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Christ Church Cathedral
August 6, 2016
There is an old story of a mother watching her son on parade as part of a cadet graduation ceremony. At one point she turns to her neighbour and, in a puzzled voice. asks "why are all those other boys out of step with our Jimmy?"
I began to have considerable sympathy for Our Jimmy and his mother on Saturday night. Out of an audience estimated as somewhere upwards of 600 it became increasingly clear that somewhere upwards of 599 of them were enjoying the performance far more than I was.
Although Bach's Mass in B minor (to use the title he did not give it) has been a favourite work since I sang in it some fifty years ago, I had somehow never heard it in the single-voice-to-a-part style first advocated by Joshua Rifkin in the early 1980s.
While there may be sound historical-musicological arguments for doing it this way, for me the ultimate test is how well the music works in performance.
And, alas, for this listener and in this case, the answer is that it did not work at all. With the exception of a single movement.
But before I unleash a litany of personal complaints, let me also adumbrate the performance's numerous positive attributes.
Firstly, the singing was very fine indeed. Although the programme nowhere stated which soloist (there were two of each voice) was singing which aria, they were uniformly excellent. And the unnamed extra vocalists certainly added a measure of fullness to the sound in some of the choruses; if it was, in my opinion, far from enough, it was not through any shortcoming on their part.
Also first-class was the playing of the Arion Orchestra. The trumpets were, for the most part, simply magnificent; I loved the bassoons, particularly their weaving, almost rock-star stance (think Ian Anderson playing the flute in Jethro Tull) in "Quoniam tu solus"; and what can one say of Pierre-Antoine Tremblay's horn in the same movement? I have spoken with horn players about this and they have invariably been blasé, yet there must surely be at the very least a certain ambivalence about this oh-so-prominent obbligato, for which the player gets no opportunity whatsoever to warm up. Tremblay — playing, naturally (pun intended), a valveless horn — was superb. And the bubbling flutes in "Domine Deus" were also delightful.
So, having dealt with the positives, what troubled me so much about the performance?
Firstly, the tempos. I hope that I am not close-minded about such matters (indeed, it was a positively spritely performance of the Christmas Oratorio back in 2014 which totally altered my feelings about that particular work, for which I had never previously cared greatly) yet I could sum up this performance simply, if glibly: the quicker movements were too fast, while the slower movements were too fast.
The work began well enough, although the impact of four voices singing the opening chords is inevitably far less than that of a chorus. The vocal lines were well shaped, the ensuing fugue taken at a flowing tempo; during the fugue more voices were added to each part: this, in my opinion, constituting a tacit admission that the case for using single voices may stand up from a musicological point of view, but not from a musical one. Certainly it brought an inconsistency to the performance, which I found increasingly irritating as it progressed.
Things, for me (and I shall refrain from adding that particular phrase to any subsequent sentence, please take it as read that everything in this review is my own person opinion) started to go serious wrong with "Christe Eleison", which was certainly lively and, in fact, sounded positively jaunty. The effect was less of a supplicatory plea for mercy and more like a couple of teenage girls trying to wheedle an advance on their allowance from their father.
Although the "Gloria" opened spectacularly — nobody loves a Bach trumpet part more than I do — the minimal vocal forces meant that their initial entries were all but inaudible from where I was sitting (a seat carefully chosen with the experience of over two decades' of attending concerts in this venue), a phenomenon which only worsened in "Et in terra pax" in which one of Bach's most meltingly beautiful lines ("bonae voluntatis") was virtually lost.
Perhaps the worst moment of all was the opening of the "Sanctus", the usual majestic pin-you-to-your-seat wall-of-sound was simply missing in action and while I must certainly acknowledge the wisdom of rearranging the singers for the two four-part choirs which sing the subsequent "Osanna", I suspect that, except for the first few rows, any antiphonal effect was difficult to detect.
I could go on, but what would be the point? By now it will have become clear that I disliked this performance intensely — with the exception of "Gratias agibus tibi", the music of which is reprised in the final "Dona nobis pacem". Here the entire vocal ensemble was employed from the beginning and the music taken at a more moderate tempo. It was really very moving and an indication of what these performers could have achieved.
I suspect that I might have enjoyed the performance more in a less resonant acoustic, although I also suspect that I shall never be convinced by the single voice to a part style of performing. Certainly the complex counterpoint in quicker movements such as "Et resurrexit" might well have sounded cleaner and less confused in another venue; and perhaps the bizarre phenomenon — which I have never previously encountered when listening to vocal music in the cathedral — of random individual plosives and sibilants ricocheting off the walls, might not have occurred.
But it is pointless to speculate. All I can say for certain is that, for me if not for the 599 others present, this much-anticipated event was a major disappointment. To paraphrase a remark made by my colleague Martin Monkman in a completely different context, this performance made a supreme masterpiece sound like really rather a good piece of music.
I'm afraid I prefer my B minor Mass with rather more majesty and splendour than was on offer on Saturday.
Let me summarise my feelings in this way: the painter and critic Roger Fry once famously remarked that "Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian", a sentiment with which I usually have a good deal of sympathy.
On Saturday night I walked away from the cathedral with my atheism firmly intact.
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