While Spanish music is giving the strongest flavour to this year's Proms, works inspired by tales from the Old Testament will provide another strand running through the season. Saturday's performance of Haydn's oratorio started things off, literally at the very beginning. The performance by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its own choir under Charles Mackerras, with a carefully matched trio of soloists, was lithe and dramatic in exactly the right stylish way, and provided a timely reminder, after the mediocre jollities of Friday's opening concert, that the Proms can and should offer performances of exemplary quality.
The vital spark for the creation of The Creation was provided in London. It was hearing Handel's Israel in Egypt and Messiah during his 1791 visit to the capital that determined Haydn to write a similar large-scale choral work. He returned to Germany in possession of a pre-existing English text that, borrowing from Paradise Lost as well as the Psalms and the book of Genesis, might well have been originally written for Handel. Haydn, though, proceeded to set it in German translation, and that was how it was heard here.
Mackerras can produce remarkable results in 18th-century music whatever forces he is conducting, but with the period instrumentalists of the OAE he was really in his element. Mackerras always pushed the music forward, teasing out lines and layers in the opening orchestral depiction of chaos, giving beautifully pointed support to the soloists, and sending a pulsing energy through the grandest of the choruses. Yet at the same time he gave the piece a palpable dramatic shape that blossomed and proliferated as convincingly as the world whose story was steadily being unfolded.
A fortepiano delicately accompanied the recitatives; solo arias and ensembles were well-balanced. If the soprano Christiane Oelze was the pick of the soloists, that is only because her diction was marginally clearer than that of her colleagues; her light, easily negotiated ornaments were a constant delight. The tenor Paul Groves had a crisp, authoritative delivery in his important declamations, but there was a just a hint of acidic edge in one or two arias; bass John Relyea was always focused and secure. A heartening, truly rewarding occasion.
· This concert will be rebroadcast on Radio 3 tomorrow at 2 pm.
