Handel's Messiah - Dunedin Consort - Inverness Courier

Recordings of Handel's ever-popular "Messiah" are hardly thin on the ground, but the progressive slimming-down of forces that has characterised performance practice of that work in recent times continues in this version from the excellent Edinburgh-based Dunedin Consort. Their beautiful recording draws on the score from the very first performance in Dublin in 1742, with some material that was not repeated in the subsequent versions which Handel prepared over the years, often to accommodate particular circumstances of a performance. The Consort deliver a fresh and hugely enjoyable perspective on the music under the direction of harpsichordist John Butt, using only a dozen singers, all of whom are soloists in their own right. The reduced scale allows a transparency of detail that is often lost with bigger choral forces, and more than compensates for any loss of power or grandeur.