Georg Friedrich Handel's Messiah oratorio was the last musical piece on the bill of the last concert the Radio Chamber Orchestra has played this season. Alongside the instrumentalists, on Wednesday, 13^th June 2012, the members of the Radio Academic Choir and also four soloists - soprano Adela Zaharia, mezzo-soprano Mihaela Işpan, tenor Bogdan Mihai and bass-baritone Zoltan Nagy - were all on stage at the Romanian Radio Hall, conducted by the British musician Niel Thomson. For two hours, the Radio Chamber Orchestra was simply transformed into an English Baroque ensemble, which has rendered in a most convincing manner the style traits specific to the vocal-symphonic masterpiece created by Handel - the ternary vibration, the frequent ornaments, the sequences, the tension that stretches out to drama in a perpetuum mobile. The Radio Academic Choir has highlighted the soloists by adapting to the musical context through difficult passages, with polyphonic melody layers. Elegant, majestic, dramatic - these would be the words to describe the last musical night of the Radio Chamber Orchestra's 2011-2012 season, all with a touch of common sense, typically English, in which the key word was balance. It was, of course, an evening dedicated to English music, in which the public was not shy to show their enthusiasm either through waves of applause or by standing up as has happened during the famous fragment Hallelujah.

Dan Mihai Goia, the conductor of the Radio Academic Choir said that "We love this music very much. Every time we re-play it, we understand it on a deeper, more profound level with all its English delicacy, I dare say; this time we've also had an English conductor, that has managed to get us even closer to the particularities of this music, exceptional soloists, very valuable and very talented. The Orchestra has played a part in this as well. And the next season will be filled with many more concerts of great responsibility and artistic beauty."

Neil Thomson, the concert's conductor, has revealed to us the importance the Messiah oratorio plays in his activity: "I have known this musical piece for approximately 40 years, ever since I was a child. I England every pupil signs in a choir, so I used to play Messiah by ear back then. In my country there is a tradition for playing this oratorio, a tradition that, especially in the 20's, was enriched with very valuable versions of it. To mention only a few are the ones conducted by John Elliot Gardiner, Trevor Pinnock, Ton Koopman.So for me this musical piece and having known it through these interpretations has been very significant. In my interpretation I have tried to render in sound the colours specific to the Baroque style and the Romanian musicians I have worked with have been very open to my suggestions."