“What I like about this is that I’m not even sure it’s a good idea in all honesty. It’s going to be beautiful though,” says Nico Muhly. That’s the one thing everyone involved agrees on — the beauty of Handel’s music. Muhly, one of five composers commissioned to mark the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death by reinterpreting one of his works for performance at the Barbican arts center in London on Saturday, explains: “If you love something a lot you don’t want to touch it.” David Daniels, the counter-tenor charged with bringing these new interpretations to life, agrees. “My first reaction was: Why mess with perfection?” he says.
But Daniels and Muhly — along with Michael Nyman, Craig Armstrong, John Tavener and Jocelyn Pook, the other composers involved — all put aside initial doubts. The opportunity to simply pay tribute to the composer Tavener calls “the greatest melodist of all time” was unmissable.
The project is the brainchild of Robert van Leer, head of music and arts projects at the Barbican, and Gill Graham, of the publishers Music Sales. “We wanted, in Handel’s anniversary year, to bring something more contemporary into the picture, amid what we knew would be a sea of Handel operas and presentations,” Van Leer says. And so Handel Remixed was born, giving musicians and audiences alike the opportunity to re-examine and reappraise his music, to hear familiar works with fresh ears.
Craig Armstrong — best known for his film scores — has taken a 16-bar passage of The Water Music as his starting point. “What really was exciting about the process was taking the time to analyze a piece of his music and look at all the chords one by one and really just look at the progressions,” he says. “The funny thing with Handel is that it sounds very fluid — like you turn a tap on — and quite simple, but when I actually analyzed the chords I realized it’s incredibly complicated and clever. The first variation just goes up a semitone all the way until it gets to the next octave. He’s an amazing composer. It made me want to go back and listen to more of his music.”
Muhly felt the same impulse, and acted on it in his own reinterpretation. One of the two works he chose is the aria O Lord Whose Numbers Merciless, from Saul. “It’s the most beautiful thing in the world,” he says. “What I always want is for it to last for ever. To live in the music. So that’s what I did.”
Muhly has slowed the aria down — in fact he’s made it around four times slower. “I took the original orchestration and extended it almost into eternity. The orchestra is playing the same notes, basically, but they’re each slower by a different proportion. The vocal line, note for note, is the same. It’s like putting the pedal down on the piano and it just goes through, and makes this cloud.” Handel’s original aria is, of course, a prayer, and Muhly’s treatment, with its long drones, recognizes that. He offers a less reverent, alternative take: “It feels like singing along to a vacuum cleaner.”
Nyman chose another well known and much loved aria — Ombra Mai Fu, from Xerxes. “Handel’s Largo, as it was always known, must have been the first and only Handel that I listened to as a child — though I must have heard the Hallelujah Chorus without knowing it was by Handel,” he says. “I seem to remember lying in bed and hearing Kathleen Ferrier singing it on a distant radio.”
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