Ruth Smith
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 May
Ruth Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The question, I suppose, can be put in terms of how was Jennings composing his libretto to match Handel's strengths as a composer?
to make Handel right at the top of his game.
And, you know, we could talk for an hour at least just about that.
But I think one way in which it succeeds is that it's not a narrative.
It's not a story.
It's not the life of Christ.
It's a statement of faith.
And it's very elusive because it uses the Old Testament a lot rather than the gospel narrative.
So the suffering servant prophet in the Old Testament is used for the elusive account of Christ's career.
But this leaves it so open for Handel to write emotive music.
for all the strong emotional directives in the work, you know, rejoice, he was despised.
These are as much emotional statements or directives as they are statements of faith.
It may be worth saying that we are stymied in some of our conjectures about Handel in that we have hardly any letters from him compared with, say, Mozart.
I think we have fewer than 50 letters.
Yes, once he's there.
But we don't have anything saying I've decided to go to Dublin on the X of X because I've got these two works.
And I mean, it's worth saying that following on from what Don's saying about him having two completely different works on the stocks.
And then he takes Messiah to Dublin.
We should remember that he, as we've already said, he does two complete concert seasons, two times six works before he does Messiah.
And Messiah could have been a speculative thing.
Showing 181–200 of 216 · page 10 of 11
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