Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast · Joshua Weilerstein

Handel Messiah w/ Aram Demirjian

December 18, 2025·1 hr 9 min·5 clips

And a lot of people think the Hallelujah Chorus is the end of the piece also, which it is not, it's the end of part two

Joshua Weilerstein frames the episode as part of a wider repertory on Sticky Notes, after moving through orchestral staples, chamber music, solo piano, and solo violin. He says opera still feels more complicated for the show because of language and the amount of textual translation it would need. From there, he introduces a somewhat new series and brings Aram Demirjian into a conversation about Handel’s Messiah. The episode centers on the idea that every performance of Messiah is different. Demirjian notes that very few performances are completely uncut, and the two speakers treat that as part of the work’s reality rather than a problem. They discuss the many decisions involved in building a personal Messiah. Demirjian describes it as a process with thousands of small choices attached to it. The conversation keeps circling back to the relation between text and music. A recurring example is Handel’s ability to make musical lines rise and fall in a way that mirrors valleys and peaks in the language. They point out how immediate that effect feels once you hear it. That leads them to a broader historical point: listeners often think of programmatic music as beginning much later, but they place Handel, and even Vivaldi, much earlier in that lineage. The episode stays focused on a few excerpts rather than trying to cover the whole piece, which keeps the discussion specific. That narrower scope lets the speakers linger on structure, pacing, and textual emphasis. By the end, Messiah comes across as a score that asks to be assembled anew rather than treated as fixed. It is a listener’s guide to hearing the piece with fresher attention.

As heard by us

A thoughtful guide to why every Messiah sounds a little different.

Aram Demirjian and Joshua Weilerstein make a strong case for why Handel's Messiah never lands the same way twice, and for how much of that difference comes down to the conductor's hand.

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Why you'd press play

You want a conductor's guide to why Messiah is never the same twice.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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