At ten I sang treble on Christopher Hogwood’s Messiah — the L’Oiseau-Lyre recording with the Academy of Ancient Music and the Christ Church Cathedral Choir under Simon Preston. We recorded at St Jude-on-the-Hill in Hampstead in the spring of 1979.
I’m named in the sleeve notes. It’s still in the catalogue — I had no idea at the time that it would be.
What made it contentious was the scale. Hogwood went back to the 1754 Foundling Hospital version, where the forces are documented and small: men and boys, soloists, period instruments. Gut strings, no vibrato, harpsichord. Against the massed-choir Messiah most audiences knew, it struck some people as thin and others as a cleaning.
For a treble it meant being audible. There weren’t enough of us to hide in.
That September we gave it at the Proms — Prom 47, the Royal Albert Hall, 9 September 1979, the eighty-fifth season, broadcast on Radio 3.
Two things stayed with me. Someone in the audience shouted at Simon Preston, “Why have you got such a small organ?”, and the hall laughed. And at the end Hogwood turned and applauded the choir.
The Times gave us a reserved nod.
The recording’s reputation took longer to settle. Gramophone revisited it in 2015 for Decca’s limited re-issue, and Lindsay Kemp wrote:
This recording is not only one of the shining lights of ‘historically informed performance’, forcing us to rethink what we thought we knew and strewing new ideas in our path; it also remains one of the most deeply convincing Messiahs we have.
Lindsay Kemp, Gramophone, 10 April 2015
I was ten. I knew the notes were hard, the hall was enormous, and the conductor was pleased with us. It took decades to work out that I’d been standing inside an argument about how old music should sound — one that’s still going on.