should go in."