hile the academics point to the theoretically balanced structure, and while period specialists worry over technical elements, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B-Minor, a work not performed for over a century after his death, stands as one of music’s great monuments, not because of a certain hodge-podge assembly of previously-written movements that somehow forge a greater whole, but because the music is perfect in service to the text, beautiful equally in melody and fugue. It is the music itself that is so wonderful, so deserving of the highest quality of performance for maximum enjoyment.
 

There were a few originals and even more numerous copies of original instruments amongst the guesting Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra, but no other attempt was made at recreating the “original” Baroque sound as it is currently understood to be. Maestro Grant Gershon didn’t resort to OVPP (one voice per part), there were no boy sopranos and altos, and no countertenors, but he chose to use the common Baroque A=415, a half-tone lower pitch that doubtlessly made three of the solo quartet members happy.

Even the 40 voices of the stylishly slimmed-down edition of the Master Chorale were greater than the numbers of Johann Sebastian Bach’s own St. Thomas Leipzig choir would have been, had the great master ever performed the work, but not the 200 or many more voices and swollen numbers of modern instruments heard in Romantic style performances common into the 1950s and early 1960s.

All that thankfully began to change when Nikolaus Harnoncourt and his Vienna-based Concentus Musicus jolted the music world with sometimes crude-sounding recreations of his unique recordings of the St. John and St. Matthew Passions, and the subsequent monumental Bach Cantata series on the Telefunken/Teldec label for which he invested years of research. Harnoncourt was able to demonstrate, despite the sometimes edgy tuning of his period instrument winds and “scratchy strings,” that Baroque music was not the dull, dreary stuff heard universally prior to his archetypal recordings.

In his six and one-half seasons at the helm of the Master Chorale, Maestro Gershon has not always proved that he understood Baroque performances free of all Romantic influences, nor had he escaped a more recent Classical approach in his performances of the Baroque. Perhaps he simply worked his way back, stretching to achieve a personal kinship with ever-earlier musicians. Maybe the influence of Musica Angelica helped to bring him full circle to meet Bach in his own style. In any case, he achieved a full measure of success in his close encounter with J.S. Bach.

The Bach B-Minor Mass, performed before a nearly packed Walt Disney Concert Hall Sunday evening, was a triumph for both Maestro Gershon and the solid musicians of the Master Chorale. As one of the greatest challenges serious musicians may face, with potential disaster looming at every turn of the page, the performance have gone worse. The fact it went so well was evidenced by the loud praise of a discriminating audience.

Digitally-reconstructed portrait, 2008	Portrait of J.S. Bach, circa 1748

Even the 40 voices of the stylishly slimmed-down edition of the Master Chorale were greater than the numbers of Johann Sebastian Bach’s own St. Thomas Leipzig choir would have been, had the great master ever performed the work, but not the 200 or many more voices and swollen numbers of modern instruments heard in Romantic style performances common into the 1950s and early 1960s.

All that thankfully began to change when Nikolaus Harnoncourt and his Vienna-based Concentus Musicus jolted the music world with sometimes crude-sounding recreations of his unique recordings of the St. John and St. Matthew Passions, and the subsequent monumental Bach Cantata series on the Telefunken/Teldec label for which he invested years of research. Harnoncourt was able to demonstrate, despite the sometimes edgy tuning of his period instrument winds and “scratchy strings,” that Baroque music was not the dull, dreary stuff heard universally prior to his archetypal recordings.

In his six and one-half seasons at the helm of the Master Chorale, Maestro Gershon has not always proved that he understood Baroque performances free of all Romantic influences, nor had he escaped a more recent Classical approach in his performances of the Baroque. Perhaps he simply worked his way back, stretching to achieve a personal kinship with ever-earlier musicians. Maybe the influence of Musica Angelica helped to bring him full circle to meet Bach in his own style. In any case, he achieved a full measure of success in his close encounter with J.S. Bach.

