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FESTIVAL REVIEW:
Carmel Bach
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By Donald B. Aird
For sixty-one years, the Carmel Bach Festival has been meeting the special challenge of programming with purpose. A Bach festival should elucidate Bach's character, his high-mindedness and his perfectionism, and explain his lofty expectations about music. It should explore what was known to the composer, his past and his present, as a rich source of techniques, ideas and inspiration to be developed by him and his contemporaries for the benefit and pleasure of his community, his friends, his family. It should show his influence on the future.
This year's festival measured up to those criteria fairly well in the planning and the performance although a number of questionable choices, peripheral to Bach, were included and a crucial aspect omitted. Together with lectures and John Butt's excellent program notes, good musical performances led by the Festival Music Director Bruno Weil raised the spirit of Bach, giving a good picture of who and what he was (or is). The Festival, beginning Saturday, July 18, typically consisted of a week's programs repeated twice. Now there is also an added "Best of the Fest," concert of pieces repeated from earlier concerts and chosen by an audience poll.
The major Bach work that annually crowns the festival was this year the B minor Mass. On Sunday, July 26, Weil's tempos were markedly pushed., seeming to be chosen more to rouse the crowd than to help it understand the music -- more speed and noise than musicality. In fast, loud movements the excellent chorus kept up, but the orchestra had lapses in ensemble, probably needing more rehearsal. Its lagging also caused a harmonic blurring, thickening the sound texture unduly. However, the "et incarnatus est" and "Crucifixus" were superbly done and moving
The program informed us that the Mass was to be "sung in German with English supertitles" ! The diction of the chorus in this was good but sounded suspiciously like Latin. The violin solo playing in the "Laudamus te" by Elizabeth Wallfisch, the Festival's remarkable concertmistress, was memorable, achieving telling shape despite the tempo set for it.
Most of the soloists were fine, the balance of voices lost only in the "Christe" duet by the sopranos Kendra Colton and Rosa Lamoreaux where changes in color were sacrificed to the emphasized high notes. Alan Bennett was a supple tenor who projected a consistent idea in a most gracefully and elegantly rendered "Benedictus." The tempos for the "Quoniam" were a three-way race between the conductor, Weil, the hornist, Glen Swarts and the baritone, Sanford Sylvan. Bach was not the winner, not until the "et in spiritum sanctum" movement where Sylvan's inspired and creative phrasing became for me a high point of the festival.
On Tuesday, July 28, love and care shone through Haydn's Symphony 98 in B-flat, and his Schoepfungsmesse (Creation Mass), also in B-flat,. here, with wonderful choral sound and ensemble, considered tempos and balances.
Representative of the Festival's almost daily solo recitals was John Butt's weekly harpsichord recital at All Saints Episcopal Church, which included the Telemann Fantasies in Italian and French Styles (he played four different Fantasies each week). Though charming and played so, the Fantasie's delightful materials didn't seem to justify their length. Butt's performance of Bach's famous C-major, "Ave Maria," Prelude was so distorted by eccentric playing that I was on edge wondering just when the next "stop" change was coming. The eccentric performance kept the piece from having real movement.
On the other hand, Butt's playing of Bach's Partita No. 5 in G major, from Clavieruebung Part I, BWV 829 was some of the best recent Bach harpsichord playing in memory: clean and crisp, rhythmically decisive but flexible, not mechanical, and with beautifully organized phrasing. Tempos were happily chosen. They were not so fast that detail was lost, yet fast enough so that, miraculously, the endings of movements seemed close to their starts, so that mind and memory could readily perceive the whole and hear the proportions.
The help provided to young singers by the Carmel Bach Festival is smart and bearing fruit. Each year, four promising young singers (this year, soprano Jennifer Ellis; mezzo Maria Soulis; tenor Marc Molomot, and baritone Jeffrey Fields) receive a scholarship. They join the top-notch professional singers who make up the Festival Chorus. In addition, the scholarship students participate in the Virginia Best Adams Master Classes under the guidance of tenor David Gordon, with Festival soloists leading some of the classes. I heard inspired instruction given all four by Sanford Sylvan and Kathleen Robbin, two of the Festival soloists this year. The vocal improvement produced in the students during the few hours of instruction was surprising.
Not all the planning was so felicitous. Some works Weil programmed seemed included for reasons of marketing. There were arias from six operas and one oratorio, two concerti grossi, and an overture, all by G. F. Handel! Are the two composers' same birth years enough to justify this much Handel in a festival centered on Bach? Do we now know more about Bach? Even more tenuous was the presence of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for Strings, Opus 47 though it did receive a moving and committed performance the opening night of the Festival. Elgar's orchestrations of two chorales from the St. Matthew Passion and the C minor organ Fantasy and Fugue, BWV537, which were not played, seem to be his only connection to Bach. And there seemed to be no Bach connection at all in soprano Rosa Lamoreaux's very interesting and well-performed works of five women composers, three of them dead before Bach was born, and whose works, to our knowledge, Bach never experienced.
As I listened to many good and varied works performed by the large cast this year at the Carmel Bach Festival, I began to be aware that something a facet of Bach's personality essential to him, something strongly a part of his life, something important for which Bach had a passion was missing from this festival. Bach's own works were contemporary music! His musical concern his programming of music, his improvisations, and above all his creative compositions were in the service of his own time, of contemporary music. The Bach Festival's inclusion a few years ago of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, a concerto grosso of this century, performed very well with verve and received with enthusiasm, was in that proper Bach Festival spirit. But this year, what would Bach have thought of a program lacking even an elementary interest in this important, contemporary, aspect of his art?
There's no question of the excellence of the Festival's casts, its exciting; individual programs, recitals, lectures rewarding experiences all. Yet the unique experience anticipated at the Carmel Bach Festival was missing. If Haydn and Elgar can be performed so beautifully on the Festival, then surely music of our era more closely related to Bach's spirit should be presented. The spirit of Bach's art and career embodied the idea of music written a few days ago, maybe last week, last month. Something new -- that's the kind of music he offered and enjoyed anticipating and hearing. It doesn't seem fair and appropriate that that experience be denied at a time and place we would be expecting to find it.
(Donald B. Aird is a composer and conductor who has taught at the University of Minnesota, Stanford [as acting organist], and the University of California, Berkeley. He was conductor of the Berkeley Chamber Singers.)
©1998 Donald B. Aird, all rights reserved
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