Coming Soon, Mendelssohn in Egypt

We hear that exciting things were afoot at St Jude's Hampstead last week, as Robert King and The King's Consort recorded Israel in Ägypten, Mendelssohn's version of Handel's oratorio Israel in Egypt.

Mendelssohn was a great fan and a frequent conductor of Israel, and during a visit to London in the early 1830s he consulted Handel's own manuscripts and prepared a new critical edition of the work. Though this didn't appear in print until 1845, his super-sized arrangement was first performed in this version in 1833 - nearly a century after the premiere of Handel's original work, 13 years pre-Elijah, and just three before the unjustly neglected Paulus (Mendelssohn's first large-scale oratorio in his own right). Working with a German translation of the original libretto, Mendelssohn added trombones and clarinets, resequenced things, and expanded the score with additional recitatives which he'd discovered in the original manuscript but which were omitted from the published version of the score.

Nearly 200 years on, King has reconstructed Mendelssohn's own score, and conducted it at the Leipzig Gewandhaus last September with several of the singers who appear on the forthcoming recording. The King's Consort play at A = 430 for this project, with a choir of 35 (a far cry from Mendelssohn's rather chaotic original performance, where the choir numbered almost 300!) and a fine line-up of soloists in sopranos Lydia Teuscher and Julia Doyle, contralto Hilary Summers, tenor Ben Hulett and baritone Roderick Williams.

Israel in Ägypten is due for release on Vivat in spring 2016.

Other related recordings from Robert King and The King's Consort

You can view the complete current Vivat catalogue here.