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SITE RATING:  8/10 SITE REVIEW: Although I never sang under Dr. Shaw, I sang under the baton of one of his most illustrious protégés, Dr. Craig Jessop, for many years, and sang several Shaw-annotated masterworks under his baton, and I can testify that Dr. Shaw was meticulous in his score annotations.  Robert Shaw was considered by many to be the premiere American choral conductor of his generation, and his many recordings testify to his perfectionism and desire for unity.  On this, Shaw's third major recording of Messiah, we're given another meticulous performance, and you can hear the almost metronomic precision with which the Atlanta Symphony and  Chamber Chorus perform.  Dr. Shaw was 68 years old when this recording was made, and although it's not a sluggish performance, it feels very safe.  All of the tempos remain decidedly moderate, and, like Goldilocks, left me feeling a little dissatisfied with the finished results. Telarc, which specialized in making audiophile digital recordings in the opening age of CD technology, had the annoying habit of lumping tracks together into long cuts, rather than taking advantage of the CD's ability to leap from track to track, (most famously on Shaw's 1990 recording of Orff's Carmina Burana, which lumped twenty-five songs into a mere four tracks) have again merged several of the arias and choruses together, lumping them as mini-movements, instead of individual songs, making it impossible to leap from one to another.  Annoying, but not a deal-breaker. Soloists are uniformly excellent, with the odd choice of having two singers share the soprano arias, but both Kaaren Erickson and Sylvia McNair giving near-definitive readings.  Jon Humphrey is also superb in his sensitive, yet potent arias.  The only sticker with keeping this recording from rating higher with me is the tight leash the chorus and orchestra sing under, making the whole enterprise seem more an exercise in precise singing than a truly transcendent experience.   ~ BDW

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