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There is a resonance here that blunts a performance’s attack, and creates the impression that all sounds are floating effortlessly – a mixture, perhaps, of what the building actually does to sounds and of the way it encourages performers, especially singers, to project.James O’Donnell, the cathedral’s master of music, set lively sensitive tempos, but from where I was sitting, comparatively near the performers (placed sideways-on against the north wall), contrapuntal details in the Westminster Cathedral Choir’s textures were blurred, while sections of harmonic grandeur lost much of their edge.The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment played with vitality, but were similarly hampered. In its picturesque characterisation and profoundly religious impulse, this was a performance that will lodge in the memory.Messiah was less favoured by the great spaces of Westminster Cathedral. It was a performance, moreover, that had the good fortune to be taking place in an ideal acoustic, clear enough to allow the teeming details in Haydn’s orchestral writing to make their expressive point, yet not so dry as to rob the big moments of their jubilant resonance.The soloists – Sylvia McNair, Michael Shade and Gerald Finley – sang with style and spirit, while the choruses were delivered with a disciplined attack and enthusiasm which became incandescent at key moments like the end of “The heavens are telling”. Friends reported that he was absolutely astonished at Handel’s majestic vision, declaring, “He is the master of us all.” The dramatic use of counterpoint by a composer for whom it was a living expressive force, rather than an archaic exercise, would obviously have appealed to a master of Haydn’s technical expertise, while the brilliant homophonic utterances opened Haydn’s mind to a whole new range of choral expression.
Haydn’s experience of Handel was to be absolutely crucial to his final creative phase, bearing fruit in the last great masses and oratorios, and this confluence of two creative streams was encapsulated last week in performances of Haydn’s The Creation at the Royal Opera House and of Handel’s Messiah at Westminster Cathedral, where it opened the celebrations of that building’s centenary.John Eliot Gardiner’s interpretation of the Haydn, with his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, was a splendid affair, rising with the utmost intensity and concentration to the work’s joys and mysteries. Haydn was already acquainted with Handel’s music through Van Swieten’s performances in Vienna, but the living tradition that London offered Haydn on his first English visit, albeit with unauthentic numbers of performers, made an altogether new impact. Handel had been dead for more than 30 years, of course, but his mind and spirit were still able to establish an electrifying contact with the other composer through the medium of the great festival of his music being held there.

Details: 031-225 4651`Reiteach’: tour details available on 0851-704493. There has been no more touching meeting of great minds than that which occurred in May 1791 at Westminster Abbey between Handel and Haydn. And the warmth with which Reiteach was received at the St Bride’s Centre in Edinburgh bodes very well for its tour of the Highlands and Islands.`Haroun and the Sea of Stories’. Unfortunately, Benchtours do not so much bridge the “audience gap” as fall between two stools which, given the resonance of Rushdie’s tale, is sad indeed.As a non-Gaelic speaker, I cannot pretend to have fully appreciated Drama na h-Alba’s production of Reiteach (“Engagement”) by John Murray, but an English synopsis and snatches of English dialogue allowed me close enough to distinguish an intriguing cross-cultural love story with two strong performances from Donna Macleod and Domhnall Ruadh at its heart.

One would have thought that Rushdie’s fantastic tale would be ideal material for a company with a reputation for inventive, visual storytelling. The result is that Rushdie’s eclecticism, with its acknowledged influences from the Wizard of Oz through Gulliver’s Travels to Alice in Wonderland, seems merely messy.The production achieves a real air of menace towards the end, when Haroun finally comes face-to-face with the Ayatollah-like Khattam-Shud, but by then it’s too late. Peter Livingstone’s upbeat Eastern-flavoured music gives John Cobb’s direction a powerful backbeat, and his cross-dressed characterisation of Mrs Sengupta is one of the show’s delights.One of the other reasons for Haroun’s stylistic incoherence is that, unlike The Bridge, the production has been devised by the company without the controlling vision of a single adapter (A L Kennedy, who was authorised to carry out the adaptation, subsequently disowned the production). From the opening scenes in a city “so sad it’s forgotten its name” the production’s tone is out of key with its story.