The Trinity Choir will perform Handel's "Messiah" at Trinity Church Wall Street
Trinity Church
74 Trinity Pl.
Sunday, December 13, 3:00, and Monday, December 14, 7:30, $30-$50
212-602-0848
www.trinitywallstreet.org
In 1770, George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah” held its New World premiere in Trinity Church. The holiday favorite is back again, as the Trinity Choir teams up with the Trinity Baroque Orchestra and concertmaster Robert Mealy, guest-conducted by Jane Glover. “The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of until I Read and heard it. It seems to be a Species of Musick different from any other, and this is particularly remarkable of it,” the Bishop of Elphin wrote of the Dublin premiere of Handel’s “Messiah” in 1743. “That tho’ the Composition is very Masterly and artificial, yet the Harmony is So great and open, as to please all who have Ears & will hear, learned & unlearn’d.” In the Trinity Choir program notes, Mealy writes, “In re-creating the musical conditions of Handel’s own performances, we may hope that we re-create the reactions of Bishop Elphin’s fellow-listeners: ‘They seem’d indeed throughly engag’d frome one end to the other . . . which Show’d that they were not only pleas’d but affected with the performance.”’
If you can’t make Handel’s masterpiece at Trinity Church, you can catch it December 13 at 3:00 at Lehman College with the Bronx Opera Chorus and the Orchestra of the Bronx ($10-$25), at Avery Fisher Hall December 15-19 with the New York Philharmonic ($31-$109), at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey, on December 20 ($10-$45), and at Carnegie Hall on December 23 with the Masterwork Chorus and Orchestra ($13.50-$85).