Handel: Messiah

7:00pm, Sat, 8 Mar 2025

  • Event Details
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  • Type of event: Concert
    Start time: 7:00pm
    End time: 9:30pm
    Venue: Holy Trinity Church
    162 High Street
    Guildford
    Surrey
    GU1 3HW
    Description: Handel: Messiah
    Now is the time to buy your tickets for our Messiah concert if you haven't already done so.  With professional soloists and an orchestra drawn from the excellent Sinfonia Smith Square (formally known as The Southbank Sinfonia) this promises to be memorable indeed. 

    Please note the start time and that Nicolas O'Neill will be talking about Handel and Messiah in a pre-concert talk at 6pm on the day.

    Messiah by G F Handel (composer to King George the First) is one of the most famous works in the choral repertoire, and yet it presents its performers and interpreters with a baffling array of questions.  Having  famously written the original version over the course of just over three weeks in 1742, Handel constantly revised and changed the work in response to the singers and resources available to him, rendering it impossible to determine what his preferred version might have been.  However, it is distinctly possible to draw on his previous experience as an opera composer in order to present Messiah as Handel would have viewed it, as a piece full of drama and life, light and shade, and with some of the impact that its first listeners might have experienced, "a species of music different from any other...as to please all who have ears and will hear".

    Handel’s friend and librettist, the Revd Charles Jennens, possibly suggested that the composer should move towards the oratorio form, after the appeal of opera began to decline. The words of Messiah are all from the King James Bible, but the skill of Jennens was the choice of texts and the order in which they are set to music. Handel, although not necessarily a devout believer, approached the task with enthusiasm, and has been quoted as saying “ I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God himself”.  This work has certainly continued to inspire every generation of musicians for nearly three centuries.