The anti-modern sensibility of Haydn's Stabat Mater

The Masterworks Chorale performed Franz Joseph Haydn's Stabat Mater on Sunday, May 17, at Sanders Theater.

Stabat Mater means "sorrowful mother" in Latin, referring to Mary, the mother of Jesus. I was struck by the insistent and sometimes graphic desire to share Christ's and Mary's suffering:

"Fix the stripes of the Crucified deeply into my Heart."

"Make me a sharer in His Passion and ever mindful of his wounds."

"Let me be wounded by His wounds."

In these lines, Christ and his mother are not abstractions, distant figures of another era. Each singer longs to know them, as if they could be touched and felt.

Whether we're religious, irreligious, agnostic, or whatever, few people actually think and feel this way today. We don't think of Christ in such intimate terms, perhaps because we're afraid of being ridiculed -- it's just not the way a modern educated man thinks.

The experience of the concert reminded me of my conversations with my father, when I was a boy, and we worked together in the back of our candy shop. I went there after my high school classes were finished for the day. We worked alone for hours each night. Often we came around to talking about Christ, the apostles, Mary, Judas -- all of them as if they were people we might know, perhaps from our family, as if Doubting Thomas could appear in the doorway and could tell us, wasn't it perfectly normal to doubt that Jesus had returned? Or for Pontius Pilate to say to us that the crucifixion wasn't really his fault, that he had a state to govern for Rome. We discussed their motives. Did Christ have girlfriends? How could it be that Mary was a virgin? Did we really believe that? We had lots of time, of course, making candy, and talking.

It was brave of Masterworks to perform Stabat Mater.

The Brookline Chorus's Elijah

I sing as a bass in the Brookline Chorus. We performed Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio, Elijah, at Sanders Theater in Harvard Square, Saturday, May 9. This was the first time I have ever sung in Sanders. It was the first time the Chorus had ever sung in such a large, prestigious hall.

All week, through the dress rehearsals with the 40+ piece orchestra, I felt the tension and excitement building among the other members of the Chorus. I saw the tension in our conductor Lisa Graham's face -- normally so young-looking, at moments in the week before the concert her features were taut, almost grim in her concentration.

We had a crowd of about 800 people, maybe more. As we stood in the wings, waiting to make our entrance, we strained to see the crowd through the doorway. Was it sold out? No, not quite. But it was more than enough.

The orchestral overture ended with a rising set chords that climaxed with the chorus's "Help, Lord!" -- and we were off. The people of Israel were suffering through three years of drought, brought on by their sins, and were pleading for help from God. What a blast of sound. And it sounded right. Despite our singing at top volume, it sounded right.

I could tell the audience was deeply involved throughout. During quiet passages, I heard an odd rustling sound -- hundreds of pages in the program book being turned at the same time, as people followed along with the libretto. It was troubling to think of that distracting interruption, yet oddly gratifying -- I edited and formatted the program book. How often do you get a demonstration of people using something you've helped create?

David Kravitz was our baritone soloist. What a huge voice, yet he stresses the syllables and consonants in such a way that he doesn't overpower the words. You understand what he's saying, and you understand the emotion. And Ethan Bremner, the tenor who sang Ahab and Obadiah, sang so easily, and yet I'm sure everybody in the place heard every syllable.

At the end, the audience stood and clapped and cheered for a long time. Lisa and the soloists (Jenni Samuelson and Krista River were the soprano soloists) came out twice. Lisa beamed, pointed and waved at the Chorus, at the orchestra, at the cellist, at the concertmaster, giving everyone their due.

David Kravitz came out center stage alone, and modestly tapped his chest, that gesture that says, "I'm overwhelmed. I'm so grateful." Everybody in the Chorus felt the same.


Two weeks ago: singing Carmina Burana with the Wellesely and Brandeis Choruses

Lisa had asked for bass and tenor volunteers to help fill out a Carmina Burana concert with the Wellesley and Brandeis choruses. I was pressed for time, but I love Carmina so much that I volunteered. There were a handful of us older men, surrounded by students. The concerts (there were two of them, one at Brandeis and one at Wellesley) were wonderful, and the students were wonderful singers. I was so glad to see younger people interested in Carmina Burana.

