About 90 minutes into the Christmas concert at the Baptist Church on Monday night, the conductor signalled his entire choir and solo performers to stand, his musicians to be at the ready. Instinctively, those who knew the music stood in the pews. Then, Tom Baker brought down his baton for the climax of the composition.
“Hallelujah!” the audience and choir sang in celebration together. “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. Hallelujah!”
I am not a church-goer. But I still love Christmas traditions, and they include attending performances of George Frideric Handel’s masterpiece, the Messiah, presented every few years by our own Uxbridge Messiah Singers. Premiered in April of 1792, the work quotes scripture from the King James Bible and, I’m told, fills 300 pages of music manuscript.
Astonishingly, Handel wrote the three-act oratorio in just 24 days in 1741 originally for performance at Easter, but during most of its 230-year history, it’s most often been featured at Christmas. Indeed, by the end of the Hallelujah choral section, we were all singing, “He shall reign forever and ever” and thinking of the Christmas story.
Not since I served as an altar boy in several Greek church as youngster, have I attended official church services (except for weddings). But that’s not to say, I haven’t benefitted from visits to churches, mosques or synagogues.
In 2014, during a tour of the Greek islands, I think I visited every religious building between Venice and Istanbul. But the jewel of them all was Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, where I learned to avoid religious strife between Christians and Muslims in the country, the Turks turned the mosque into a permanent museum.
Inside St. Peter’s Basilica in 2008, I remember stopping beside a pulpit in the middle of the cathedral and looking up at the roof structure placed on an angle above the spot where priests would preach. I learned that the roof acoustically projected the priest’s normal speaking voice throughout the entire church – it was known as “a sounding board” and it proved more effective in delivering the priest’s words than even a public-address system.
Perhaps my most spiritual moment inside a religious building occurred in 1970 when – as a young broadcaster – I received an invitation to join a small audience inside Trinity College Chapel at the University of Toronto. When my eyes adjusted to the dim light inside, I noticed that instead of an altar, the sanctuary featured a stage with a small rock band and a cast of singers.
A couple of young men stepped up to microphones on the bandstand and introduced the cast of singers and what they referred to as “music history’s first ever rock opera.” With that, the band played the overture and the opening number Heaven on Their Minds:
“What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening,” chanted the Apostles.
“What should you want to know? Don’t you mind about the future, don’t you try to think ahead,” sang the featured performer, Jesus.
“Jesus Christ Superstar – tell us that you are who they say you are.”
Yes, I had been invited to a sneak preview of a rock music first, introduced by its co-creators – composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice. And by Christmas that year, 1970, the popular music world was all buzzing about their blockbuster recording, Jesus Christ Superstar.
And the preview all happened in that tiny chapel tucked away on Hoskin Avenue on the U of T campus that October afternoon. I guess that’s why I’ve never shied away from attending musical events inside churches. They always seem to deliver their own kind of magic.
So, it was partly the tradition, partly the spectacle, partly the familiar music, but mostly the act of joining an audience during the holiday season that drew me to the Baptist Church on Monday night. Normally, the Uxbridge Messiah Singers have performed Handel’s work at Trinity United in Uxbridge. With the tragic loss of the 134-year-old church during last May’s tornado, the Messiah Singers needed a new venue, but the show had to go on.
In the smaller Baptist sanctuary, I actually sat arm’s length from conductor Tom Baker as he led the performance. (“You’re all so close,” Tom said at one point under his breath.) Still, Maestro Baker milked all four minutes of Handel’s classically endless “Amen,” to equally endless applause. Then, behind me, a member of the audience summed things up.
“OK, I’ve seen and heard the Messiah,” she said. “Now, it’s officially Christmas!”