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Music Review: Swiss ensembles work magic with Bach's
Mass in B minor Monday, October 09, 2000 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette By David DeAngelo Begun in the mid-1720s and revisited by the composer over many years, the Mass in B minor of J.S. Bach is one of the masterpieces of baroque music. It stands as the musical culmination of a lifetime of faith spent by a man who in his own time was rarely regarded as anything more than a talented, if a bit old-fashioned, church musician. The Mass, wondrously performed on Friday evening by the Ensemble Corund and accompanied by the Capriccio Basel (both ensembles from Switzerland) was the opening concert of the "Music in a Great Space" series presented by Shadyside Presbyterian Church. There is not time enough or words enough to describe the artistic achievement of this piece fully. Never performed whole in Bach's lifetime, it is a catalog of early 18th-century musical forms and styles. He constructed the forms both to reflect and magnify the central meaning of the texts. He did this by arranging the texts of the centuries-old Catholic liturgical Mass into balanced symmetrical forms that, as the music unfolds, "point toward" that movement's central most important ideas. The text of the Gloria, for example, is centered around the sentence "Thou that takest away the sins of the world." He set at the core of the Mass' central movement, the Credo, three sections that must have been the central tenets of Bach's faith: Christ's incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection. For Bach, this piece was not only the consummation of his prodigious musical talents but also -- more important -- a deep description of his profoundly held religious beliefs. It's been said that one can not understand America without understanding baseball. For Bach, one can not hope to understand the music separate from his faith. The performance itself was a wonder. Playing on period instruments that guaranteed softer and drier tones impossible on their more muscular and sweaty modern descendants, the instrumentalists of the Capriccio Basel accompanied the Ensemble Corund with a warmth of sound that was most refreshing. To be honest, a few of the time changes between movements seemed a bit out of focus. And there were a few split notes from the brass, but since the brass players were playing on next-to-impossible-to-play valveless trumpets, forgiving them their few minor sins seems like the right thing to do. Stephen Smith, the conductor, never allowed his conducting to become a performance in itself. To do so would have selfishly drawn attention away from the music. Just as Bach never let the surface level details of the music overshadow the inner meaning of the words, Smith and the rest of the ensemble took a step back and let the music speak for itself. The result was a performance that seemed quiet, meditative and serene -- even in its loudest sections. The vocalists sang with an obvious understanding of the both the idiom and the piece. As a full chorus, they were a balanced and homogenous wall of controlled, quiet strength. In smaller groups, they blended well with each other and the orchestra. The clean sounds from the chorus were never overmatched by the orchestra. David DeAngelo is a free-lance music critic for the Post-Gazette |
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