Every December a group of homeless men and women - alongside professional musicians from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Master Chorale - perform Messiah at the Midnight Mission on Los Angeles' Skid Row under the direction of concert violinist Vijay Gupta. Moving freely across space and time, drawing links between modern LA and Handel’s London, this deeply musical Christmas Sunday Feature follows the singers and players at this year’s performance while exploring the composition and public history of Messiah itself.
Handel’s score is unlike anything he’d ever written and has deep-rooted ties to philanthropy. Messiah occupied a special role in terms of the new civil spaces of Georgian London, the profits from its early performances helping people out of debtor’s prison, tied thereafter to the Foundling Hospital for children. But its history is also one of public participation, of community singing - a sense that Messiah belongs not to the formal world of classical performance but to audiences, to us. We hear singers from the Skid Row community rehearse and perform at the Mission and talk about what Messiah means to them; how Handel and his librettist Charles Jennens created a work that has powerful secular meanings beyond the devout text – a thought experiment, a message of social revolution, an address to universal humanity and one of hope. For the singers at the Mission, Messiah is a refusal to make peace with the idea of a permanent underclass, or that whole swathes of society should be left homeless, scapegoated and vulnerable. Recorded on the streets of Skid Row, rehearsals and performance at the Midnight Mission and at Handel’s house in London where he wrote Messiah, this year’s conductor and founder of the Street Symphony project, Vijay Gupta, presents.