The Bach B-Minor Mass, performed before a nearly packed Walt Disney Concert Hall Sunday evening, was a triumph for both Maestro Gershon and the solid musicians of the Master Chorale. As one of the greatest challenges serious musicians may face, with potential disaster looming at every turn of the page, the performance have gone worse. The fact it went so well was evidenced by the loud praise of a discriminating audience.

Let’s start with the fact that Bach’s music itself is indestructible. The Swingle Singers successfully turned him into a jazz giant, and Walter/Wendy Carlos digitized him back in the 20th century. On this occasion, as in every performance of this masterpiece, there are myriad choices to be made, tempo not the least in importance. By and large, Maestro Gershon chose tempi that would not abuse the median tempi of today’s recordings, albeit a tad slow in the Kyrie sections, which dragged along at a properly penitential pace, or a tad too fast, as in the final measures of the Confiteor, in which he chose to end the movement without the more traditional slowing termed “streetcar coming into the end station.” Some would not have preferred the phrase-breaking, over-the-top staccatos of the two Kyrie movement themes, a distinctive but fussy gesture that was to a certain degree ignored by the magnificent bass section. It seemed for a while as though we were in for an evening of B-Minor Mass as a painful but exquisite expression of faith. As the Mass proceeded, the ensemble eschewed effect, and returned to the basic score. And then the music itself emerged full and unforced.

Curiously, it was Musica Angelica that all too often appeared to play timidly, commonly a sign of too little rehearsal. The evening’s concert mistress, Ingrid Mathews, performed the Laudamus te obbligato playing as though afraid to miss even one of the many 64th notes, but without string-biting energy and committed, linear shape. On the other hand, the flutists, Stephen Schultz and Sherril Wood, and especially the wondrous oboe obbligatos of Michael DuPree, were outstanding and comparable to Europe’s best. In a venue of the size of Walt Disney Concert Hall, one must wonder why such a small portative organ was employed, when a large instrument would have provided a more secure continuo. The orchestra was solid when playing tutti or when providing solo aria support, and is obviously at home in the Baroque style as is generally understood today.

The solo vocal quartet were a slight disappointment, if one were to read their glowing CVs. Mary Wilson executed the solo soprano coloraturas and hit all the right notes, but did so in a voice of uneven tone production. Her Christe eleison duet with mezzo-soprano Paula Rasmussen seemed more a duel of competing tremolos, despite Ms. Rasmussen’s otherwise gorgeous tone. The tremulous solo voices stood in stark contrast to the relative straight-toned singing of the Master Chorale. Ms. Rasmussen achieved her best singing in the penultimate Agnus Dei despite a lack of requisite spiritual commitment. Things went better for the ladies in their second-half duet, Et in unam Dominum, in which tremolos were trimmed and collegial music-making returned.

Tenor James Taylor struggled with the phrasing in Benedictus, singing just under the already lowered pitch here and there, after bleating along with Ms. Wilson in their Domine Deus duet.

Baritone Jesse Blumberg attempted to negotiate the corno- (read modern double French horn despite the program’s indicated “Natural horn”) accompanied Quoniam to solus sanctus, but he was often overwhelmed by the horn. Although he certainly hit all the right notes, an achievement cherished by horn players everywhere, the musically reliable James Thatcher beat a hasty retreat from the stage as soon as his duties were finished. In the familiar Et in Spiritum Sanctum Dominum, a popular midrange male student of the singing art challenge, Mr. Blumberg increased the volume, but couldn’t muster tone in the range of the lowest three notes of the movement.

The Master Chorale voices were a great pleasure to hear. The wonderful sopranos, who in this challenge were divided musically as well as physically, sang with pure, unfettered clarity, lacking only what they could never produce, the metallic tone core native only to boy sopranos, which delivers the high-flying Bachian tessitura with unearthly ease. One is grateful that this Mass of all masses was performed this season, and not two years ago, when the soprano section was much weaker. Encomia to Maestro Gershon for employing the current membership. The rock solid alto line never wavered, and the tenors, occasionally a little reedy, were never shy in tackling their role. Textual clarity, to the extent such was possible, was consistent in all sections.

