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Hellin wrote:so...

...a sousaphone is a type of tuba, so this next December when one of your string player acquaintences mentions a Messiah gig, you should show up as well, bring a sousaphone, and insist on playing and getting paid.

Chuck Jackson wrote: Beecham made his famous recording of the piece with this arrangement and as far as I know, it has rarely, if ever, been played sense. I believe that the recording used over 300 voices. It can be bought and should be in everyones library, if for nothing else, sheer sonic audacity. It remains one of my favorite recordings of anything ever done. I sense that the historical people fainted dead away when they heard it, but I say "pooh" to them. Period performance practice is nothing more than sheer guess work. So, yes, there is historic precedent. I have never seen the Goosens score, but rest assured, there is a tuba part. And you gotta love the percussion, especially the cymbals and triangle parts interspersed throughout the piece. I think ol George Freidrich would be happy!!!!


Chuck

Handel's original performing forces numbered about forty singers and forty instruments. He evidently was fully satisfied with this size, quite normal for the time, for he could have had many additional performers had he so desired. The practice of enlarging the orchestra and chorus began only shortly after his death. In 1784, a Handel Commemoration in estminster Abbey used 525 performers. Mozart did the first re-orchestration five years later, dropping the old-fashioned harpsichord and rewriting the accompaniment for a Classical-period orchestra. Numerous later revisions and expansions further bloated the score in deference to nineteenth-century tastes for large orchestras. The choral forces grew even greater. At a Handel Festival in London for the 1859 centenary of his death, 2,396 singers took part. Fifteen years later the chorus for this annual event had grown to 3,500, and as late as 1923 four thousand singers were assembled for a performance.

The tendency in recent years has been in the other direction, fulfilling at last George Bernard Shaw's wish, expressed in 1891: "Why, instead of wasting huge sums on the multitudinous dullness called a Handel Festival does not somebody set up a thoroughly rehearsed and exhaustively studied performance of Messiah...? Most of us would be glad to hear the work seriously performed once before we die."

bloke wrote:Anyone else do the Sandy Fatt...Patty "rock" Messiah thing when she did this on tour (to sellout crowds...at least in our town) quite a few years ago? Tons of instruments were hired, and all of our parts were already recorded in the "mix", which was played in the house system louder than the "paid/live" instruments.



bloke "I remember - right in the middle everything, they brought out Phil Driscoll to play some 'Jesus - scream trumpet' solo...' made absolutely no contextual sense whatsoever."