Messiah album review – Whelan takes Handel’s oratorio back to its beginnings

Irish Baroque Orchestra and Choir/Whelan

(Linn)

Conductor Peter Whelan leads a finely judged and agile period-instrument performance with only 13 singers.

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very year, the Irish Baroque Orchestra and their conductor Peter Whelan bring Messiah back to Dublin, the city of its 1742 premiere. Their recording of Handel’s oratorio – the first on period instruments by an Irish ensemble – attempts to recreate the version heard at its first performance at the Fishamble Street music hall, a hot-ticket event at which such a crush was anticipated that the ladies in the audience were requested to forgo hoops in their skirts and the gentlemen to leave their swords at home.