In the great choruses, Gloria in excelsis; Cum Sancto Spiritu; Et incarnatus est – Crucifixus – Et resurrexit; Et expecto; Sanctus; Osanna; Dona nobis pacem, Maestro Gershon shaped each to fit the emotional content of the various texts, which together with the beautiful singing heard all night, formed an overall impression of greatness that met the highest standards of the world’s finest choruses.

Post script: Victoria Looseleaf’s programmed notes included one subheading that read: “Different from Bach’s other liturgical music in that it transcended the theology of Christianity …”  As much as one might wish otherwise, even this great Mass, sans spiritual content and intent, could never be separated from its underlying theology.

- Reviewed by Douglas Neslund
 

n two successive evenings, the fabled Vienna Choir Boys (Wiener Sängerknaben – literally, Viennese Singing Boys), represented by the team named in honor of composer Anton Bruckner, himself once a choirboy, presented themselves in concert, Friday night in Santa Clarita and Saturday night in Glendora. Their conductor-accompanist was a newcomer to the road show, Johannes Kobald, who replaced Martin Schebesta as head of “Brucknerchor” a year ago.

Boys’ choir directors are more responsible for the artistic achievement of their choirs than any other choral ensemble. Theirs is the praise or the blame, but not entirely. In Santa Clarita, home to the College of the Canyons and its still-new Performing Arts Center, the venue acoustics worked strongly as a detriment to the choir’s performance, as the dryness – a lack of reverberance that feels to a singer as though he must sing through a wet blanket thrown over his head, the going was tough indeed. While this venue is very attractive, the choir sorely needed to have an acoustic shell wrapped around them, the better to reflect their singing out into the auditorium. They were afforded such in Citrus College’s much larger and much more reverberant Haugh Performing Arts Center, and the result was a much more musical and enjoyable evening’s entertainment.

For his debut tour, Kapellmeister Kobald chose a repertoire that ranged from challenging (Jacobus Gallus’ Pueri concinite, which was two or three steps above the heads of his boys) to the simple (Camille Saint-Säens’ lovely and rarely heard Ave Maria) to the spectacular (Orlando di Lasso’s well-known Echo Song with a solo quartet providing just 2 or 3 of the expected 4 note “echo,” who stood as far stage left as they could), to the disappointing (Robert Schumann’s Zigeunerleben, that was taken at far too fast a tempo, creating mental images of gypsies dancing frenetically over glowing hot coals), to the predictable Austrian folk songs that were not well sung on either night, robbing them of their inherent charm. (The recent folk song CD made by the choir is the exact opposite, but serves to expose a performance in which the music and the tradition are approached matter-of-factly.)

Balancing the above selections were “pop” items - A Wonderful Day, Ain’t She Sweet, and Stormy Weather, the latter which became most appropriate in the cold downpours of a late-Winter, early-Spring storm in Glendora.

The audience went most enthusiastically for … The Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz? Not this time, because it wasn’t offered. Instead, Kalinka, a popular Russian folk song that audiences everywhere adore, was the favorite. This was performed with good humor and precarious director-pauses just before the anticipated clapping of the ever-accelerating tempo, causing the choirboys to be alert and, for the first time in the entire concert, actually forcing them to watch their conductor. He varied the length of those “pregnant pauses,” and threatened to create a “solo performance” that none of the choirboys would wish to have.

Johannes Kobald was introduced to classical music at an early age with his first piano lesson taking place at the age of six, and went on to study piano, organ and jazz in Klagenfurt, as well as church music at Vienna’s University for Music. He was not a Sängerknabe, however.