I especially loved hearing the soprano soloist, Andrea Matthews. I've heard many good sopranos now in the last few years, but her singing is different. She doesn't just sound great, she expresses the sentiment, the subject of what she's singing. I was moved by her singing. She's not a young woman herself, but when she sang, "Sweet boy, I give myself to you," she sounded so young.


Noel Perrin's book of essays, Third Person Rural

I read these essays about country life in Vermont a few weeks ago. He's not as engaging or dramatic as E.B. White describing life on a Maine farm, but Perrin is very good at describing the reality of farm life (or being a part-time farmer, which is how he described himself -- he also taught English Literature at Dartmouth). There's no sentimentality in his work, and his prose at times seemed a little too matter-of-fact and dry.

The Masterworks Chorale's concert, Sunday March 15

Because we know Steve, the director, and Sandy, one of the singers and have attended so many of Masterworks' concerts, these afternoon concerts really have taken on a friendly, relaxed feeling to them, as if we were spending time with friends.

The music was friendly as well. Selections from Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes, Mendelssohn's Six Songs to be Sung in the Open Air, and Mendelssohn's opera Son and Stranger.

I knew the Brahm a little because the Brookline Chorus had included some of the songs in one of our concerts last year. They're wonderful pieces, and the Chorale sang them well, particularly the one that was sopranos only (though I forget the name of that one).

For the Six Songs, I imagined a German family picnic, in which the townsfolk formed up in choirs and sang. Did they do that?

The opera was the highlight of the concert, of course. It's a rarely played opera. I could really sense how deeply the singers were invested in their roles. I found it a bit hard to follow the story. Yet, there was enough acting to pretty much demonstrate what was happening. And it was in English, after all. All the singers were wonderful, especially Sumner Thompson, the baritone as Kaus. He's got a big, hall-filling voice, and he showed the right sense of comic timing and acting skill to make the role come alive. It's a light opera, not dramatic, and it doesn't have big, defining moments.

Recent events I haven't blogged about

I'm going to quickly catch up on a few events we attended recently, but which I failed to blog about.

The Huntington's production of Two Men of Florence, March 7

This is a recent play by Richard Goodwin (who happens to be the husband of Doris Kearns Goodwin). A very earnest play. It's excellent that large issues of God and Reason are explicitly argued in front of us, here with Pope Urban and Galileo acting as spokesmen for the respective sides (though here, the pope appears to be the man of Reason, and Galileo is the more religious). I felt as if I were watching a very well acted historical re-enactment not unlike what we see on PBS. And that I've seen this same show several times. I found a lot to like in the characters, and the performances, but the play is short on drama and overly talky, like a slightly senile professor.


The New Repertory Theater's Exits and Entrances, a play by Athol Fugard, March 5

Really wonderful performances by Ross MacDonald as the young playwright, and especially Will Lyman as the grisled veteran actor. Some touching scenes as Lyman recalls his past in the theater. But very little drama. A little too earnest. The younger man-older veteran story is a good one, but there's not much story here. I kept wondering if there was a sexual component here that Fugard never explored. It seemed like a possible undercurrent, but too far under.


The Brookline Chorus concert Songs of Freedom, February 28

(I sing in the bass section with the Chorus). A very short concert. I think the centerpiece of the concert was the Kirk Mechem songs from his opera, John Brown. I enjoyed singing them. Overall, the theme of "Freedom" is too diffuse. Going from Horizon (a tragic South African song by Peter Van Dijk about a Bushmen tribe that includes claps, hisses, finger snaps), to John Brown, to the Greg Bartholomew piece The 21st Century: A Girl Born in Afghanistan (set to excerpts from Koffi Anann's Nobel Peace Prize lecture), didn't quite hang together for me. I didn't feel the thread that held it all together, though Lisa Graham, our director, tried mightily to make it work musically and thematically.


