The Christmas Concert

The Christmas season is officially here. Its usual harbinger, Handel's Messiah, received last night the kind of performance it always deserves. The Harvard Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, and Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, all conducted by G. Wallace Woodworth, played the Christmas section of the oratorio with freshness and reverence.

Woodworth, by eliminating flutes, clarinets, and horns from the orchestra, reproduced, the work as it probably sounded in Handel's own day. The resulting orchestral restraint was matched by generally subdued part of the concert seemed tonally veiled--noticeably different from the exuberance of most productions. Not until the chorus, Glory to God in the Highest was the veil lifted. The trumpets, which had been silent through the first half of the concert, suddenly joined with a choral fortissimo entrance in what was one of the evening's greatest moments.

I would have preferred a few more of these highpoints at the beginning, but it seemed to be Woodworth's plan to hold back as much as he could, saving the most glorious sounds for the final Hallclujah Chorus.

Of the four excellent soloists, tenor Oscar Henry'52 stood out. His magnificent voice is even stronger and truer than last year. The chorus, as always, was a marvel of precision and balance.