Lake Neuron

Well, I suspect that my fellow Mountain T.O.P. board member Sally Chambers has summed it up far better than I can hope to do. (I didn’t know Sally was going to be there, and I’m sorry I missed seeing her.)

What can I say about Handel’s “Messiah” that hasn’t been said by so many others over the years? It’s a glorious, reverent retelling of the Gospel story, with music and art equal to the truth of the tale.

Thursday night was my first “Messiah,” so I have nothing to compare it to, but I thought it was a fabulous performance. All four soloists were great, but soprano Awet Andemicael was particularly so, at once precise and emotional. Even when she wasn’t singing, she seemed not like she was waiting for a cue but like she was lost in the music herself.

I’ve blogged on previous occasions about Schermerhorn Symphony Center’s wonderful acoustics, and they certainly enhanced this experience. If you hear something like the “Hallelujah” chorus through the little speakers in your TV, you’ve not really heard it. In a live performance, especially in this venue, the sound is so much brighter and there are so many different layers to it. If you think you don’t like classical music, you’ve never heard it performed live.

I am no musician, and am very uninformed about composers and styles and what have you. I don’t know what I’m listening to without reading the program notes. But I know the joy of sound that a concert like this one can create.

Some people look at the Grand Canyon or the vastness of space and find proof of a Creator in their beauty, which is quite appropriate. I think that a work like “Messiah” functions the same way. Mrs. Rittenberry, the fourth member of our party Thursday night, is a math teacher, and technically the score to a musical composition can be expressed as just a series of formulae. But to hear something like this in its majesty, it just gives me the awesome sense of God giving one human being the ability to compose it, giving others the ability to perform it, and giving us all the ability to hear it and be moved.

Well, I skipped covering a school board meeting to go hear Handel’s “Messiah” tonight in Nashville, and ended up running into a school superintendent anyway.

During intermission, as we were stretching our legs, my mother suddenly called out, “Mike! Mike Harris!”

Sure enough, it was my cousin, Clarksville / Montgomery County school superintendent Michael Harris, with his wife Debbie. They were sitting just a few rows ahead of us; we were in the center section and they were in the left section. I’d swapped e-mails with Mike just a month or six weeks ago, but it’s been ages since I’ve seen him or Debbie in person. They’re doing great.

The concert was phenomenal — I’ll post more about it tomorrow, perhaps (it’s already past my normal bedtime as I write this). My parents, of course, enjoyed it as they do every year, and the fourth member of our party, Mrs. Rittenberry, a friend of ours from church, had a wonderful time as well.

It was appropriate to run into Mike at a performing arts event — the very first real play I ever attended, when I was, I guess, in sixth grade or junior high school, was Mike’s senior play at Smyrna High School. It was “Camelot,” and he was King Arthur. (He has a wonderful singing voice.) I was so proud!

Although I’m sad about the circumstances — someone had to drop out at the last minute due to a family illness — I’m thrilled to be headed, along with my parents and a friend from church, to the Nashville Symphony and Nashville Symphony Chorus performance of Handel’s “Messiah” tonight at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. My parents have been going to see “Messiah” for several years now, and it’s the high point of their holiday season. The first year they saw it, they were literally in tears by the end of the evening.

I’ve wanted to go ever since, but just haven’t been able to work it out. I’ve never seen “Messiah” live before. When we had our meeting on Tuesday to plan the Nashville Symphony concert in Shelbyville, I was reminded that Shelby Strickland — the symphony’s director of education and community outreach, and an important part of our committee — is also a member of the chorus, and we were chatting about the concert. I mentioned that I probably wouldn’t make it this year, and we said that maybe I would get to see it next year.

When Dad called me last night to invite me, I knew I had three things to cover tonight for the newspaper and wasn’t sure if I could make it. But a co-worker is going to cover the most critical one and I’m going to talk to someone after the fact to get stories on the other two.