The Messiah

The Messiah

On Tuesday evening, December eleven I attended the 68th annual rendition of The Messiah in Zeeland. It was performed by the Zeeland Civic Chorus along with soloists Betsy Archer as the soprano, Cammille Zoet De Boer as contralto, Matthew Lehman as tenor, and John Scheid as the bass. The chorus was made up of about 75 individuals. They met together once a week for 8 weeks before the performance, giving them little time to prepare for the production. This performance was conducted by Richard Cory. The instruments used were the organ, played by Mark Steigenga, and the trumpet, played by Bruce Forsma.

In the Messiah there is a mix of singing from the chorus and the soloist. In the soloist portions they would either sing recitative or aria. Recitative is where the soloist’s would sing straight through the words of a bible passage with no exact way it was to be preformed and was always homophonic. When the soloist’s sang aria they would also be singing a portion from the bible like in recitative but they would repeat a portion of the verse multiple times before moving to the next portion of the verse. These sections were always homophonic as well. There was also vocalizing during many portions of the arias. I did not like the aria portion of the performance at all. It took at least five minutes to get through one bible verse.

Now I will go through some of pieces preformed by the chorus since that was the part I enjoyed the most.

The third piece was And the Glory of the Lord. In this piece there was a lot of polyphonic music. There was a lot of point of imitation. The piece seemed to be played in ѕ time. There were parts when they used crescendo and decrescendo.

The 7th piece, choruses 2nd, was And We Shall Purify. In the beginning of the song it starts out monophonic but before too long it turns into a polyphonic tune. This piece also had a much softer texture than the previous piece. The chorus sang “and we shall purify” the entire song until the very end where they close out the piece with the final part of the verse. During the finally the texture gets much stronger and louder as well.

The 9th piece, O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings To Zion, started out with the soprano and the chorus came in about halfway through the piece. It was monophonic while the soloist sang and for a portion of the chorus part but there was definitely some polyphonic parts in the piece along with plenty of point of imitation.

The 11th piece, For Unto us a Child is Born, starts out monophonic but like all the others turns to polyphonic before too long. It uses lots of point of imitation. There is singing in chords, mostly used to back up the main line of singing. There appears to be some form and sequencing in this piece