Chameleon Arts Ensemble recital, A Tale that's Told in Ancient Song, February 15

Not easy for us to get to, down on Beacon Street, at the Goethe Institute. But we enjoyed it. Especially the Manel de Falla songs sung by Sabrina Learman. Liked the Smetana Trio in G Minor too.


Lexington Symphony concert, February 7

A wonderful orchestra and concert. I especially wanted to hear Samuel Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915, a nostalgic piece. It was sung beautifully by Janna Baty. It's haunting and scary, even as the singer describes a protected and beloved childhood. "After a while I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am." So the song ends.

Jonathan McPhee seems like a wonderful conductor.

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, by Giles Militon

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, by Giles Milton (2008)

The title Paradise Lost works as a pun on two levels. The British writer Giles Milton is the author (no relation, I assume, to the classical poet John Milton). "Paradise" was the name of the Smyrna neighborhood of wealthy British and other European merchant families that had made Smyrna their home for several generations. This neighborhood was certainly "lost" to those families, as Smyrna was lost to the Christian population that had lived there for nearly two thousand years. But since the events described in the book amount to a horrifying tragedy in which hundreds of thousands of people were brutally killed, the punning should have been avoided.

The title aside, this is a terrific book. It recounts the history leading up to the massacres of Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna, and the expulsions of their populations in 1922. The Greek army's ill-conceived occupation of the city following WWI, and its nearly insane expedition to defeat the nationalist Turkish forces that followed, along with the atrocities by both sides, and the ultimate defeat of the Greek army, are all dramatically recounted.

I found it hard to put down, and the last few chapters, which narrate day by day the terrible weeks of September 1922, kept me up at night reading. Milton does the right thing by telling his story from the point of view of members of these wealthy clans. It's a fresh perspective on the Smyrna tragedy, and one that most modern day readers will be better able to understand. These family members, with their middle class British sensibilities, probably seem familiar to most modern American readers, more so than the village Greeks, Armenians and Turks of that era.

For American readers unfamiliar with those events, this is a great book to read. The awful scenes in the streets of Smyrna and on the Smyrna quay were created by great power politics combined with the constantly-stoked frenzy for ethnic revenge. This is foreign to most Americans -- no foreign country has ever manipulated armies and politics and resources here, nor pitted one ethnic or racial group against another. We have the racial and class divide, and memories of slights and injustice, but nothing on this scale. We don't know what it's like.

And what can you say about Asa Jennings? I haven't read his story before, but if we're to believe this account, Jennings was the American YMCA director who took it on himself to cajole and con the demoralized Greek Navy and the reluctant navies of the major powers into rescuing tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees desperately waiting on the quay for days. There should be statues of him and streets named after Asa Jennings all over Greece.

The Huntington Theater's production of "The Corn is Green"

The Huntington Theater's wonderful cast and their performances (Kate Burton, her son Morgan Ritchie, Will LeBow, and all the rest) was not enough to keep me from feeling that this was a dated, tired play. It does have some good moments, the third act finally has a little tension, and there are the performances, especially if you simply want to see Kate Burton.

In its time (I think Emlyn Williams wrote it and first produced it in 1940), I suppose the depiction of the headstrong independent Miss Moffat might have seemed more original. We're to take it on faith that Miss Moffat is brilliant -- there's little evidence of it shown onstage. In the first act, the village boys are unruly childish louts. During the intermission, they become receptive bright-eyed eager-beavers, with Morgan surpassing them all as a natural genius (sort of like Tarzan, growing up in the jungle and learning to read and speak English in time for Jane). What Miss Moffat did to make this happen is unexplained. She is just magic.

The sets are homey and comfortable looking. The occasional background music between acts (Welsh choral music) is pretty but I can't tell if it has anything to do with the play. I guess the biggest reason to see this, aside from Will LeBow's humorous and lovable Squire character (a character he excels in), might be to watch Kate Burton. Except that she's simply playing Kate Burton. In the three or four performances we've seen with Kate Burton, she plays pretty much the same character -- Kate Burton, the center of attention, an actress who gives off a sense of energy and heat.

