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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW
March 8, 2004
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By Bruce Lamott
Perhaps as restitution for the many decades in which Schütz and Bach were performed like Brahms, the California Bach Society demonstrated that it's possible to reverse the procedure in its all-Brahms program heard Sunday at St. Gregory's Church. A finely tuned ensemble of 28 singers with crystalline German diction, the chorus produced a lean, incisive sound that gave the effect of a Brahms string quartet played by a consort of viols. The boyish sound of the vibrato-less sopranos and a rather cool, edgy tone in the alto were no match for the warmth and resonance of the tenors and basses.
The precision of the ensemble snapped the audience to attention with the rhetorical “warums” of ”Warum ist das Licht gegeben,” introducing Brahms, the musical antiquarian. Dedicated to Philip Spitta, biographer and editor of Bach and Schütz, the former's tortured chromaticism and counterpoint is juxtaposed with the lilting homophonic dances of the latter, ending appropriately with a chorale text by Luther. Here, as well as in the seamless double-choir exchanges of ”Ich aber bin elend” the Bach Society excelled, negotiating the intricate harmonic shifts and contrapuntal labyrinths with clarity and facility born of their longtime experience with Baroque choral music.
However, by the time the polychoral “Fest- und Gedenksprüche” closed the first half, signs of vocal fatigue and uncertain ensemble set in. The two choirs, so finely matched in the earlier works, became unbalanced. The unabashedly chauvinistic texts selected by Brahms, a recent honoree as “Free Man of the City of Hamburg,” demand, if not more singers, more hemoglobin. Only the fanfares of the second movement (“When a strong armed man…”) received sufficient heft, and the group negotiated its ungainly fugue admirably. The “Amen” which closes the work, one of the composer's finest passages, rose to a seraphic climax.
It's doubtful that even Brahms ever programmed an entire evening of his a cappella choral works, and if he had, I suspect that he would have done so with an eye to variety and contrast. (The succession of Liebeslieder waltzes comes to mind.) Conductor Warren Stewart made a fine selection of repertoire and conducted effectively from memory, but segregating the motets in the first half from the part-songs in the second minimized the distinctiveness of each work. Stewart relies too much on the composer alone to provide welcome contrast in the part-songs. The vocal color of the ensemble remained, for the most part, monochromatic, and dynamic changes seemed expressively unmotivated. These works require of each performer the dramatic presence of a Lieder singer; a raised eyebrow or earnest look at the music folder does not suffice. Likewise, the shifting moods of works such as Waldesnacht, not to mention the strophic repetitions of ”Vergangen ist mir Glück und Heil,” seem stylistically suited to a beat more pliant than Stewart's rather inflexible tactus. There were magic moments however, in the hushed lullaby which closes Waldesnacht and the male/female chorus dialogues of ”Nachtwache I.” The finest contrast was achieved in the transition from the pallid lifelessness of ”Leztes Glück” to the tumultuous ”Verlorene Jugend.” The latter displayed a new level of engagement with the text, as the singers effectively conveyed the spirit of wanton youth and nostalgia for its loss. While Brahms was indeed a aficionado of early music, the early music he heard was interpreted in the stylistic traditions of the Mendelssohn and Cecilian revivals by the German Singverein (ancestor of groups such as the California Bach Society). Despite his classical formalism, Brahms was at base a Romantic, and even his archaism (comparable to his contemporaries, the pre-Raphaelite painters) ought to find its voice in the stylistic language of Romanticism.
(Bruce Lamott is choral director of the Philharmonia Chorale and the Carmel Bach Festival. He is also an instructor in music and Western Civilization at San Francisco University High School and conducts choral classes in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Extension Program.)
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