Press

Handel Week Festival Opens in Oak Park With Concerti and a Roman Rarity

Each February for the past 27 years, Dennis Northway has convened musicians to perform the work of George Frideric Handel in Oak Park. Not the Messiah that appears with metronomic regularity each Christmas, nor even the Water Music or Royal Fireworks that surface on classical radio, but the unfamiliar catalog that gradually receded from public memory after Handel's death. Even after relocating from Chicagoland to the Pacific Northwest, Northway has returned annually to sustain this unlikely tradition.

That there is a Handel Week Festival at all feels something like a miracle. The composer who once dominated European musical life now occupies a peculiar position: universally recognized for a single oratorio, largely unknown for everything else. Yet here, in the sanctuary of Pilgrim Congregational Church, the thread holds.

Handel's music receives dedicated advocacy at Oak Park festival by Lawrence A. Johnson

"Celebrations of Bach's music are as innumerable as the stars, as they should be. Yet for some reason concerts devoted to music of Handel – apart from the inescapable Messiah – are less thick on the ground. Considering his inexhaustible fount of melody and prolific achievements across several genres, too much of Handel's music remains unexplored, at least on the local scene. All credit then to the Handel Week Festival. Co-founded by artistic director Dennis E. Northway and baritone Philip Kraus, the annual Oak Park event is currently marking its 26th season. . . (Soprano) Josefien Stoppelenburg proved a worthy exponent of Handel's music in three sacred cantatas. . .The soprano largely showed herself an impressive Handelian – singing with full tone, flexibility, and idiomatic Baroque style with the agility to sail through Handel's coloratura hurdles in the concluding Alleluias. . .(Northway) led a notably alert and well-balanced performance of Bach's BWV 51. The festive rejoicing of the framing movements proved especially vibrant and engaging with Stoppelenburg's fine vocalism complemented by Ryan Berndt's stylish trumpet playing. The vocal works were spelled by Handel's Organ Concertos in B flat and F major. David White was a game soloist and the piping chamber organ proved ideally scaled for these works. . . White brought out the ingenuity of Handel's music, wittily underling the cukoo and nightingale onomatopoeia in the F major concerto."

"With no sets, costumes or stage direction to distract one's attention from the music, one could concentrate on the skill and beauty of the singing and orchestral playing under Northway's fluid direction. He secured a crisply convincing period instrument sound from his chamber orchestra without using period instruments."

"...the opportunity to hear live music by a master of so many genres is worth commemorating, as is the local dedication and talent that year after year make Oak Park an extremely popular venue for hearing Handel's music."