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The Philips Classics series has many appealing features, not least of which is good value. This series typically offers two CDs for the price of about one-and-a-half. They feature top-rank and often legendary performers. Finally, they are digitally remastered recordings from the sixties and seventies, many of which rank as standard-bearing readings of the classical canon.
This 1966 London Symphony Orchestra performance of Handel’s incalculably beautiful Messiah is robust in the old-school, English, big-voiced, fully-orchestrated, modern-instrument manner. This is the Messiah that first put the lump in your throat and made you wonder at how regular folks stood when ‘Hallelujah’ came up.
I find it almost breathtaking to sit here – again – among the speakers and come to grips with the fact that the pure sound emerging is from a recording that took place four decades ago. Harper, Watts, Wakefield, and Shirley-Quirk are in marvelous voice.
Do yourself a favor. Break the Messiah-at-Christmas routine (though do listen at Christmas), buy this CD, and sit down with it for an evening at some atypical time of year, say, when an autumnal nip is in the air.
Handel’s uniquely musical hearing of a Christian retelling of the biblical prophets and their adumbration in the New Testament that was conventional in its day is a work for the ages. Resonant, effortlessly intertextual, energized by both faith and art, Messiah is one of Christendom’s jewels.
It is nearly a fool’s errand to review Messiah in a few paragraphs, even more when the reading is question is that of Sir Colin Davis and a throaty English cast.
Simply impeccable.
Canter Bridge 
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