Music: New Records, Jan. 4, 1960

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Handel's Messiah is a little like an intricately carved altarpiece with countless sliding and interchangeable parts. An inveterate improviser, Handel altered the work's solo parts constantly to suit various singers. In addition, the orchestration varied: at times Handel called only for strings, trumpets and drums, but to these he sometimes added oboes, bassoons and horns. After Handel's death (1759), well-wishers by the dozens set to work "modernizing" the Messiah: Mozart added new parts for violins and violas, used wind instruments in parts previously reserved for the organ or harpsichord; English Composer Ebenezer Prout in 1902 brought out a thickly orchestrated edition retaining most of Mozart's additions (but printing them in small notes). Today some 50 different versions exist, most of them based on either Mozart or Prout. Anxious to spread the Handel sound on stereo, record companies have brought out four new readings of the Messiah by four distinguished conductors—each with his own concept of how the work should be played.

Sir Thomas Beecham recorded the work with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus (Jennifer Vyvyan, Monica Sinclair, Jon Vickers, Giorgio Tozzi; RCA Victor, 4 LPs, mono and stereo). His performance is the most opulent of the lot, the most animated—and by all odds the farthest from any thought in Handel's mind. In defiance of "drowsy armchair purists," Beecham offers a thunderously 19th century-styled orchestration—lush, richly colored, and full of dramatic contrasts. Soloists and chorus are uniformly fine, but the recording is not for listeners who take their Handel neat. Eugene Ormandy offers a severely cut reading (Eileen Farrell, Martha Lipton, Davis Cunningham, William Warfield; the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; Columbia, 2 LPs, mono and stereo). The performance indulges in fewer pyrotechnics, is chiefly memorable for the truly superb singing of Soprano Farrell.

Sir Malcolm Sargent produces a package (Elsie Morison, Marjorie Thomas, Richard Lewis, James Milligan; the Huddersfield Choral Society; the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra; Angel, 3 LPs, mono and stereo) that lacks the fire of Beecham, the vocal glories of some of the Ormandy passages, emerges as painstaking rather than impassioned. Perhaps the best performance of the crop is furnished by Hermann Scherchen (Pierrette Alarie, Nan Merriman, Leopold Simoneau, Richard Standen; the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and the Vienna Academy Chorus; Westminster, 4 LPs, stereo), which is marked by some lovely, light-textured choral passages, a translucent orchestral sound and a movingly meditative air.

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