Handel: Judas Maccabaeus – Somary

Regis has done collectors a service by resurrecting this Vanguard set, though “resurrecting” is a strange word for a performance that never really felt entombed in the first place. Johannes Somary belonged to a generation of Handelians — Menuhin among them, and Boult in his way — who assumed that emotional directness and big-boned choral tone were not sins to be corrected by later scholarship but simply how the music went. Nobody had told them about gut strings yet. Or rather, somebody had, and they had declined the invitation.

The results, heard now, occupy a curious middle distance. Too plush for the period-interpretation crowd, too small-scaled and alert for the full Victorian oratorio-society treatment that once buried Handel under massed choirs of a thousand voices, this is British Handel of the mid-century sort, disciplined by scholarship even as it clings to old habits of phrasing. The strings of the English Chamber Orchestra swim in vibrato that Christopher Hogwood would spend the next decade trying to scrub away.

And yet the piece breathes.

John Shirley-Quirk is the reason to own this set. His bass has exactly the granite-and-velvet quality that “Arm, Arm, Ye Brave” wants, and he phrases with the natural authority of a singer who came up through English cathedral and concert traditions where this repertoire was simply the air one breathed, no need to reconstruct performance practice, because it had never gone extinct at places like Christ Church and King’s. Alexander Young’s tenor shows its years more plainly. There’s an ache and a heaviness to “Sound an Alarm” and to that curiously touching “‘Tis well, my friends,” recorded, one imagines, in a studio with a single microphone hovering somewhere near the harpsichord, which tinkles gamely under him like a spinet in another room. It’s not fashionable singing. It is, however, honest, unmannered singing of a kind we don’t hear anymore, for better and worse.

Heather Harper and Helen Watts split the soprano and alto arias with the reliable excellence one expects of both. Watts in particular has a plummy, dark, almost contraltoish weight (well, she is a contralto) that gives “Father of Heaven” real gravity. The business of two female voices taking the “Israelite Woman” and “Israelite Man” duets registers as odd only until you remember how much odder the eighteenth-century original casting arrangements often were. Handel never let anatomical consistency get in the way of a good vocal match, and neither, evidently, did Somary.

The choir, the Amor Artis Chorale under John McCarthy, sings with a plush, upholstered richness that will delight some ears and try others. “See, the Conqu’ring Hero Comes” arrives with all the four-square grandeur British choral singing could summon in 1971: crisp fugal entries, yes, but weighted with a vibrato-laced sonority that owes more to Elgar’s Britain than to Handel’s London. Compare it with John Eliot Gardiner’s later, leaner Monteverdi Choir version, swifter tempos, translucent textures, historically tuned instruments, and Somary sounds practically Brahmsian. Compare it instead with the old Beecham-adjacent recordings, or with Boult’s ponderous studio Messiah tradition, and Somary suddenly sounds positively lithe, almost brisk.

Somary’s overall pacing tends toward the broad rather than the driven. He lingers, he lets the choral fugues expand. Some listeners will find this a virtue: space to hear inner voices, room for the harmonic sequences to land. Others will simply find it dated. Both reactions are correct.

Sound: boxy but warm, close-miked voices against a slightly recessed orchestra, the harpsichord continuo audible in a way modern engineering often buries. Not demonstration sound. Perfectly serviceable, and cheap at Regis’s budget price.

Should you buy it. If you already own a period-instrument Judas Maccabaeus, Gardiner’s, say, or one of the more recent Baroque-specialist versions, this makes a fascinating, humane second opinion, a document of how thoroughly our ears have changed in fifty years and how much of the old style still has something to say. If you own nothing at all, start elsewhere for scholarly rigor, but don’t skip this one for long. Shirley-Quirk alone justifies the modest cost of admission.