The Kincade of the Baroque

My attention was directed today to something called the "The Young Messiah", which was an arrangement of Handel's oratorio trimmed for length and then expanded to include rock instruments, specifically a trap set, a keyboard, an an electric guitar. The various arias are sung in pop styles, often in different ranges from what Handel specified, and with backing vocalists.

Now I'm not in any way a musical purist. "Proper" baroque practice is interesting, but hardly obligatory, and there's nothing wrong with reinterpreting classical music, or pretty much any thing else, in some other style. As it happens, this project originated from the same guy who took "Jesus Joy of Man's Desiring" and sped it up with a rock beat to create "Joy", which was a minor hit in 1972. A fellow named Jonathan Aigner took it upon himself to savage this thing, citing it with clips from some performance done sometime in the 1990s. For this he was roundly savaged himself, a bit unfairly, but we'll get to that in a minute.

The performance itself is, well, mostly dreadful. As far as Messiah itself is concerned, I grew up on the highly controversial Bernstein recording, with its substantial omissions, its extreme tempo changes, and most of all, the rearrangement from three sections into two. He apparently anticipated this, because it came with a lengthy justification of the changes. Be that as it may, I have tended to prefer "maestro" recordings (such as the Dorati version recorded at WNC, with its spectacular and reverberating choruses) and find a lot of the original instrument versions a bit dry. And surely one has to believe that if Handel had had wailing electric guitars at his disposal, there would have been "b-tchin' guitar solos": baroque music, and especially Handel, is dramatic in the extreme and full of showy virtuosity.

And yet... The thing was remounted in 1999 in a production funded in part by the Irish government (recalling that the original 1742 performance was in Dublin), about which one of the producers had this to say: "By re-interpreting the music in a modern idiom, with popular artists, this new version will, in our view, be immediately accessible to a much wider audience." Yeah, well, I don't see that happening, except in the way that some people can't take the full strength version of something and have to have it diluted. The thing we have here is simultaneously undercut and overblown, so that for some reason we can't have a soprano singing the brilliant aria preceding "Glory to God in the Highest" (and indeed, peculiarly, we seem to have no women soloists at all), and the flourishes in the choruses have to be simplified. The rock band is slathered uniformly across everything like the "light" in a Thomas Kinkade Christmas card scene, adding little to nothing beyond blurring Handel's sharp rhythms. It's not really a reinterpretation: Handel is all still there, but diminished and weakened. Perhaps it is more accessible to someone, but really there is no getting around that it is a lesser thing.

The comments on Aigner's rant mostly center around the inference that he is attributing the badness of the thing to the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) scene, when the original version came from Irish/British musicians whose link to CCM is perhaps tenuous. The version he criticises, though, is full of CCM people, and the style is straight out of American CCM productions. It owes essentially nothing to the very English-influenced Pretentious Art Rock of ELP and their compatriots, who, on either side of the pond, were heavily influenced by classical technique and style and whose renditions of classical pieces were transforming, not diminishing. That's not what we get here: Handel is debased, and it is debased because, apparently, American evangelicals can't take the real thing.