Creation Performance Reviews
Erica Jeal, The Guardian *****
Is The Creation really Haydn's masterpiece? String quartet lovers might disagree; so might anyone who has heard a mediocre performance. However, Paul McCreesh's performance with his Gabrieli Consort and Players was extraordinary. For a start, there was the sheer size of it. The the forces McCreesh had assembled - six of each woodwind instrument, a sea of violins, a professional chorus and the chamber choir from Chetham's Music School - meant the stage was set as if for a Mahler symphony.
Overlooking one or two moments of ragged string ensemble, bigger was most certainly better. The chaos of the empty universe at the start flourished in the contrast between the soft buzz of massed strings and outbursts of stereo timpani. The pairs of trumpets on either side of the platform made for a radiant response to the choir's "Let there be light", with Mark Padmore's clarion tenor ringing out in approval.
The menagerie grew steadily in Neal Davies's eloquent baritone narration; he and McCreesh had tweaked the clunkier parts of the text slightly, just as Haydn probably would have, had he had better English. The doves, described in Sandrine Piau's poised soprano aria, lost some of their elegance but none of their appeal when their cooing was depicted by rasping baroque bassoon instead of its more emollient modern equivalent.
Performing the work without an interval made for a long haul, and by the time we got to the Garden of Eden, the fortepiano tuning was flagging - as did McCreesh's tempo for Adam and Eve's duet. But Miah Persson's piquant singing as Eve helped hold the interest. McCreesh's upcoming studio recording is something anyone who has ever doubted this piece should listen out for. (31/10/06)
Matthew Rye, The Daily Telegraph
The fact that nearly everyone does "period" these days to some degree or other means that the original progenitors of authentic performance practice are having to find ever more novel ways of presenting their wares.
And anyone entering the Barbican auditorium on Thursday evening could have been fooled into thinking that things had come full circle when faced with a platform overflowing with seats and music stands: at first glance, it had all the trappings of a big choral society event.
But this was Paul McCreesh's attempt to demonstrate that the presentation of oratorios with massed forces wasn't a Victorian invention but rather was there right from the start.
When Haydn's The Creation was first performed in Vienna in the dying years of the 18th century, it was done in ostentatious style, and it was this scale of event that McCreesh aimed to emulate in his re-creation of the work. His Gabrieli Players were bulked out into an orchestra of Straussian proportions – 25 woodwind, 15 brass, 70 strings, timpani and fortepiano – and the singers of the Gabrieli Consort were joined by the Chamber Choir from Chetham's School of Music in Manchester.
McCreesh had also taken the bold step of reassessing the English libretto. Although it was this English text – rather poorly fashioned from Milton and the Bible – that first inspired Haydn, he initially set a German translation, and the English has always sat uncomfortably with some of his vocal lines. McCreesh has kept the spirit of the original but fine-tuned it to go better with the notes.
It certainly enabled his soloists for this performance to convey the sense of awe and drama in Haydn's music. Peter Harvey made a devoted Adam, but vocally the evening was stolen by the Uriel of tenor Mark Padmore and Raphael of bass Neal Davies, both of whom combined narrative impulse with expressive fervour. However, it seemed an odd decision to employ Swedish and French sopranos as Eve and Gabriel to sing in an English-language work, admirable though the singing of Miah Persson and Sandrine Piau was.
The massed choral voices were incisive, too, while the vast orchestra made an impressive sound. There was the odd occasion when the supplementary woodwind – placed antiphonally at either extreme of the stage – were out of sync, but McCreesh's bold, demonstrative conducting style otherwise kept everything together and conveyed the dramatic sweep and ever-fresh joyousness of Haydn's masterpiece. (31/10/06)
Richard Fairman, The Financial Times ****
"Be fruitful, grow and multiply," exhorts Haydn in The Creation, and they certainly had. The last time I saw the Gabrieli Consort and Players there were barely a dozen of each. At the Barbican on Thursday they had increased to 200, multiplying so enthusiastically that there was hardly room for them all on the stage.
Paul McCreesh's idea was to recreate one of the "gargantuan" performances of The Creation that Haydn himself conducted in Vienna with an orchestra of more than 100 players. (Although would the chorus also have been so large? Proportions were generally different in those days.) To that end he supplemented the usual band of Gabrieli singers with the chamber choir from Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, producing a mighty noise in what is not so big a hall.
Keeping everybody together had its occasional challenges, but this was always a hugely spirited performance. Antiphonal groups of trumpets and drums assailed the audience's ears equally on both sides and there were no woolly voices hidden among the choirs. Having summoned his massive forces, McCreesh enthusiastically set out to use the potential for contrast to the maximum, indeed sometimes to excess: the bass aria that describes the "boisterous sea" and the "limpid brook" went from a tsunami down to the sort of trickle that comes out of Britain's leaky Victorian water supply.
Each of the quotations above comes from McCreesh's revision of the original English text. It is debatable whether that new version is really necessary - McCreesh keeps favourite old phrases such as "The heavens are telling" and "With verdure clad" - but if it is going to be sung with as much insight as it was by the tenor Mark Padmore, the outstanding soloist of the evening, it is worth it.
In the first two parts Sandrine Piau was the soprano, sounding like a refugee from smaller period performances, and Neal Davies the reliable bass. For Part Three, two new soloists took over, with Peter Harvey a lyrically sensitive Adam and Miah Persson singing Eve with an angelic purity that would get her the key to the Garden of Eden any time. (2/11/06)