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CHORAL REVIEW
Mission Music Revisited October 26, 2001
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By Kerry McCarthy
To celebrate the 225th anniversary of Mission San Francisco, Coro Hispano
de San Francisco and Conjunto Nuevo Mundo joined together this weekend
for a concert of New World sacred music from the era of the California
missions. With a chamber choir, six vocal soloists, and a small but
versatile instrumental ensemble, the combined groups brought to life what
their artistic director Juan Pedro Gaffney calls "music of a thousand
candles, rich in color and vibrant in sound."
The program consisted mostly of large-scale works by Mexican composers
active between 1760 and 1830. These included a Kyrie and Gloria, a Te
Deum, and psalm and Magnificat settings, all in the elaborate classical
style of the day. The only exceptions were two anonymous earlier pieces
(one a lovely Renaissance hymn of Carmelite origin), and a short original
work by Gaffney, sung "in commemoration of the victims of terrorism
throughout the world."
The second part of the concert was a reconstruction of a solemn Vespers
service for the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, which also included a
fair amount of Gregorian chant. Two pieces in the Vespers received their first
modern performances in this series: the Beatus vir of Juan Antonio
Juanas (d. 1819) and the Magnificat of Francisco Delgado (1792–c. 1853).
Although this music originated in the great Mexican cathedrals, some
manuscripts of it have also been found in California archives, at Mission
Santa Barbara and Mission San Fernando Rey. The musical establishments
at the missions were staffed by Indian singers and instrumentalists. They
were excellent performers, according to the testimony of visitors, with a
repertoire of elaborate music for Sundays and feast days. It is quite
possible that this concert at Mission Santa Clara has returned some of
the music to an environment where it was sung by the original Californians
nearly two centuries ago.
The performance was, for the most part, a delight to see and hear. Coro Hispano and Conjunto Nuevo Mundo performed with a skill and enthusiasm that enlivened even the occasional dull passage in the music. The orchestra sometimes threatened to overwhelm the singers (but certainly not soprano Mimi Ruiz, whose powerful voice was more than a match for the ensemble and the cavernous acoustics of Mission Santa Clara.) The sheer beauty of sound produced by some of the soloists, notably oboist Alina Plourd and bass-baritone John Kendall Bailey, contributed much to the group. Gaffney's Vespers reconstruction was a success, although the austere elegance of the chant and the Renaissance-style hymn setting was a bit jolting when interwoven with the grandeur and rococo flourishes of the later mission-era music. The transitions between psalms, antiphons, readings, and other liturgical building blocks were not always smooth, though that is certainly an occupational hazard of real church services. Unfortunately, the spell of the first part of the concert was also broken halfway through by a request for donations and a sales pitch for CDs and T-shirts. Shades of the Franciscan fathers asking alms for their California missions? . . . (Kerry McCarthy, a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Stanford University, is a performer, conductor, and student of early sacred music.) ©2001 Kerry McCarthy, all rights reserved |