Handel’s Messiah closes Auckland Choral’s 2025 season in style – William Dart

Review by

William Dart

NZ Herald·

15 Dec, 2025 04:00 PM2 mins to read

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From its 1742 Dublin premiere, Handel’s Messiah was destined for greatness, loftily praised at the time by one George Faulkner as, “the sublime, the grand and the tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestic and moving words”.

Above all, he added, it “conspired to transport and charm the ravished
heart and ear”.

On Sunday night, closing Auckland Choral’s 2025 season, the iconic oratorio achieved all of that for a full house eager to experience what conductor Uwe Grodd described, in his lively welcoming speech, as a masterpiece that binds us together, as only great art can.

All of which was made possible, it must be admitted, by that shrewd genius Handel, whose unerring sense of the theatrical and downright tunefulness might have made him, on the other side of the Atlantic, a few centuries later, a Broadway great.

The glow of enjoyment was there from the first few phrases of Pipers Sinfonia’s crisply delivered overture. It was fortified by Robert Macfarlane’s first recitative, singling out a cry of “Comfort ye” with dramatic dynamics rather than florid ornamentation.