Oxford's 1749 Messiah

Instruments of Time & Truth bring Handel's Messiah to the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities on Saturday 12 December, and it's not the version you'll usually hear. They're performing it as a full-length 18th-century version, played on period instruments, which is a fair way of saying they're going back to how it sounded when it was first played in the city.

There's a bit of local history to it. In 1749, the opening of the Radcliffe Camera was celebrated with the newest music arriving from London: Handel's Messiah. That performance was directed by William Hayes, the Heather Professor of Music and organist of Magdalen College, who did a lot to carry the work beyond London and secure its place in the repertoire. More than 270 years later, Instruments of Time & Truth and conductor Edward Higginbottom are drawing on archival research to recreate that version in full, played on period instruments in the true eighteenth-century spirit: ambitious, celebratory and full of invention.

The staging also nods to the architectural link between the old Radcliffe Camera and the new Schwarzman Centre, where the concert is held as a full-length reading of a work rarely heard in its entirety today. It's a long one — about three hours and ten minutes, including two intervals — and it's already sold out. On stage, Instruments of Time & Truth are joined by the Oxford Consort of Voices, with Rowan Pierce on soprano, Hugh Cutting on alto, Thomas Herford on tenor and Daniel Tate on bass, all under Edward Higginbottom's direction.

The concert runs from 4:00 to 7:10pm in the Sohmen Concert Hall, part of the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter on Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG.