with Cristian Măcelaru, Music Director

Back when he wielded a bow more often than a baton, CSO Music Director Cristian Măcelaru’s Decembers used to be clotted with performances of Handel’s Messiah. Workaday musicians joke that performances of the perennial are so plentiful that they tend to pay for their holiday plans many times over. Măcelaru was no exception. 

Even so, no two performances of the Christmas classic were ever the same — especially not when Măcelaru was coming of age, in the early 2000s. No longer a fringe musical movement, historically informed performance practice had solidly entered the mainstream, where it remains today. Still, the purism of approach varies wildly. Does one use a countertenor or a mezzo? Period or modern instruments? And what cuts are observed, if any?

Măcelaru’s experience in historically informed performance practice dates back to his graduate work at Rice University. Unbeknownst to him, his violin teacher, Sergiu Luca, was a leader in the historically informed performance movement; the two played together as part of an organization called Music in Context, which performed repertoire on instruments from the period and region. 

Though he’s not going to ask the orchestra to use Baroque bows and gut strings, Măcelaru says his Messiah with the CSO and May Festival Chorus will draw on lessons he learned from Luca — and, yes, years of playing his own Messiahs with minimal rehearsal time.  

“I tell the orchestra and chorus to begin with a very simple concept: If the music goes up, so does the intensity; if the musical line goes down, so does the intensity. Then, I’ll let them know when we inevitably break this rule,” he says. “But if you start from that point of view, you already have a different way of listening to each other.”

—Hannah Edgar