On the evening of Saturday 9th April, a girl
dressed in a grey hoodie slouched into the church and scowled at the people she
saw. Some them she probably already knew, but she didn’t care for any of them.
They included a nervous and nerdy young man, an aggressive yuppie, a young
widow, a rather prudish woman and seven others. One of the men picked up a
score of Handel’s Messiah that he found, and started to sing.
This was the start of the Merry Opera Company’s performance
of Messiah, a staged version produced by John Ramster, which came to King
Charles as part of a tour that also took them to the University Church in
Oxford, St James Piccadilly and other churches around England this spring. And
it was astonishing. In the course of the evening, we watched the characters,
all played by professional opera singers, interact with each other as they sang
and listened, walked around the church, and shared out the solos and choruses,
sometimes with two or more singers exchanging phrases in the same aria. Through
their gestures and action they expressed their individual stories, and they all
changed through the evening, shrugging off their various inner demons to become
a united group which absolutely thundered out the final chorus.
This was a wonderful and moving performance, which without
any of the acting would still have been magnificent. But watching the music
brought to life in individual and very human emotions took it to a new level.
The organ provided all of the accompaniment and was played supremely well by
the virtuoso Chad Kelly. There were tears in the audience and a standing
ovation at the end.
Performed at the Church of King Charles the Martyr, Tunbridge Wells
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