Now Everyone Can 'Sing Along'
Bill Harris, The Toronto Sun
December 2, 2010

This just sounds kind of Christmasy cool.
The holiday special Sing Along Messiah debuts on Bravo! on Monday, Dec. 6. With lyrics provided on-screen, viewers can sing along to a performance of George Frideric Handel's Messiah, which was taped before a live audience at Massey Hall in Toronto.

Dressed as Maestro Handel, complete with period wig and powdered face, Ivars Taurins leads the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Tafelmusik Chamber Choir and a couple thousand audience members on a musical journey through time.

It's the broadcast premiere of this 23-year-old annual Toronto tradition.

By the way, if it's still a little too early for you to really get into the Christmas spirit -- despite subliminal messages from every mall in the country that you're already behind -- be aware that Sing Along Messiah will repeat on Bravo! on Dec. 18, Dec. 22 and again on Christmas morning.

Don't be shy, give it a try!


We have a choice of singalong Messiahs: passive watching tonight or active singing on Dec 19
John Terrauds, Toronto Star blog
December 6, 2010

Tafelmusik's annual Singalong Messiah at Massey Hall is an entrenched Toronto institution that's getting its moment of televised glory tonight at 9 p.m. (Eastern) on Bravo!

Recorded last spring at technologically friendly Koerner Hall, tonight's broadcast features a dream quartet of soloists -- soprano Suzie LeBlanc, countertenor Daniel Taylor, tenor Rufus Mueller (both men return as soloists for this year's Messiah run) and bass-baritone Locky Chung -- the excellent Tafelmusik orchestra and chamber choir and conductor Ivars Taurins hamming it up for all it's worth, dressed up as George Frideric Handel himself.

The audience makes a fantastic choir, sounding every bit like a well-prepared large choral society -- even without Taurins shouting out at the singers at the top of his voice.

The overture is overlaid by clips of the musicians getting ready backstage, and Taurins providing a bit of historical background as he gets into costume. It's too bad the oratorio has been cut substantially to accommodate the 90-minute format, as well as Taurins' commentary.

In my opinion, the real magic of the Singalong Messiah is in being there to participate in the choruses. It's just not the same watching it on TV, no matter how nicely done. However, this is a great way for someone who has never heard the oratorio to check out Messiah without having to commit to buying a ticket. It could be the start of a life-long love affair.

Tafelmusik is running its Singalong Messiah YouTube video contest for the second time. People can submit 2 minutes of video by Sunday to have a chance of winning four free tickets to the Massey Hall concert on Dec. 19 and well as a basket of other goodies


Hallelujah! Nothing says it's Christmas like a TV special
John Doyle, The Globe & Mail
December 6, 2010

Christmas. The holidays. Joy to the world. Fine, go for it. Knock yourself out.
Tinsel, mistletoe, Christmas parties with depressed people laughing maniacally or descending into despair immediately after they’ve been rude to you. The lineup at the post office. Department stores where nobody wants to take your money. Trawling the toy department for some obscure gadget to give to a child you know is the spawn of Satan. Christmas cards with illegible signatures. Pure joy. Look forward to it every year.

And then there’s the holiday TV schedule. Before Halloween, I think, they started arriving, those lists of “Holiday Programming” to be offered during November and December by broadcasters big and small. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas or, that other spawn of Satan, Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.

Fact is, mind you, that the holidays are defined by nostalgia, not by what’s happening now. A lot of people use television to induce the necessary nostalgia. Remembering the first time they saw Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, that sort of thing.

In many homes the TV set has replaced the traditional hearth as an emanation of the warmth of the holiday spirit. Thus, advertisers are anxious to get their products promoted on the old, familiar shows that epitomize the holiday experience. No matter how nostalgic and feel-good the programs may be, they're about selling stuff.

There are few exceptions to this rule, even at the high-art end of things. Tonight’s Sing Along Messiah (Bravo!, 9 p.m.) is far from Frosty the Snowman but it’s still about nostalgia. In the two-hour special, Tafelmusik, the period instrument orchestra and choir, perform their annual rendition of Handel’s Messiah with a chorus of thousands at Toronto’s Massey Hall. In a twist, viewers across the country are invited to join in at home. The program provides lyrics on-screen, so that, as Bravo! puts it, “families at home can warm up their vocal cords and join in the revelry of this magical evening.”

It is a bit magical. Ivars Taurins, founding director of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir, appears as Handel himself, cracking jokes about this and that before the music starts. Mind you, before any of this happens, various people in the audience at the performance are interviewed, specifically about how many times they have attended the annual ritual. Most have had the experience multiple times. Just as some people believe the holidays have arrived when they watch The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, others know the season has arrived when they experience this performance of Handel’s music.

I’m not knocking it. It’s a lovely production and soprano Suzie LeBlanc is a joy to behold performing Handel. Me, I like the Messiah and have since childhood. Like everyone raised in Dublin, I know the work was first performed there, in a hall on tiny Fishamble Street. I know that Jonathan Swift, then the boss of the cathedral up the road, had misgivings about it, but Swift had misgivings about everything from God to muddy ale and mouldy bread.

