Messiah

Among the highest peaks of Western music, Messiah by Georg Friedrich Händel occupies a unique place, for expressive force, dramatic power and spiritual depth. Composed in just twenty-four days in the summer of 1741, to a libretto based entirely on biblical texts, this oratorio has become a universal symbol, loved and performed all over the world.
The Messiah is a monumental work that transcends all confessional or cultural barriers: it is not a theatrical narration, but a meditation in music on the mystery of redemption. The three parts that compose it – Announcement and Nativity, Passion and Resurrection, and Final Glorification – do not follow a linear plot, but develop like a sound architecture in which intimate and contemplative pages alternate with grand choral frescoes of overwhelming impact.
In this composition Händel manages to fuse the lyrical intensity of Italian opera, the severity of German counterpoint and the formal clarity of the English tradition. The famous Hallelujah is just one of the many peaks of a score that offers the audience an uninterrupted succession of masterpieces: from dramatic recitatives to heartfelt ariosos, from monumental fugues to exultant chorales.
The concert offers the complete performance of the oratorio, with period instruments and a philological approach that restores its original colour, transparency and vitality. The Locatelli Ensemble, accompanied by its own Locatelli Vocal Ensemble, intends to bring to light all the theatrical and spiritual force of this work, not as a historical relic, but as a living and involving experience, capable of speaking even today with impressive topicality.
To stage the Messiah is to give voice to one of the highest testimonies of European Baroque music, in a timeless dialogue between art, faith and humanity.