Messiah recording that knocked me out

[Larry Kart]

Picked up Solti's 1984 CSO set on LPs at a thrift store yesterday and was stunned by what I heard compared to my much-vaunted echt HIP recording with Andrew Parrott. Margaret Hillis' CSO Chorus is beyond belief, and as for Solti, the opening "Symphony" was proof enough -- some actual damn shaped but not over-shaped MUSIC rather than marking time for the vocal stuff to begin. Finally, comparison between Solti's Kiri Te Kanawa and Parrott's Emma Kirby -- Te Kawana, without being at all operatic, has so much more voice, plus the ability to actually express the text, versus Kirkby's almost wholly instrumental fluting. Same goes for the other soloists, though I've yet to hear a contralto that's completely on top of her arias and recitatives in the Messiah; some of that stuff seems to border on the impossible in terms of asking for long legato phrasing and penetrating vocal power (and in tricky areas of the register for most contraltos, too).