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SYMPHONY REVIEW
May 20, 2005
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By Jeff Dunn
A dream came true for Oakland East Bay Symphony Music Director Michael Morgan: a successful rendering of Leonard Bernstein's shamelessly all-encompassing Mass. Morgan wanted to do the piece ever since he arrived at the Symphony fifteen years ago. With a lot of effort on his part, and considerable help generously acknowledged in the program booklet's “Message from the Maestro,” Morgan & Co. brought the audience to its feet with wild whooping and cheering. Premature raising of the house lights unfortunately put a stop to this demonstration of appreciation after five minutes. It could well have gone on for twenty, such was the enthusiasm.
Mass, a treatment of the Roman liturgy with additional text by Stephen Schwartz and Bernstein and orchestrations by Hershey Kay and Jonathan Tunick, is subtitled “A Theater Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers.” It was commissioned to inaugurate Washington's John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971 and received an enthusiastic response from attendees, but New York Times critic Harold Schoenberg dismissed it as “fashionable kitsch” that would disappear in less than a year. Others considered it blasphemous. Yet despite naysayers and the large forces required, the work continues to be performed, especially in recent years. In 2000, it was even performed at the Vatican.
The two keys to Morgan's Mass success story were superlative pacing and the procurement of outstanding soloists. In fact, to these ears the tempo management was superior to the composer's own recording. Morgan has unerringly picked up the pulse where Bernstein's drags slightly. Also, Morgan has introduced selective, but excitement-inducing, accelerandos not always found in Bernstein's approach.
And then there were the members of the Street Chorus, prepared by Lynne Morrow. Most had had experience in musicals; all were fine actors as well as vocalists. Katy Stephan was tops in this regard, keeping in character throughout the work as a troubled youth who has lost the “thank you” in ”Gratias Deo.” Also noteworthy was the beautiful coloratura voice and performance of Meghann May. All soloist voices were miked, as specified by Bernstein, and Michael D. Jackson's sound engineering came off without a hitch.
The part of the Celebrant was ably sung by Hector Vasquez, who was brought in to replace the originally-scheduled Douglas Webster. In the program notes Bernstein is quoted describing the role as that of “a young man of mysterious simplicity . . . who throughout the drama is invested by his acolytes with increasingly ornate robes and symbols which connote both an increase in the superficial formalism of his obligation and of the burden that he bears. Despite the composer's wishes, however, Vasquez instead seemed to portray the Celebrant more maturely as suffering a mid-life crisis. In one of the few miscalculations in the production, he was dressed for the part in a tight charcoal three-button suit. No clerical collar, no robes. Was he a Celebrant or a stockbroker? The singing was fine, but the acting seemed too restrained by the confines of the suit. The boys' chorus of Bernstein's conception was replaced by a mixed children's chorus, with no harm done. Boy soprano Andy Gutierrez sang his part on key but a tad dryly. The Oakland Symphony Chorus, unlike the Celebrant, was fully robed. This gave members something to do during the ”Dona nobis (ex pacem)” riot at the climax of the work, when the robes were ripped off and flung down. Unlike some recent concert versions of Mass, Morgan's stage concept included a dance troupe. The all-female Huckabay McAllister Dance, dressed in red silk tops and black pants, emerged episodically down aisles of the Paramount Theater, two aisles in the Orchestra and two on the Balcony levels. The dancers were joined by the Piedmont children's choirs during the riot in the same aisles. When the Celebrant finally stopped the riot by shouting ”pacem” (not loudly enough, by the way), all fell down to the aisle floors, panting. Whether the result of this climax would have been appealing to fire marshals is not known, but it was certainly in the spirit of the piece and a credit to Morgan's concept. Although the mixture of classical, tonal, twelve-tone, rock, blues and other styles in the work was and is considered vulgar by more than a few critics, Mass is important historically. In context, it can be considered as one of the harbingers of postmodernism along with the latter music of Shostakovich and Berio. The strength of the work lies most in its music: its melodiousness, integration of themes, dramatic structure and infectious rhythms. The words, constantly revised over the years, appeal to few poets. Nevertheless, they strike home to a large majority of listeners. I still see the work as an artifact of the 60s, when society was being torn asunder along generational and ideological lines, but all of the many people I interviewed after the concert felt the work has current relevance, especially with regard to religious and political concerns. Could the same be said for a Mozart opera?
(Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in Geologic Education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of NACUSA, a Bay Area correspondent for the journal 21st-Century Music, and President of Composers, Inc.)
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Hector Vasquez
