Handel / Mozart: Messiah (Haus für Mozart, Salzburg 2020, directed by Mancini)

Director Robert Wilson, known as the creator of impressive visual worlds, delivers a magnificent staging of Mozart's adaptation of Handel's "Messiah." In Marc Minkowski, a conductor has been engaged who perfectly understands how to combine the Baroque style with the sonic possibilities of a classical orchestra such as the Musiciens du Louvre. The excellent quartet of soloists, featuring Elena Tsallagova, Wiebke Lehmkuhl, Richard Croft, and José Coca Loza, blends perfectly into Wilson's impressive flood of imagery. Mozart was commissioned by Gottfried van Swieten to modernize the score fifty years after Handel's popular composition (1742). Mozart's version is based on the German text and uses the instrumentation typical of the orchestra of that time. In particular, the wind instruments are utilized differently and more prominently, so that individual movements are given a special sonic coloration through specific instruments.