The New Reportory Theater's "Cabaret" is menacing and satisfying

We liked The New Repertory Theater's Cabaret. It's the third time we've seen the Kander and Ebb play in the last 15 years, and I'd say this was the best production.

How do you write about a play as complex as this? Some of the numbers are rollicking "fun" -- and yet we know about the rise of Hitler and the enormous tragedy to come. The director, Rick Lombardo (who's leaving the New Rep for San Jose at the end of the season) struck a good balance between the fun and the menace. This production brought out the sinister undertone of the play in a coherent way. It all made sense, whereas previous productions I'd seen left me confused -- why are these people enjoying themselves so much? In this production, we sense the desperation of the characters, despite the laughs and the jiggling Kit Kat girls.

Those Kit Kat girls -- they were hilariously dirty, and almost over the top with the sleazy bump and grind numbers. They were explicit and raw. And therefore perfect for the play.

I thought the stage was a bit big for this show -- with so much space, I didn't always feel the claustrophobic, crowded ambience of a cabaret. Aimee Doherty, who was wonderful as Sally Bowles, was reaching a bit in her "Cabaret" song near the end, a little too intent on producing a Lisa Minelli showstopper. And Cliff Bradshaw (nicely played by David Krinnit) puzzles me. If he is, or was, gay, then how can he be in a love affair with Sally? His sexual persona is ambiguous, yet the play depends on their love. That didn't make sense. Finally, John Kuntz was an excellent Emcee.

B.R. Myers's "A Reader's Manifesto": I agree with him, but why do these authors sell?

B.R. Myers wrote A Reader's Manifesto in 2002. The subtitle, An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, pretty much sums it up. The chapter titles themselves are satirical bits of lit-crit-speak: Evocative Prose, Muscular Prose, Edgy Prose, Spare Prose, and so on. It's a fast, entertaining read and -- unlike the lengthy quoted sections he takes from famous current authors -- it's well written. His basic premise is that much of what is praised as great current literary fiction is actually laughably mediocre.

Myers asserts that fiction, and the literary culture that surrounds it, has become pretentiously high brow and and that celebrated writers have come to ignore basic precepts of clear narrative story-telling in order to mystify and scam their readers.

It's easier to produce a gushy incomprehensible word soup than swift, thoughtful prose. Readers have to accept it or risk being considered unsophisticated. Myers pretty well demolishes Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and David Guterson, using them as examples of what is bad, and yet critically praised.

When Myers quotes from novels, he's devastating. And after he has blasted each writer in turn, he makes the rubble bounce.

Myers: "Sure, Proulx has plenty of long sentences, but they are usually little more than lists:"

Annie Proulx (from a piece of her fiction): "Partridge black, small, a restless traveler across the slope of life, an all-night talker; Mercalia, second wife of Partridge and the color of a brown feather on dark water, a hot intelligence; Quoyle large, white, stumbling along, going nowhere."

I did start to feel sympathy for these writers, they're so thoroughly gutted, and their quoted excerpts so terrible. I've tried to read Annie Proulx, and found her constant stream of disconnected images too much. I've tried reading DeLillo, and felt bored. The others I haven't read.

I'm surprised Myers didn't make more of the academic background of literary fiction. Many contemporary "serious" writers have (or had) academic positions in English and Writing departments (by necessity). I think these writers find it hard not to write for their academic colleagues and their literary agendas -- a writing professor is naturally interested in gaining the esteem of fellow professors and department chairmen, and not necessarily that of readers in Butte, or Buffalo.

I agreed with a lot of what Myers says in this book. And I see the parallels to some of the theater we've seen produced in the last ten years. Yet, I wondered -- how do these writers keep getting published? I know that some people really like Annie Proulx, McCarthy, and the others. Can it really be that it's lit-crit cultural pressure and bullying that's making people buy their books?

Mark Twain's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" -- this boy never grows up

What got a'hold of me and made me read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)?

I don't know. It was lying there on the discount table at the Barnes and Noble in Brookline, a beautiful hardbound edition, with the Winslow Homer painting, Boys in a Meadow, on the dust cover, and a sticker with $4.95. I had to buy it. The nostalgia? The longing for the pastoral youth that I never had? Maybe. (By the way, that Barnes and Noble is closing down -- yet another book store about to disappear.)

