In your Tatler’s youth, long, long ago, it was the tradition of the family to alternate yearly the locales where Thanksgiving was celebrated; in CT where we lived, and NY where relations lived. At either locale, it was also the tradition after Thanksgiving Supper to play Handel’s Messiah, the version you see above.
There were precious few recordings of Messiah available where we lived back then, only two coming to mind: Sir Thomas Beecham’s glorious extravaganza, with its wholesale re-orchestrations of it, with huge forces, and Eugene Ormandy’s relatively conservative approach to it, the one preferred by the grownups in the family.
Listening to it today for the first time since youth, it sounds remarkably good for its time. Ormandy, as was his wont, made the work his own, with additional instrumentation and large cuts, but to these ears it holds up just fine. The yearly tradition of listening to it on this most American holiday may just have been revived.
The Taos Tatler 