A Baroque Near-Miss

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What if you programmed an orchestral concert and then proceeded to ignore the orchestra? Hearing Philharmonia Baroque’s concert set “The Majesty of Christmas” Saturday at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, I got the sense that conductor Konrad Junghänel had somehow managed this dubious achievement. Seeking to unearth the music of 17th-century German composers whose reputations have wilted under J.S. Bach’s long shadow, Junghänel offered a largely lackluster program that gave the orchestra precious little to wrap its bows around.

Seeing the coloristic array of strings, cornetts, and sackbuts onstage, all patiently working through some uninspired repertory, I couldn’t help thinking of the program as a missed opportunity.

With the instrumentalists mostly relegated to the background, the brightest spotlight fell instead on the Philharmonia Chorale, a crackerjack ensemble under Bruce Lamott’s direction. Boasting a vibrant and well-balanced sound, the choir itself often played a supporting role to the array of soloists, drawn from its ranks. These singers gave capable and often well-nuanced performances that, if sometimes in lacking star quality, nonetheless seemed a just reward for their meritorious service within the choir.

Heinrich Schütz composed some glorious vocal music, but the cantata Weihnachtshistorie (The Christmas story), SWV 435, is not among his finer efforts. Written during the final years of his long life, the piece offers a narrative of the Christmas story with eight brief scenes, plus a whole lot of dry recitative. Prioritizing clarity of text over melodic beauty, the music might work better in a church service than a concert hall. (As one patron wryly put it, Schütz seemed to be decomposing rather than composing this piece.)

Selling a cantata like this to an audience is inevitably challenging, especially under Junghänel’s laconic conducting, but the chorale gave it a decent shot. In the lead role of the Evangelist, tenor Brian Thorsett displayed lovely tone but wooden stage presence, leaving a dull impression when combined with the music’s uninspiring melodies.

A host of soloists from the chorale serviceably performed the roles of angels, shepherds, magi, and priests, the one real spotlight being bass Paul Thompson’s agile, resounding delivery of King Herod’s inquiry regarding the Christ child. Organist Hanneke von Proosdij, the one orchestral member to be fully occupied throughout the evening, deserves a Christmas bonus for her faultless accompaniment.

Undazzling Musical Textures

Only slightly more enervating was Johann Kuhnau’s cantata O heilige Zeit (O holy time). An admitted conservative who avoided operatic frills in favor of a more purified church style, Kuhnau peppered this piece with highly varied textures, from fugal figurations to elongated melodies, that somehow never managed to dazzle. Moments of errant intonation and lack of projection marred the otherwise solid chorale solos, which included a well-matched duo between tenor Mark Mueller and bass-baritone Jim Monios on “Was ist der Mensch als Satub und Erde” (What is man but dust and earth).

Seven of the orchestra’s principals finally earned a moment in the sun with Johann Rosenmüller’s Sonata No. 7 in D Minor. A collection of five short movements, this trifling piece is possessed of considerable charm, rooted in its appealing melodies and vivid textures. Given this one chance to shine, the ensemble responded brilliantly with an exuberant performance. Every nuanced phrase was a delight, from the sinister layering of textures in the opening Largo to the Adagio’s solemn, choralelike homophony and the sprightly fugue of the closing Allegro. The enthusiastic audience response seemed to confirm that this was what they had been waiting for all along.

The program’s closing work, Rosenmüller’s Magnificat in C Minor, is essentially a two-trick pony, combining majestic declaration of selected words with more rapid figurations elsewhere in the text. Here the orchestra returned to the background, yielding to an octet from the choir that ably delivered the piece’s many ornamented melodies and moments of more solemn declamation. Junghänel’s choice of an encore, the Bach classic “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” seemed like an atonement for the program’s otherwise unfamiliar material.

Joseph Sargent, a doctoral candidate in musicology at Stanford University, is a professional writer and editor as well as a performer, conductor, and scholar of early music.

Comments

I couldn’t put it in such erudite language,but as an attendee, I couldn’t agree with you more.

Posted by Arnold Wasserman on December 11, 2007 at 10:14 pm