San Francisco Classical Voice

FESTIVAL REVIEW America's Oldest Is Alive and Kicking

May 21, 2002

By Janos Gereben

CINCINNATI — A music festival makes a good first impression when brass fanfares from Lohengrin and Tannhäuser call thousands of well-dressed listeners into the auditorium from the richly ornamented but unpretentious lobby with the feel of Dresden's Semperoper.

The May Festival is called the Western Hemisphere's oldest choral festival. In its bizarre/spectacular Music Hall home, it has pulled together this city some 80 times in the past 128 years (made into an annual event by Max Rudolf in 1967, a season highlighted by George Szell introducing the 19-year-old Peter Serkin), and it's doing that again, spectacularly well.

James Conlon, in his 23rd year of leading the May Festival, is programming with a broad range, bold variety, imagination and a reach that only occasionally exceeds his grasp. Provided by the first two days of the festival this weekend, here are just some highlights of a healing event offered in a neighborhood devastated only a year ago by a week of riots on the streets:

A stunning recital by Cynthia Haymon, one of the most promising young sopranos around. A "natural singer," who manages to make all her training and effort transparent, delivering music in unassuming, "conversational" manner, Haymon performed Richard Danielpour's Portraits, to Maya Angelou's text. She was sensitively supported by a quartet from the Cincinnati Symphony, consisting of Rebecca and Daniel Culnan (violin and cello), Michael Chertock (piano) and Richard Hawley (clarinet).

Robert Porco's superb May Festival Chorus, the heart of the enterprise, sang a sublime performance of Beethoven's C Major Mass. Chorus and orchestra excelled throughout the work, which culminated in a glowing conclusion. The very end, the heartfelt prayer for peace, created a rare, unforgettable moment as Dona nobis pacem dissipated into the deep silence of the hall, sung simply, beautifully, with all the meaning and relevance that resides in the music. This curious work employs four soloists, but gives them very little to do, not even a single aria. Of the four, I wish Kristine Jepson (also excellent in the Beethoven Ninth Symphony) and festival veteran John Aler had more to do.

A full house of 3,400 (older and whiter than the performers) clapped, shouted and rocked to the Central State University Chorus' His Eye Is On the Sparrow and Jesus Is a Rock in a Weary Land, Conlon turning into a fine jazz-band leader while a reduced and completely unnecessary Symphony orchestra provided a Mantovani background sound for the young singers and band members. "Unclear on the concept" comes to mind about all those strings, but the performance was still a great success, deserving the genuine standing ovation and reprise.

The African-American CSU Chorus joined the mostly white May Festival Chorus in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Conlon rushing the tempi while an annoyingly mistuned timpani brought down the level of the performance, until the delightful surprise of a Papageno-happy "Ode to Joy," instead of the standard Sarastro-magisterial pomposity.

A Fidelio finale, graced by Conlon's driving rhythm and luminous musical line, the Cincinnati Symphony and the chorus at their best — and seriously handicapped by the soloists: Gary Lakes, the great heldentenor promise of a decade ago, a Conlon regular, as a weak Florestan; Bridget Hooks as the uninvolved, almost bored Leonora; Richard Paul Fink as the uncomprehending governor, without a trace of warmth in his voice; a shaky Maureen O'Flynn substituting for the indisposed Desirée Rancatore as Marzelline; and — thank goodness! — Aler, singing a fine Jacquino.

A great audience favorite was Adolphus Hailstork's 1985 Done Made My Vow. Written for a school anniversary, and very fitting for that it must have been, this 40-minute cantata keeps hitting musical and narrative highlights, meant to rouse the audience with its Biblical and Martin Luther King quotes, fortissimi freely applied, all leading to the big standing O. A well-meaning project to introduce African-American themes and artists to the audience and increase black participation on stage and in the hall, Done Made My Vow appears unwittingly influenced by associations with It's a Small World, Up With People! and the sound of propaganda music from Europe, the sort that has audience manipulation as its main substance.

An Olympic embarrassment

And finally, a kind of anti-highlight: The festival-opening Olympic Hymn, attributed to Bernstein, has more background and history than musical value. In 1981, one Günther Kunert rewrote (with a German text!) the song To Make Us Proud from the star-crossed Alan Jay Lerner-Leonard Bernstein bicentennial musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Two decades later, US Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur, who should know better (and did, when contributing to the lyrics of Candide), "customized" the 10-minute piece in English. ("For in these games, when all is told, It is mankind who takes the gold. That wins the laurel of victory, And shows the world what it might be." Commented a festival official, strictly on a Deep-Throat basis: "It's rather embarrassing.")

But here is the strange part: the Festival Chorus, "reinforced" by a university choir for the purpose of presenting the following work, by Hailstork, sang this premiere presentation of the English text in such a way that not one single word could be understood. Considering the text, that was not much of a pity, but still it was strange because the festival chorus' diction in the Beethoven works was outright crystalline.

"Beethoven, Bernstein, Brotherhood"

The festival theme is "Beethoven, Bernstein and Brotherhood." So far, Conlon — a great audience favorite here — is getting full marks for the 19th century, a good chunk of the brotherhood effort, and not much out of Bernstein (a former music director here), even when including the very brevis Missa Brevis, all 10 minutes of it.

Fortunately, there is still a second week for that, including excerpts from the Mass (first performed at the May Festival immediately after its Kennedy Center premiere 30 years ago), and the Symphony No. 3 (Kaddish), its text rewritten and narrated by Jamie Bernstein Thomas. The composer's daughter said the new text represents another layer of struggling with one's father: as he cried against the heavenly Father (in an "overly sentimental, often mawkish" manner), she in turn is arguing with her own elders.

"In spite of its seeming audacity, there is something very right," she said, "even traditional about this revision. Ancient rabbis wrote their commentary in the margins of the holy text, while a later generation of rabbis wrote their commentary in the margins of the previous commentary, and so on." The revision/argument between generation, she said, represents the way "we fight our way into the world, and learn who we are by bumping up against the walls our elders built to protect us from falling. The bumps are painful, the walls shudder and sometimes crack, and on and on we go." Large gestures and overstatements seem to run in the family.

(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janos451@earthlink.net.)