Phil Coulter and Friends and Handel’s Messiah

Phil Coulter and Friends and Handel’s Messiah

Reviewed by George Fleeton

What a juxtaposition!

Phil Coulter in the Ulster Hall, still at what he does best on the edge of his 70^th birthday and, two weeks later in the Waterfront Hall, G F Handel, a German who chose to live and work in London exactly 300 years ago, instrumental in making his music an inextricable cornerstone of 18^th century English culture.

Phil Coulter and Friends

One of the feathers in the cap of the Downpatrick Twinning Partnership is the very active 30 year old link with Listowel Co. Kerry, famous for its Writers’ Week in June, its festival week of horse-racing in September, and as the spiritual home of many well-known dramatists and poets, including John B Keane.

It is just one of several European towns twinned with Downpatrick, which include Bezons, outside Paris (since 1984), and Chiari, outside Milan (since 2007).

The Phil Coulter event (November 26th) was organised to celebrate those three decades of north/south co-operation between Downpatrick and Listowel with an impressive range of Irish music which entertained an audience of almost 600 for well over three hours, attended by Ms Carál Ní Chuilín, the north’s Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure, and Jimmy Deenihan, the south’s Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

John Noble, who drives all these town twinning links from Downpatrick, ably stood in as compère, at short notice, for an indisposed Noel Thompson.

The concert began with Liam O’Connor, self-styled ‘king of the accordion’ whose relationship with this versatile instrument elevates it to an exhilarating plateau far beyond that of a busker’s squeezebox, with a style developed and refined from years spent touring with Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance phenomenon.

Una Hunt, on grand piano, is one of the country’s most influential and best known recitalists.

Here she was obviously content to take a back seat, showcasing violinist Kenneth Rice, and the splendid baritone voice of Kerry-born Gavan Ring, who did sterling justice to the song books of Thomas Moore, and of Count John McCormack - that paragon of clear diction and unique breath control, and successor-manqué to Caruso (since he declined to take over at the Met after the great Italian tenor’s death 90 years ago).

Una Hunt then accompanied young harpist Aoife Ní hArgáin to close this part of the programme.

Fiddle player Matt McGranahan and bagpiper Darren Milligan weren’t shy about introducing their new traditional ensemble, Kintra, where the emphasis was on Ulster-Scots music, which included a Lambeg drum solo, from a position up near the Mulholland Grand Organ, supplemented with much singing and dancing.

That theme of good friends from both communities, a fusion of musical cultures, Irish and Scottish music at ease with itself, underlined the whole point of this concert and prepared the stage for the Cross Border Orchestra of Ireland (CBOI), an incarnation of the peace initiative, set up in 1995 in Dundalk, with young musicians ages 12 to 24.

It was conducted on the night by Gearóid Grant, long time artistic director of the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society.

The music of the CBOI was introduced by Emmanuel Lawlor, an established tenor and singing teacher, and the uilleann (or elbow) pipes solo was taken by Patrick Martin.

At this stage of the evening it was 10.30pm, the last buses had gone and no one had left the Hall.

Suave, anecdotal, and user-friendly Phil Coulter took over at this point and his fan base had a ball.

Strange that he made no reference to the other music of the evening nor to the purpose of the event to which he had lent his name and impeccable good will.

He encored of course with The Town I Loved So Well, his signature song which, after 40 years, could be any one of our home or twin towns.

Handel’s Messiah

This was one of the lowest key performances of this famous work I have ever witnessed (on the first night of two performances, December 09th).

But low key here means nuanced and subtle, under the baton of David Agler, artistic director of Wexford Festival Opera since 2005.

Three of the soloists were new to me, but we had heard Irish tenor Robin Tritschler’s voice in the Great Hall Downpatrick

in June 2010 when he recorded a set of art songs (Schumann, Britten and Bax) accompanied by Simon Lepper,  for BBC Radio 3, a recital which was then broadcast in August  that year.

The Messiah probably needs no introduction.

It re-imagines itself in every performance and you are free to take from it what you will each time.

It was famously first heard in Dublin 270 years ago, the year after Handel had composed his final opera.

It’s like a concert opera, with large chorus and orchestra but without dramatic interaction or character development or props or costumes.

Being an oratorio, it is a prayerful piece, an assembly of short key (and some more obscure parts of other) scriptural texts.

J S Bach, J Haydn, F Mendelssohn and E Elgar all played major roles in establishing the sacred oratorio as a way of life in classical music, though Handel took the lion’s share.

Between 1732 and 1741 he was progressing from composing operas in Italian for London audiences to oratorios in English to take account of declining numbers, competition from the short-lived Opera of the Nobility and changes in musical taste.

Hence the boat to Dublin in late 1741, with the Messiah in his back pocket, hoping to find a more appreciative and broad-minded audience who wouldn’t consider it blasphemous if, for example, Christ’s words were to be quoted in an entertainment context, God forbid.

He found that audience in Dublin, and they loved it, so he spent about nine months there, and a new chapter in Handel’s history was written for, when he returned to London, with Samson, oratorio had become the new opera.

(I am reminded that at our final Opera Fringe Festival in Downpatrick in 2009 we had offered to our audience in Down Cathedral Handel’s very first oratorio, translated as The Triumph of Time and Disillusion, which he had composed in Rome in 1707, age 22).

What David Agler, on his début with the Ulster Orchestra, and the 126-strong Belfast Philharmonic Choir gave us was mercifully not one of the big arena productions, which tend to distort, disrespect even, the integrity of Handel’s intentionsDavid Byers’ notes for the Waterfront Messiah were extremely helpful before and during (and doubtless after) the performance and several people commented to me on how valuable they found them.

Singing alongside tenor Tritschler were bass-baritone Darren Jeffery, mezzo Karen Cargill and Dublin soprano Sarah Power.

The new chorus master was Stephen Doughty, who also played harpsichord.

This was a purist’s Messiah, informed, stylish and all the better for that, though perhaps losing a bit of its emotional power along the way.

The recitatives were delivered with impact, and once Handel virgins got used to the decorated baroque da capo arias, and the fact that duets aren’t really what we come across in later opera, and having  to stand up for the Hallelujah chorus (why?), all was well that ended well by the time the trumpets and timpani arrived.

© George Fleeton mmxi