I'm glad I read it. It's always readable. And I remember that I loved, and was surprised by, the novel Huckleberry Finn (it was a great novel). Tom is not a great novel, but I guess it is a kind of warmup for Huckleberry. Many parts are very funny, of course. You can just sense Twain unloading at his favorite targets. The satire is constant, and is still timely. It's worth the time. Here is the town minister:

"He was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church 'sociables' he was always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps, and 'wall' their eyes, and shake their heads, as much to say, 'Words cannot express it; it is too beautiful, too beautiful for this mortal earth.'

"And now the minister prayed. A good, generous prayer it was, and went into details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the church, for the other churches of the village; for the village itself; for the country; for the state; for the state officers; for the United States; for the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the President; for the poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas; for...."

A disappointing thing about the book: despite all he goes through, Tom is the same at the end of the book as he is at the beginning. He's still the very same child, still quick to dream in the very same childish way as when we first meet him. He hasn't grown at all. We like him, of course, but think he should've learned a thing or two.

Tobias Wolff's memoir-novel, "Old School"

I was engrossed with Tobias Wolff's novel Old School (2003). It is written in the form of a memoir recounting the narrator's years at an exclusive prep school somewhere in New England. He is one of a very few Jewish boys in the school. He masks his "Jewishness" for most of his time at the school. He doesn't speak about it to anyone. He desperately wants to be a writer, and much of the novel is about the urgent sense of competition among the boys to write and be rewarded for their writing -- the school mounts writing contests in which the winning boy gets a private meeting with a famous writer visiting the school. We get to see and meet Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Earnest Hemingway. The portraits of the writers are vividly detailed and realistic -- they feel as if they must be based on actual journalism.

The narrator does something unexpected in the climax of the story. It surprised me that a voice and a person that I had come to know and trust would suddenly do something so untrustworthy.

It was great to read about a school where literature is taken so seriously! Writers and writer wannabes are heroes in this school.

It reminded me a little of my all-boys high school, Hutchinson Central Techincial High School, in Buffalo. We were a public school, and not exclusive in terms of wealth; we prided ourselves in being smarter than the other public high schools in the city; in my first year, we wore ties and white shirts to school. Like the claustrophobic world described in Old School, we were all boys, and each day you had to make your place in the locker room scenes and bravado.

The environment and scenes are so realistic, they stand out and I remember them now (a few weeks after reading the book) more than the story itself and the thinking of the characters. The book was stoically old fashioned -- no highfalutin language, no obscure allusions, no scrambled time sequences. Just a real story with realistic characters.

One of Wolff's achievements here is that the language is clear and fluid. It seems to disappear and simply leave you with the story itself.

The Masterwork Chorale's surprisingly modern Petite Messe Solennelle, by Rossini

A belated posting on the Masterwork Chorale's performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, which we attended on November 16, at Sanders. This mass surprised me -- a couple of the early movements sounded almost folklike, you could dance to them. I loved the harmonium. Other movements were operatic. And other movements were more traditionally liturgical and mass-like. It takes you on quite a journey. The entire piece sounded surprisingly modern -- yet Rossini wrote it in 1863.

The conductor, our friend Steve Karidoyanes, seems to be steadily shaping the sound of the Chorale. They seem to have a tighter, and lighter, sound then they did a year ago.

Cambridge community Chorus's Messiah

We enjoyed the Cambridge Community Chorus's performance of Handel's Messiah (an abbreviated version) on Saturday afternoon. Their new director, Jamie Kirsch, seems like a great find for the chorus. He seemed energetic, and the chorus seemed to respond to him. Their sound was clearer than it was when we last heard them, in the spring. The sopranos especially sounded good. The movements sung by the soprano soloist Danielle Munsell Howard stood out for me -- she has a powerful and controlled voice.

And who'd have thought that over a thousand people would come out for the Messiah on a sunny Saturday afternoon!