When baritone Jesse Blumberg was a teenager in suburban New York City, he’d occasionally get away from his family and spend a weekend with his buddies in Atlantic City — but not for the reason you might think.
“I was in the New Jersey All-State Chorus,” he recalled. “We attended these music educators’ conferences every year, and our tradition was to sing the ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus a cappella on the boardwalk.”
If singing the praises of the “king of kings” seems incongruous amid casinos and carnival rides, Blumberg and his colleagues are now set to perform that famous chorus, along with the rest of Handel’s Messiah, in an altogether more appropriate environment. Blumberg is slated to be the baritone soloist with American Bach for the ensemble’s annual performance of the ever-popular oratorio in Grace Cathedral this month.
Except for a forced break during the COVID-19 pandemic, Artistic Director Jeffrey Thomas has been leading performances of Messiah in that iconic space every December since 1998. This year at the cathedral, he plans to conduct the Christmas portion of the oratorio, along with music of J.S. Bach, on Dec. 12, followed by a complete performance of Messiah on Dec. 13.
“Being entrusted with rendering the music of a great composer is a great job to have,” Thomas said in an interview from his Walnut Creek home. “As musicians, we can see all kinds of things beyond the notes. Our job is to play it in a way that the audience can hear what we see.”
Messiah premiered in Dublin, Ireland, in April 1742. George Frideric Handel, a German emigre in London, had fallen on relatively hard times as his style of opera gradually lost favor. But librettist Charles Jennens’s text — a loose narrative in three sections that focus on Christ’s birth, sacrifice, and resurrection, respectively — sparked the composer’s creativity like nothing before, inspiring him to complete the 2½-hour piece in a matter of weeks. Audiences have responded enthusiastically ever since.
The tradition of performing Messiah during the Christmas season took hold in the U.S. and U.K. around 200 years ago, and while the work’s popularity has never waned, styles of presenting it have changed. For a time, an approach of “the more singers, the better” predominated, but today, using smaller forces (closer to those of the original performances) is more common.
Despite the size of Grace Cathedral — which holds around 1,200 people, including 400 who have obstructed views of the stage — Thomas has always opted for a smaller scale. His Baroque-instrument orchestra consists of around 30 players; his chorus is made up of 34 singers.
Large numbers are not needed, Thomas explained, thanks to the cathedral’s sophisticated sound system. “There’s a very subtle time delay as the sound goes down toward the great doors at the front,” he said. “It’s mostly imperceptible, but it brings the clarity all the way to the back row.”
Blumberg said he’s sung at bigger venues, like the roughly 4,000-capacity National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., so he’s familiar with the acoustic challenges but also trusts how such spaces handle them.
“They do something similar there. You do your best for the people in the front, and you leave it to the sound designers to relay it to the people in the back,” Blumberg said in a separate interview from his Toronto home.
Yet big doesn’t always mean blowing the audience away with sheer volume.
“We can put more nuance into it because we’re not trying to compete with a giant orchestra or giant chorus,” said Tennessee-based soprano Mary Wilson, who has soloed in about eight Grace Cathedral Messiahs over the years and is scheduled to join American Bach in the work again this season. “We can be subtle. Little grace notes are heard.”
That might seem counterintuitive for such a grand space, but Wilson said that “there’s something special about the intimacy Jeffrey creates. The experience is personal. It’s about reaching people, telling a story, being in the moment.”
Thomas credits this approach to several great conductors who led productions he sang in as a youth, including Richard Westenburg, founder of the New York-based ensemble Musica Sacra, and Roger Norrington, a pioneer in the field of historically informed performance.
“Norrington impressed upon me how incredibly prepared he was,” Thomas recalled. “The orchestral parts in his score were all marked up. So I marked up my score — and we’re still using it to this day.”
As that continuity suggests, Thomas’s view of Messiah hasn’t fundamentally shifted over the past quarter century. “The things I initially saw in the score are still the main points to bring up and polish over and over,” he said.
“But it’s the process of polishing year after year that keeps revealing more and more,” he continued. “It’s not like we’re delivering the same performance [every December]. That is what inspires our musicians — the knowledge that each time, we’re going to throw ourselves into this pursuit of how perfectly we can deliver Handel’s music.”
And remarkably, Messiah still feels fresh after nearly three centuries.
“Handel’s music speaks to us so easily,” Thomas said. “Bach’s music is more intellectual, but Handel’s is more accessible. He sends it right to your mind and heart.”
“Handel was not a native English speaker, but the way the text lies is so natural,” added Wilson. “It feels good to the ears, and it really connects emotionally with people. When the tenor sings ‘Comfort ye,’ you see people just sink in their chairs and take a deep breath.”
Thomas admitted that Grace Cathedral can be a little chilly for the singers some years. He recalled performances where his female soloists wore leggings under their gowns. For Blumberg, any shivers would likely evoke nostalgia and those long-ago performances on Atlantic City’s boardwalk on brisk November days.
In any case, the baritone is overjoyed to be returning to Messiah and San Francisco.
“There’s a comfort knowing the quality, intensity, and passion will be there,” he said. “What I appreciate most about [American Bach] is everything we do is always in service of lifting the piece to somewhere more profound and more communicative.
“Perfection for perfection’s sake isn’t that interesting.”
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