Me, I have misgivings about holiday-themed TV. Just as A Charlie Brown Christmas tells you there are few shopping days left, so does a performance, on TV or in a theatre, of Handel’s Messiah. Same thing, really.

It would be nice if there was a variation from it all. For a time, the holidays were signalled by new, smarmy, feel-good TV movies about a single mother meeting a nice man at the mall, or something. There was also a craze for having a Celtic Christmas on TV. If you weren’t listening to flutes and fiddles and women in long dresses singing Gaelic carols, you weren’t having Christmas at all.

Specials such as The Rankin Sisters Home for Christmas and Christmas Together with the Barra MacNeils, are typical of this genre, and always air on Bravo! at this time of the year. They’re nice shows and all, but the Celtic Christmas thing is just another racket. “Celtic Christmas” became shorthand for old-fashioned values and sitting around the fireside singing aye-tiddly-aye music. In such settings, nobody collapses, drink-sodden, to the floor. In reality it does transpire, believe me.

All I’m saying is that a new variation on holiday themes would be a tonic. And I need a tonic. The line-up at the liquor store as it teems with people who clearly shouldn’t be allowed to drink because then they’ll go around decking the halls or, worse, singing about decking the halls. People offering you Christmas pudding which clearly isn’t Christmas pudding as known to a living soul. People asking me when the Queen’s Christmas Message is on TV. Skating specials. Year-end lists. Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. Joy to the world. Just bring it on.


A Musical Tradition
Kevin Bazzana, Times Colonist
December 2, 2010

For Handel-loving homebodies, there is the television première of the popular sing-along Messiah presented annually by the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir. (Bravo!, Monday, 6 p.m.) Recorded in Toronto in January, the performance features four outstanding soloists (including the soprano Suzie LeBlanc and the countertenor Daniel Taylor) and "a mass audience choir made up of more than 1,000 Tafelmusik fans," and is conducted by Ivars Taurins, done up as "Maestro Handel."


Handel's Hell Hallelujah Heaven
What's On In Vancouver
December 3, 2010

This time of the year, versions of Handel’s “Messiah” are as common as fake snow and red velvet. But there is something quite uncommon about the one Tafelmusik puts on every year. It’s not the only one in which the audience gets to sing, and it’s probably not the only one with period instruments. However, it is unusual to see “Messiah” conducted by George Frideric Handel himself.

That’s the twist in a performance that has been a Toronto Christmas tradition since 1986 – and is finally coming to TV as “Sing Along Messiah Monday, Dec. 6, on Bravo!

Since its debut in Dublin in 1742 – with Handel at the helm that time, too – “Messiah” has undergone myriad adaptations and changes.

“Symphony orchestras tend to do the ‘full symphonic’ versions that were elaborated upon, with added instruments and things,” says Ivars Taurins, founding director of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir. “This is something that started to happen as soon as Handel died, and the performances started getting bigger and bigger. The first person to add instrumentation was Mozart. … It was adapted to the tastes of each age.”

Now we’re used to a full symphony orchestra with a huge choir belting out the “Hallelujah Chorus” with enough force to blow down the gates of heaven.

With “Sing Along Messiah,” Taurins says, the aim was to get back to a version that is “more intimate and more approachable in a way.”

Onstage are the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir featuring soprano Suzie LeBlanc, countertenor Daniel Taylor, tenor Rufus Muller and baritone Locky Chung. The orchestra and choir each have around two dozen members.  But for “Messiah,” the ensemble becomes something of a costume drama with a cast of thousands. Each year, Massey Hall’s 2,700 seats are filled with concertgoers who also play the role of choir – and are seated according to vocal range.  The filmed performance was staged last January at the Royal Conservatory in a slightly smaller hall, but everything else is more or less the same as always.

Taurins, in 18th-century costume, complete with powdered wig, plays Handel as a crotchety ghost who got suckered by God into conducting a gang of amateurs in his holiday classic every year for eternity.

“Because Tafelmusik orchestra and choir deal with the music from a historical perspective, there was something to be said for bringing to life Mr. Handel and showing what a performance led by him might be like,” Taurins says about the original concept. “And I’ve done a lot of research into him as a man, a composer and the entrepreneur of his own work, and about how he dealt with people, his great wit – and his anger.”

Thus, Taurins punctuates the music with anecdotes, instructions for the ad hoc choir and a fair amount of heckling – particularly of the tenors. He also conducts with an almost rock ‘n’ roll energy and sense of fun.

“Actually it was a bit of a fluke that I ended up getting dressed up as Handel,” he says. “I told our manager at the time that the only way I’d think about doing a sing-along ‘Messiah’ was if I could dress up as Handel. “She said, ‘What a brilliant idea,’ and my goose was cooked.”


Larissa Liepins, Postmedia News
Windsor Star, Montreal Gazette
December 6, 2010

If singing Hallelujah is more your thing, the Sing Along Messiah makes its TV debut tonight, with conductor Ivars Taurins (as Maestro Handel, resplendent in powdered wig and 18th-century garb) leading the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir, along with a mass audience choir of more than 1,000 Tafelmusik fans, as they perform Handel's baroque masterpiece. (9 p.m., Bravo)

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