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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
April 1, 2006
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Old and New By Kaneez Munjee
It has been noted by many that the Pacific Mozart Ensemble does a lot more contemporary work and a lot less Mozart these days — which made it perfectly fitting that its 25th anniversary celebration concert featured Mozart's unfinished Great Mass in C Minor, nearly completed with new works by Dave Brubeck, David Lang, and Meredith Monk, all commissioned specifically to extend Mozart's incomplete setting. Saturday evening's performance at San Francisco War Memorial's Green Room, which gave the premiere of the three contemporary pieces, was an appropriately celebratory affair to a sold-out, standing-room-only house.
Mozart's well-loved motet Ave verum corpus opened the concert, with strings and continuo accompaniment, and with chorus alumni invited to join in. Both choir and orchestra delivered a rich, warm sound, featuring a fine balance between voice parts and well-blended choral sections. This sound rarely faltered throughout the evening. It was put on full display for many portions of the Mozart Mass, and was powerful and effective in sections such as the Kyries, the opening section of the Gloria (with stellar runs by the basses), the Cum Sancto, and the Credo. Artistic Director Richard Grant's tempos were mostly brisk and largely compelling, and both choir and orchestra kept up with ease. The only movement in which I found the tempo unconvincing was the Qui tollis, where the orchestra's omnipresent 32nd notes seemed too fast to be appropriately portentous.
The solo vocal quartet (Donna Warrington, soprano; Lisa Sargent, mezzo; David Kurtenbach, tenor; Torlef Borsting, bass) had no easy task, as most of the solo lines encompass an unusually wide range and require agility and the ability to sustain at high tessituras. But the four singers rose admirably to the challenge. Warrington demonstrated an elegant sense of line combined with a warm sound from her first appearance in the Christe, though some of her lower notes were obscured by the orchestral accompaniment. Sargent showed off a lighter voice in her Laudamus te, but she negotiated the range and tessitura issues with equal ease. The two women's voices paired well in the Domine, to the point where it was hard to distinguish which of them was singing the piercingly clear alternating high B-flats and As toward the end of the duet. Kurtenbach and Borsting (in the Quoniam and Benedictus) were musically solid but lacked assertiveness on certain entrances. Some rhythmic uncertainty crept into the vocal lines during a few of the solo movements, but the stumbles were soon overcome. However, the truly stellar solo moments came in the Et incarnatus, where the playing by oboist Robin May, flautist Lenora Warkentin, and bassoonist Erin Irvine was nothing short of breathtakingly beautiful.
Music Director Lynne Morrow took the podium for the three premiere pieces, which all set portions of the Credo text. Brubeck, Lang, and Monk were invited to set any of the Mass text left uncompleted by Mozart; coincidentally, all three settings were a cappella. After first deciding to set just the Crucifixus and Resurrexit sections, Brubeck went on to set the entire Credo text. In his piece, the text of the Creed unfolds in an easily flowing and largely homophonic declamation, with repeated key words (such as "credo") and with smaller sections involving fugal figure ("crucifixus" and "resurrexit") and subtle word painting ("descendit"). The chords Brubeck uses are lush and thick, often including polytonality, reserving pure major triads for key moments such as the arrival at "ascendit in coelum" and the final "Amen." The final buildup, both in volume and in pitch, at "et expecto," was particularly moving. Lang's piece I Await / I Believe paired the English version of the "et expecto" text, "I await the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come," with a text from the Jewish tradition, "I believe with perfect faith that the dead will be brought back to life when G_d wills it to happen" (Maimonides). The piece starts with the tenors singing the first of these texts in a repeated pattern throughout the piece, while the altos and then basses repeat just the first syllables percussively around their line. The sopranos, in a cantus firmus sort of line, join in with the Maimonides text. The second half of the piece continues with the same tenor pattern, and with the altos and sopranos switching roles. The abrupt ending, "I await," was striking. Monk's Amen is subtitled Birth of the Stars, and its unfolding is a repeated buildup of chordal patterns on the word "Amen." A middle section, described by Morrow as "five choral trills," breaks the "upward choral cadence" of the beginning and end. In all three of these works, Morrow's conducting was expansive and grounded, allowing the focus to be on the sounds. The chorus sang the works with passion and excellent sense of tuning and ensemble. The high Cs from the top sopranos in the Brubeck and the tenor ostinato in the Lang deserve special note. As the idea was to "complete" Mozart's Mass, these sections of the Creed were performed where they would flow according to their texts: after the Et incarnatus and before the Sanctus and Benedictus, which ended the concert. As a concept, this makes perfect sense, and it is hard to argue with the idea of ending a concert with the dynamic, double-chorus "Hosanna." Yet the three modern pieces are so different from the Mozart in style and — more important — in mood, that it almost seemed to do them an injustice to immediately jump back onto an 18th century choral-orchestral train. Indisputable, though, was the power of all the settings, classical and modern alike.
(Kaneez Munjee is a singer, writer, and editor. She is currently a doctoral
candidate in musicology at Stanford University.)
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