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University Centre Auditorium
May 6, 2013
"It has been said that the music of Ernest Bloch bears little relation to the musical fashion of his time. This may well be as true as it is unimportant. The same might be said about Bach or Beethoven. They, too, may have been born into the wrong century. But their music still lives, as Bloch's music will continue to live, by virtue of its cosmic awareness, its just measurement of the stature of man, and its positive concern with that part which is indestructible."
Certainly, and I am sure that composer and critic Herbert Elwell would agree, it is time for a reevaluation of Bloch's music, which seems to have almost dropped off the radar since his death in 1959.
I cannot have been the only person who was more than pleased to note that Monday's concert by the Victoria Choral Society was scheduled to begin with a (purely instrumental!) work by Bloch.
In the event it was just two (of four) movements of Bloch's Concerto Grosso No.1 which we heard, played by pianist Wendy Stofer (the VCS's regular pianist) and the evening's string orchestra (mostly familiar faces from the Symphony). And a glorious noise they jointly made.
Brian Wismath directed a performance of energy and precision which could only make one wonder why (insofar as I can tell) this music has not been performed in Victoria for almost thirteen years.
Much of the Twentieth Century history of the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) has been of suffering and repression, whether at the hands of the Third Reich or the Soviet Union.
From this background has flowered a strong choral tradition of which the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks is a notable representative.
His setting of Dona Nobis Pacem dates from 1996 and displays his influences - Arvo Pärt, of course, but also, in the slow instrumental introduction, Shostakovich - yet the work never sounds derivative, even though, overall, its effect was reminiscent of Barber's Adagio for Strings.
It has been some time since I last heard the Victoria Choral Society and the improvement - the presence of a number of familiar faces suggests that the improvement has not been achieved by a wholesale clearout - is considerable. From their first entry the sound was well focused, balances were very good (I suspect Wismath's cunning strategy of seating the, numerically fewer, men in front of the women helped) and intonation excellent.
Wismath - a conductor who impresses more at each hearing - shaped the music beautifully and provided an impressive climax.
Steven Dobrogosz was the youngest composer on the agenda and was represented by two movements from his setting of the Mass and the Canadian premiere of his Te Deum.
Dobrogosz is an accomplished composer, although I found his idiom a little odd: the Kyrie from the Mass featured some highly syncopated passages - nicely done - yet culminated in something which sounded more like a Broadway showtune. And the final movement veered towards Hollywood: more Doris than Agnus Dei.
The Te Deum was still sweet but had none of the tendency towards the saccharine of the Mass. The gently flowing performance was most enjoyable, even if the piece was arguably a shade too long.
There could be no doubting, though, that the evening's main event was Haydn's Mass in D minor, known by its composer as the Missa in Angustiis (Mass in troubled times) and by everybody else - at least since 1805 and the Battle of Trafalgar - as the "Nelson" Mass.
Aside from being a towering masterpiece, this is a wonderful work for the chorus (I speak from experience) and the choir made the most of it, whether it was the supplicatory-but-demanding Kyrie, the exuberant Gloria (with a commendably firm top end in "glorificamus te"), the robustly canonic Credo, the great swelling of sound at "Crucifixus", the joyful "pleni sunt coeli" or the final, do-not-mess-with-us "Dona nobis pacem".
The soloists were generally good and well matched; but this work, like few others, makes serious demands of the soprano and there were a couple of places where Betty Waynne Allison could have used a little more control - I am thinking in particular of the soaring, florid line at the reappearance of the opening Kyrie and her apparent desire to speed up at "In nomine domini" in the Benedictus.
The instrumental accompaniment - strings, trumpets, timpani and organ - was very good, although the decision to use a positive organ rather than the hall's, while quite possibly more authentic, meant that the instrument was less than usually present: the wonderful, falling figure in "Qui tollis", for instance, was scarcely audible.
But these were minor blemishes in an otherwise excellent performance of music which really should be heard more often.
This was a most rewarding evening; the Victoria Choral Society has clearly chosen its new Music Director well. I look forward to future productions.
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