|
CHORAL MUSIC
5/13/06
|
A Passionate Passion By Anna Carol Dudley
The American Bach Soloists returned to their roots Saturday night at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley. Twenty-six singers, soloists indeed, gave tongue to Bach's monumental St. Matthew Passion, accompanied by an equally accomplished Baroque orchestra. Under the baton of Jeffrey Thomas, they formed two choruses and two orchestras. The eight soloists who usually perform out in front of the orchestra sang in the chorus.
The use of drama in the church to make Biblical stories real and relevant to the congregation goes back to the first celebrations of the Mass and continues into medieval mystery plays. Music, developing along with theater, was, by the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, an increasingly important part of Passion plays, dramatizing the last days of Jesus' life. Martin Luther's love of music ensured that the Passion stories would be expressed musically, taking over from the spoken word. Bach grew up in the Lutheran tradition, and his great passions were performed as Good Friday services.
In the 1970s, there was a brief fad for staging the St. Matthew Passion as an opera. I was involved in one such venture. The San Francisco Opera even gave it a go — a Spring Opera production in the Curran
Theatre. But of course it isn't an opera. The dramatic action is in the music, and it is a gripping story told by one person, the evangelist Matthew, in many voices (as Jeffrey Thomas rightly argues in a program note), along with the expression of powerful emotions, not action, in a variety of voices. The St. Matthew Passion is an enduring work because of the power of Bach's music, composed to a continuously relevant text.
Singing or hearing it is a religious experience to the Christian, and a profound human experience to everyone. A man who spent his life teaching people how to live in justice and harmony with each other is such a threat to the political, religious, and economic establishment that he is killed. His followers are too weak to save him. They feel guilt at their acts of betrayal, grief at their loss, and finally determination to follow his example. It is all laid out in this extraordinarily human, moving musical masterpiece. In Bach's Passion, the lion's share of Matthew's words is given to the Evangelist, reciting straight out of the Bible. Other parts of Matthew's story are sung verbatim by Jesus, by characters such as Peter, Judas, Pilate, and other unnamed personalities, and by the chorus. The non-Biblical part of the text is by the poet Picander, expressing individual and collective responses to the betrayal and death of Jesus. Bach, steeped in the rhetoric of the Lutheran sermon, used Picander's text to create dialogue between the choruses or between a soloist and a chorus, to speak for the congregation in various settings of chorales (familiar then to all, and still today to some), and to express private and communal outpourings of emotion.
Saturday's concert was propelled by the riveting performance of tenor Wesley Rogers as the Evangelist, the one soloist who sang the story entirely in recitative rather than in song. Adapting his clarion voice to the rhythms of speech, he sang of the events leading up to Jesus' death, beautifully paced according to the text — sometimes slowed for emphasis, sometimes rushing with excitement, sometimes punctuated by suspenseful pauses — across a wide range of dynamics from loud to heartbreakingly soft. Baritone James Weaver sang the part of Jesus, singing the recitatives with some lack of carrying power in the low bass ranges but great eloquence in moments of high drama — breaking the bread at the Last Supper, pleading for his life in Gethsemane, crying out in anguish on the cross. Weaver assumed another role as an observing soloist toward the end, giving warm utterance to "Mache dich, mein Herze, rein" (Make yourself pure, my heart).
The Passion opens with a searching question-and-answer dialogue between the two choruses and orchestras, with the addition of a chorale on Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), sung by sopranos augmented in this performance by the bright, pure voices of the Pacific Boychoir. After three and a half hours of an infinite variety of musical forms and prodigious solo turns by both singers and players — the chorus acting now as the mob, now as the awed Roman centurions, now as the grieving followers of Jesus — a final chorus lays him to rest. Both the choruses, separately and together, performed admirably, articulating the text as one voice and giving expression to a variety of emotions. Among the principal soloists, standouts were sopranos Ellen Hargis in "Aus Liebe" and Jennifer Ellis in "Blute nur," alto Judith Malafronte in "Erbarme dich," and tenors Steven Tharp in "Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen" and Gerald Thomas Gray in "Geduld." Instrumental solo turns worthy of special mention were taken by violinists Carla Moore and Lisa Weiss, cellist Farley Pearce, oboist Debra Nagy, flutist Sandra Miller, and gambist William Skeen. Jeffrey Thomas' flailing conducting style is such that it is a mystery to this observer where in space his beat exists; for awhile I thought it might be in his elbows. But except for a bit of a scramble in the brief orchestral introduction to the alto solo that began Part II, the whole production hung together remarkably well. Either he is doing something with his eyebrows, or everything is worked out in rehearsal with these able musicians and their stellar continuo, so there are only a few spots where a consensus is in danger. However it is done, he deserves credit for a finely paced, moving performance. (Anna Carol Dudley is a singer, teacher, member of the faculty of UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University lecturer emerita, and director emerita of the San Francisco Early Music Society's Baroque Music Workshop.)
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was corrected on 5/23/06 to be more specific about the location of "the scramble" mentioned in the last paragraph.]
|
