Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Which edition to use? Please weigh in...

A predictable question, with some familiar concerns.

It’s time to buy myself a score (I love this part!) Because this is Messiah, I imagine I may be using this score twenty times over the next fifty years, and I want it to be the 'best' one. That has been (maybe still is) the Watkins Shaw edition (that worn vocal score is sitting on my shelf), though I’ve heard of several others gaining favor recently. And complicating matters, the church owns the G. Schirmer vocal scores. No orchestra parts, though, which I will have to buy or borrow.

So there are many variables to consider:
  • Any edition I buy will have to be compatible with the Schirmer vocal score.
  • The style of the continuo writing is a factor- I have been warned away from Schirmer for that reason, and we will use continuo for at least some of the performances. Others, though, will require a playable reduction for organ alone.
  • Of course, there are the varying orchestrations (i.e. Mozart's addition of trombones, etc.)
  • Above all, is my desire to prepare and mark my score for use in the far future. I don’t want to choose an overall inferior score though it may be useful for the particular circumstances of this year’s project.
If I were a touch richer, I would follow some advice I got from a teacher last year: she suggested that I buy my own orchestral parts to every full score I buy. That way I can mark them to my liking and take them with me wherever I go. Good advice, but hard on the budget, since full scores alone are already a major expense.

Of course, our friends at choralnet.org have discussed this before:

http://choralnet.org/resources/viewResource.phtml?id=2543&category=1

If you have anything to add or declare, please do so!

3 comments:

CurrentConductor said...

Buy Dover!

It's the cheapest, and it also happens to be one of the excellent Dover ones, where they got a really good editor.

Anonymous said...

From Phil Choquette of Colorado:

The edition used in recent years by the CSO Chorus is the New Novello Choral Edition, edited by Watkins Shaw and published in 1992. Print size of the text is too small in my opinion, but I like the score.

Anonymous said...

Hi,
I'm a conductor and professor of conducting at Westminster Choir College in Princeton NJ. I've led just over 30 performances of Messiah . . .
I love the Dover score. It's cheap, easy to read, and very well edited. The down side is that there are no matching vocal scores or instrumental parts.

So I've finally replaced my old Dover score (sigh) with the relatively new one edited by Clifford Bartlett for Oxford. Easy to use, cheap, with matching vocal scores and instrumental parts. And it has the most complete selection of alternate movements (all by Handel) I know, so, unlike any other score, if you decide to use the a minor soprano version of "refiner's fire" and the two alto version (with chorus) of "How beautiful", you can do so without having to track down extra performing parts for those.

One word about W Shaw - it was a ground-breaking score in its time, but I would not use it. Shaw made too many decisions (esp about over-dotting) that I think should be left up to the individual conductor. If you don't want to think about such things, Shaw may be your man (although the somewhat glossy paper is difficult to read under bright stage lighting, and the staves are often too close together!), but Shaw's decisions about over-dotting are extreme to many conductors today (F. Neumann and others have caused many fine musicians to rethin the extent of our use of over-dotting).

Best wishes for your many performacnes of Messiah over the years to come - it's a beautiful work that rewards the performer as well as the listener, and can really hold up to repeat performances.

Andrew Megill