The Messiah: Part I

I have to vote for For Unto Us a Child is Born. I'm born close to christmas, from choir-singer parents. My mom says she sang that one to me the night after birth.

For Unto Us is the best of the choruses, definitely. For the solos I feel like it's a tossup between Ev'ry valley and Rejoice greatly

guilty confession: because this is so ubiquitous every year, I've never actually sat down and listened to it. And I know it's sublime, it's like a thing I have taken for granted my whole life.

I have to admit, though, I'm more of a Christmas Oratorio kind of guy.

I've been binge-listening to "For Behold"/"The People That Walked in Darkness" for a couple of weeks and I've come to two conclusions about Handel:

1. It's no surprise that this is his most famous work. Musically it's an astonishingly good balance of virtuosic showing off and tuneful accessibility.
2. There's about a 75% chance Handel didn't really understand how voices work, based on how some of these go.

Lol. Dunno, I never really got good a coloratura singing, but I always thoroughly enjoyed singing Händel.

Some of the phrases, especially in the solo pieces where you can't hide your catch breaths, are inhumanely long in addition to the rampant coloratura.

Yeah, definitely. Always been particularly bad at singing those long phrases, taking a whole lot of pauses.

people didn't smoke as much back then

crooked straight

rough places plain

people didn't smoke as much back then

well no, they had giant fireplaces that delivered tar directly to the lungs, thus obviating the need to smoke

Messiah is childsplay, though. Sang in Copenhagen Boys Choir when we had 75 jubilee, and they decided to celebrate by doing Israel in Egypt as the yearly oratorio concert - though only the two-part version. Still, that's a lot of coloratura-filled chorusses for a bunch of kids aged 11-14.

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