April 5, 2022

Late music

The longer I spent not writing anything for the newsletter, the more pressure I felt to make the next email "good," whatever that means, which made it harder to write anything, blah blah blah. Anyway, here are my thoughts about every classical music concert I’ve been to this year, in reverse chronological order.

Polyhymnia, music of Christopher Tye, March 12. Tye was an English Protestant who endured all the regime changes of the Reformation, writing music for all four monarchs from Henry VIII through Elizabeth I, like his Roman Catholic contemporary Thomas Tallis. The program, accordingly, reflected the abrupt changes and reversals in English sacred music and liturgy in the 16th century.

Most of the works performed were in Latin, and the centerpiece was the Missa euge bone, a mass setting composed either for Henry VIII or for Mary I under the briefly restored Roman hierarchy. I was especially moved by the radiant, joyful block harmonies that opened the Sanctus, and by the intricate Agnus Dei, which curiously had three instances of "...miserere nobis" instead of two,¹ each given different music for a different group of voices. Another highlight was the penitential motet Peccavimus cum patribus nostris, full of lovely dissonances, possibly written in Mary's time but reminiscent of pre-Reformation models in its length, complexity, and use of high treble vocal lines. The settings of English texts were were less inspiring, and made me wonder whether Tye was just finding his footing in writing Anglican music.

Polyhymnia sounded impeccable: the polyphony was executed with precision, the blend was impressive, and the treble lines soared. This was a gem of an early music performance, both edifying and illuminating.

Cantori, "Room of Her Own," March 5. This program consisted of three choral works, all by male composers, together meant to "honor the voices of women in later life."

The first, The Woman Where We Are Living by Robert Maggio, was a setting of excerpts from the medical records of a woman named Auguste Deter, who was the first person to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and who died in 1906. The piece began with a quotation of "Das himmlische Leben" from Mahler's 4th Symphony, a young boy's account of a vision of heaven, and ended with a pronouncement of Deter's death followed by an aura of soprano voices singing her words: "This is where I will live. Here and everywhere, here and now." The central conceit of the work seemed to be that dementia is a state of childlike simplicity and transcendence, a sentimental view bizarrely at odds with Deter's obvious suffering expressed elsewhere in the excerpted text. The musical setting relied on the cliché of the contrast between impassive, authoritative "male" lower voices singing the doctors' words and ethereal "female" upper voices singing the patient's, which occasionally created musically striking effects, but did nothing to "honor" the voice of the woman being recorded by her doctors.

The other two pieces were more conventional. Forgive Me by Paul Crabtree was a setting of various apologies from Iris Murdoch's letters; the text came off as amusingly neurotic and at times charmingly insincere ("I am sorry too that you thought I was rude. (Though I don't think I was.)"), but the musical setting lacked levity and seemed to take Murdoch's words entirely at face value. The Wave Rises by Ben Moore was a rather generic setting of Virginia Woolf's writings. Cantori gave an admirable performance of the material they had, but I couldn't help but think that the program was ill-conceived.

ARTEK, music of Dietrich Buxtehude, March 3. Buxtehude was a German Baroque composer and organist of the late 17th century, and the program was a varied sampling of his vocal and instrumental works. I went into this concert expecting to be primarily interested in the cantatas, and ended up having one of the most pleasant experiences I've ever had listening to Baroque instrumental music (which I tend to find dull...sorry!). Each of the trios on the program (Op. 2 No. 2, BuxWV 260; Op. 1 No. 2, BuxWV 253; Op. 2 No. 5, BuxWV 263; and BuxWV 272, which I missed because I was late) was astonishingly melodically inventive, dramatic, and full of stylistic contrasts.

The real highlight for me was hearing Gwendolyn Toth play the lautenwerk, which is a 17th--18th century keyboard instrument similar to a harpsichord with gut strings instead of steel. (Hers was built in 1989; no examples from the period survive.) Hearing it was a revelation---it was warm, resonant, full-bodied, somewhere between a harpsichord, a lute, a nice acoustic guitar, and a harp but in a class of its own. There's a recording of the concert on YouTube, so you even can listen for yourself.

Opera Philadelphia, Lilacs by George Walker and Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky, February 23. This was an odd pairing. Lilacs, for orchestra and solo voice, is a setting of sections of Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, an elegy for Abraham Lincoln written shortly after his assassination. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for the work in 1996. The music was solemn and somewhat fragmentary, its lyrical vocal lines paired with short, unsettled motifs and passages appearing and vanishing in the orchestra, evading a definite sense of momentum or conclusion. The piece in its entirety did not cohere for me, even though I found individual moments compelling. Tiffany Townsend, the soprano soloist, sounded elegant, and I wish I'd heard more of her and less of the orchestra in the balance.

If Lilacs was elegiac restraint, Oedipus Rex was vicious excess. The so-called opera-oratorio, which has a Latin libretto by Jean Costeau, was performed unstaged, with a Greek chorus of lower voices elevated behind the orchestra. Stravinsky's collage-like neoclassicism produced a riveting, unreal effect; the various 18th and 19th century operatic devices seemed to mock the characters and provoke sympathy at once, as in Oedipus's initial heroic, self-aggrandizing aria in an entirely different world from the ominous, thumping chorus music, or Jocasta's hysterical bel canto-esque flourishes as she insists, "oracles lie, oracles always lie," trying to suppress Oedipus's revelation that he had killed a man unknown to him at the crossroads. The chorus was crucial in ratcheting up the tension, culminating in a stunning savage unified cry of "Ecce!"---behold!---once Oedipus's transgressions are revealed, followed by an even more stunning expression of pity. "Te amabam, Oedipus. Tibi valedico, Oedipus," they sing---I loved you, I bid you farewell.

William Burden was excellent as Oedipus, projecting naive arrogance giving way to rising terror, and Rehanna Thelwell lent great dignity to her role as Jocasta. Once again, the orchestra tended to drown out the voices. Imperfections aside, this was a satisfying performance of a weird, remarkable opera, certainly worth a trip out of town.

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Actually, I also heard the Trinity Wall Street and St. Thomas choirs perform Bach's St. Matthew Passion last week. I'm not writing anything about it now because I'll probably attend a different performance of the St. Matthew Passion next week, so maybe I'll write about both of these concerts in another six months or something.