O dear! Mozart had plenty to say about Handel, and about the Viennese audiences for whom he arranged Messiah; but Jean-Claude Malgoire seems to have little to say about either. Mozart's arrangement, with its piccolos, flutes, clarinets, horns and trombones ventilating, tinting and rounding some of the sharper baroque edges of Handel's orchestration, can have dramatic cogency as well as charm, as Sir Charles Mackerras showed in his enlightening recording on DG Archiv. Malgoire, though, fails to realize that the numbing tendency of some of the scoring (particularly the revised trumpet parts and the trombone underscorings) needs to be answered by even more astute pacing. This need is all the more urgent in the context of the constricted, comparatively dry sound of the Ecurie's almost vibrato-free violins.
Mozart's 12-strong choir is here doubled to 24, though it doesn't sound like it. The Namur Chamber Choir is light, childlike of timbre, apt almost to be blown away in choruses such as ''For unto us a child is born''. They can turn a phrase prettily enough, as can Malgoire's strings, but they sound unenthusiastic about their German-language Arbeit.
The soloists, too, are unexceptional. Hans-Peter Graf's tenor is happier in pastoral mode than in robust rejoicing; Chris de Moor's light bass is suitably cast for Mozart's woodwind-illuminated Handelian darkness. But the nations rage with no more power than Stephen Varcoe's sounding trumpet (or, as Mozart insisted, horn). Contralto Bernarda Fink (from Buenos Aires, in every language other than English, which has her born in the USA) and Lynne Dawson are satisfactory, if unremarkable, as Mozart's two sopranos.
If this Messiah is disappointingly dreary, then the supposedly echt Handel, from Mark Brown's Czech forces, is simply difficult to take seriously at all. The orchestra can at least be given the benefit of the doubt for having to work with what are possibly inferior instruments: this is still a real problem for period-instrument bands in Eastern Europe. The choir, though, earnest in its clipped English, seems at times justifiably bewildered by fluctuating tempos and desiccated period-performance cliches which are largely characterized by extravagant ornamentation and mean phrasing. All four soloists can sing. But their over-precise and under-imaginative articulation defines individual performances which range from the pedantic to the caricatured.'