I never had much interest in Messiah but I had long known about this recording. A few years ago I heard a CBC radio feature on Jon Vickers where they played Every Valley. It was one of those rare "What is THAT?" moments that I have had all to rarely in years of playing and listening to music. Finally I bought the recording and listen to it around Christmas every year, and love it more every time.

While I appreciate the scholarly concepts behind period performance, I often find it boring in practice. Small orchestra, small choir? What's the point? Give me big, bold and raucous. If you want authentic, hire a bunch of musicians who can't play in tune and hire an unheated hall. I'll take Beecham, the reorchestration, the opera singers and all the inauthenticity one can muster if it produces music-making like this. Strongly recommended.

... and there will be a winter after the Presidential election in America, whoever wins, with the usual need to play the Messiah when Uncle Harald and Aunt Lily come to visit, if only to preclude conversation, so...

Let's do a little round-robin review of Messiah performances, which will be much more fun than exchanging barbs and diatribes. In the comment thread to follow, tell me your current favorite and least favorite Messiah recordings, and/or tell me what you think makes a good performance of this so over-performed masterpiece.

I chose this ancient performance, which I have on vinyl, as a starting place because it's so very awful that I can't imagine not launching the discussion from a consensus.
What's so bad about it?
*The orchestra is badly out of tune, at least when i can discern tuning amidst all the blare and ruckus.
*The chorus is precisely what George Orwell meant when he spoke of Handel's "big bow-wow." It's thick in timbre and unwieldy in phrasing, and it just plain doesn't make an appealing noise.
*The soloists can't keep up with the baroque sixteenth notes, and each of them has her/his own noxious vibrato.
*The tempi are absurdly slow and turgid.
*The recording quality makes the music sound like an old Studebaker car radio. even on good speakers.

I have six other performances in my collection, some old and some new. By conductor: Solti, Hogwood, Pinnock, McCreesh, Harnoncourt, and Christie. Make a really good case for any other and I'll order it in time for Uncle Harald.

This is music from the angels! Perfect, perfect, perfect is all I can say - you won't be disappointed with this CD. Great to listen to all year, but especially at Christmas.

While I am not by any means an original instrument/performance purist, even I find myself balking at the leisurely swagger of so many of the tempi adopted here (although Sir Thomas scampers through "For we, like sheep" as if he cannot wait to be rid of the embarrassment of it) and the rather disconcerting woodwind twiddles, flutey noodlings, lush horns and timpani bashings with which the Goossens orchestration (or was it more the work of Beecham himself?) graces us - yet I will readily admit that I really enjoy this rendering of Handel's inexhaustible masterpiece, done con amore as only Beecham could do it. The slow tempi certainly allow a clear articulation and a grandeur of utterance which are not unbecoming to such theologically elevated music.

The soloists are very fine, especially the men; Vickers obviously has a heroic tenor very different from the rather hooty, throaty tenorino so often wheeled out these days for this music (I mention no British tenors whose weedy sound is so inexplicably prized...) and he articulates the recitative with real depth of feeling. Tozzi, likewise, is a tower of strength - you can just luxuriate in the smooth treacle of that bass. The women are stalwarts of that era; fine artists both.

It's not the only "Messiah" you will want to hear; there is room for a less reverential, more animated and generally more lightly sprung interpretation but in many ways it brings you closer to the emotional heart of this music than many an underpowered, chilly and spare "original instruments" version. (Actually, Beecham's orchestra and choir are not that big compared with the Victorian blockbuster style which preceded it; it's just the ponderous tempi and extra orchestration which create an impression of additional weight.)

So buy this - it's very reasonably priced and beautifully recorded for its 1959 provenance - and enjoy it for what it is: Beecham's tribute to a master composer.

If you want a Messiah as big as the planet, but with style, get this famous Beecham version done with romantic ornamentations. It's awesome!