Prom 63, Prom 64 and Prom 65 offer Prommers a breakfast, lunch and dinner of choral music, plus a free choral workshop thrown in there too: making Saturday, 7 September this year a full “choral day”. The hour before this performance of Handel’s Messiah, conductor John Butt invites Prommers to join his free ‘sing from your seats’ workshop in the auditorium, in order to practise singing along to the almighty Hallelujah chorus, and the closing finale of “Amen”.
It is quite an extraordinary experience to stand with six thousand audience members, alongside six choirs amassed on the stage: Philharmonia Chorus; Bath Minerva Choir; The Fourth Choir; Jason Max Ferdinand Singers; London Youth Chamber Choir; and Voices of the River’s Edge. Topping it all is Stephen Farr going all-guns-blazing on the Royal Albert Hall’s almighty organ, “The Voice of Jupiter”. The sound is enormous, joyous, and physical: you can literally feel the sounds of Handel’s most iconic composition vibrating all around you.
Although Handel wrote his Messiah in 1741 for modest vocal and instrumental forces, its orchestration has since been revised and amplified many times, most notably by Mozart in 1789: it is this version that we are singing along to. Having not been performed in this version at the Proms for 40 years, it seems only fitting to bring it back for a day celebrating the power of communal singing.
Under John Butt’s expert direction, the strings of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields are particularly crisp and tight. Special mention must also go to the co-ordinating chorus-master, Gavin Carr, for his hand in making sure every gigantic chorus sounds remarkably unified, with no inadvertent echoes or delays. Soprano Nardus Williams offers the highlights the solos, bringing her emotionally expressive quality that gestures towards the operatic.
Tickets for all 73 Proms are available from just £8 on the BBC Proms 2024 website.
The Prickle 