Sing along with a classic

There’s a moment during Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” that everyone knows: the Hallelujah Chorus. The audience stands up, the trumpets ring high, the choir belts out those familiar four notes – and you can bet your bottom dollar that most of the audience is wishing they could sing along.

Well, you can. Not while you’re at the Tacoma Symphony Chorus’ “Messiah” on Dec. 16; that’s a listening experience. We mean at a “Messiah” sing-along, and there’s one this weekend at a Lakewood church – a tradition that goes back almost 20 years.

“In the early 1980s, I was conducting the choir at Christ Lutheran, Lakewood,” says Tom Goleeke, the Lakewood sing-along’s conductor, who at the time was also head of vocal music at the University of Puget Sound. “A parishioner came up to me and said that back where he’d grown up, they did a sing-along ‘Messiah,’ and could we do it here?”

Goleeke and his choir thought it was a great idea and a sing-along tradition began, lasting every year until Goleeke retired from UPS in 2003. He says he needed a break, but at parishioners’ requests, he took up the baton again two years ago and will lead the sing-along this year.

Goleeke gets together an orchestra of local professional musicians, including two trumpeters and a harpsichord, plus four professional soloists, to play along with the choir. The choir and orchestra rehearse the day before, then invite anyone interested to come and sing along. Music is provided.

The oratorio, which Handel wrote in 1741 to a Bible-based libretto about the life of Jesus Christ, is a big one, so there are a few cuts: In his sing-along, Goleeke – a Handel expert – includes all of Part I, and some of Parts II and III – the favorite sections like the Hallelujah and Amen choruses.

“The whole thing takes about two and a half hours, depending on how fast we go,” Goleeke says.

How fast you go is quite an issue in actually singing the “Messiah.” Unlike the Hallelujah chorus, many of the chorus numbers are difficult, each part including seemingly endless pages of sixteenth-note runs and some very high notes for the tenors and sopranos.

The Tacoma Symphony Chorus, which has sung the oratorio yearly since 2005, takes three months of weekly practice to rehearse it, even though most of the 65 members know it well.

“It’s glorious to sing,” says Sibyl Adams, who has sung both alto and soprano with the TSC performance since it began, and in college and high school before that. “It’s wonderful. It’s a marker for the season; I love singing it.”

Adams says that as long as she’s warmed up, the runs aren’t too difficult, and she knows the notes extremely well by now. The other pleasure, however, is reinterpreting such a well-known work in a different way each time, under the direction of Geoffrey Boers.

“I get to transform it with the choir every year,” says Adams. “That’s the challenge and the fun of it for me.”

Even if you don’t sing along with the “Messiah,” you’ll be taking part in a long tradition just by standing when everyone else does at the beginning of the Hallelujah Chorus – though it doesn’t have much to do with Christian joy. Back when King George II heard the work in 1743, he stood at that moment to express admiration for Handel’s work – a kind of solo standing ovation. Since he was the king, everyone else had to stand as well and – even in a democratic republic – we still do.

After 18 performances, though, does Goleeke ever get tired of conducting the “Messiah?”

“No, I don’t,” he says. “This is the one time of the year I get to do it. It’s such a great piece.”

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568 rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com log.thenewstribune.com/arts