Despite his musical upbringing, the 36-year old maestro does not appear to exhibit very stable conducting technique, as every gesture is oversized, and nuance is rarely to be seen or heard. He actually looks uncomfortable when conducting the a cappella items that take him away from the keyboard, and his unsure direction is reflected in the choirboys’ singing.

He also does not seem to have training in or awareness of the singing voice, as several of his solo boys displayed vocal problems that could be solved through the application of proper technique. Even his best singer, a strapping soprano named Konrad, had difficulty negotiating ascending lines, and avoided legato phrases, singing each note separately as though pressing a note on a keyboard. In addition, Master Konrad appeared stiffly wooden, with hands knotted into fists. This was clearly not a matter of fright - he was simply untrained how to sing. His singing contained no passion, no joy – just notes – one after the other. In comparison with the other occasional soloists, he seemed to be the highest note specialist, the notes sure to impress and please an uncritical audience, but also notes that avoided his Übergang (passagio) problems.

The most consistently noteworthy deficit of this Viennese contingent was their lack of phrasing. In virtually every phrase of every item, words were sliced and diced so that extra breaths could be taken, most egregiously on the final “A (breathe) men” of the final movement of the Pergolesi Stabat mater, of which perhaps four movements were sung as excerpts. These vocal-choral deficiencies lie on Kapellmeister Kobald’s plate, and might even be justified had the boys actually needed to breathe (which they clearly didn’t). It was a choppy kind of singing that left one yearning for at least one, long phrase that was not to be heard by this choir.

The conductor also composed a free-standing Kyrie eleison (Greek for “Lord Have Mercy”) performed with five choristers standing in front of the piano-playing composer, as though playing football and creating a picket fence to defend against a goal kick, except their hands … well, never mind. The five sang a quasi-Gregorian chant that seemed a bit more at home in the Greek Orthodox tradition than the Roman, and was de facto led by the tallest lad, whose head nod brought the others in with him on successive phrases. Gregorian chant is always unaccompanied, but Kobald created a new genre by playing high-pitched New Age arpeggios over the “chanting five”. This theme returned twice, interrupted by a jazzy, piano-as-soloist B section of all-out vigorous, rhythmic content. The choirboys clearly enjoyed singing this one.

Kobald believes that music, and especially singing, leads the performers to better understand themselves. “The joy the singers feel must be shared with the audience. If we can manage that, we will have achieved much.” Very true, but one should not, while chasing the illusion of “self-esteem,” ignore the fundamental vocal health of the choirboys. These ideal principles are not mutually exclusive. On a similar note, Kobald did not allow his boys to move until almost the end of the program, when the audience was treated to happy-clap, happy-snap, and happy-stomps that drowned out the sound of their voices. But the piece de resistance of movement took the form of a trio of boys who came downstage for an encore of Kalinka to attempt a primitive trepak, with the middle boy dropping down to dazzle folks with a terrific turtle spin, a sort of breakdance that has its origins in Russian folk dance.

It is a fundamental, physical need of choir-age boys to move. And even if they are instructed to stand straight for 90 minutes, their growing bodies require them to move, and they will, whether it be standing typically on the sides of one’s shoes, or bending a wrist backward with the other hand; or even playing pranks of swaying side to side (as two first altos did) or the same two going up on tippy-toes on a series of particularly high notes, all to amuse themselves, but serving to reflect the need to move.

Gone are the operettas that afforded predecessor Vienna Choir Boys the chance to move, to dress up, and to afford an audience with moments of authentic comedy, but in an appropriate format. In 1954, when the author first saw and heard the Vienna Choir Boys, they were quite literally singing for their suppers in the aftermath of World War II, and they sang beautifully, with focus and intensity. Today, without hunger as a driving force, the choir has yet to find authentic motivation to perform up to that standard. Where this institution built a reputation worldwide as offering musical haute cuisine, today they seem to have chosen instead to hawk Big Macs^®.