Handel: Messiah – BBC Singers

   in Choir & Organ (Mar, 2019)
As Nigel Simeone points out in his fine liner notes to David Hill’s recording, Messiah has survived numerous different approaches in its 370 years’ existence: from historically informed accounts recreating the forces used by Handel himself – and these could vary depending on circumstances – to Mozart’s arrangement, to Eugene Goossens’s re-imagined orchestration complete with a percussion section and made famous through Sir Thomas Beecham’s recording. Stian Aareskjold’s arrangement for the Norwegian Wind Ensemble is the latest version of Handel’s indestructible masterpiece, here given its premiere recording.

Having been resistant to the idea of a wind ensemble accompaniment, and that ensemble includes, for example, a soprano saxophone (in ‘O thou that …