Sunday evening Friends Of Music and the Arts presented a concert featuring Igor Stravinsky's Mass and John Rutter's Requiem. I had been looking forward to this particular concert for some time, as the Stravinsky Mass is one of my favorite pieces. Admittedly I was also feeling slightly apprehensive. It was an ambitious and difficult program, and although I knew many people who had been working hard to master the music, I also had heard some say that the Stravinsky was simply not beautiful. I know this is not the case, it can be a breathtakingly and profoundly beautiful piece, but I also appreciate that learning new music can be difficult, especially when that music plays with accents, stresses, and the layering of chords that in unusual or unfamiliar ways. I would say that Stravinsky's sacred music is not nearly as atonally shocking as his secular music, and, in fact, is quite melodic, but it does not follow the familiar mold that we have come to expect for sacred music. There may be something quite insightful in that.
The Mass is scored for chorus and wind instruments. Stravinsky wrote it as a piece of music intended not as a concert piece, but for liturgical use. To accomplish his intent, Stravinsky draws on very old techniques used in Medieval and Renaissance liturgical music, but not so commonly employed today in Western liturgy. There is a strong rhythmic focus very reminiscent of the old style of Gregorian Chant, with its complex mixed meter before the emergence of complex polyphony. I also hear echoes of the Russian Orthodox in this music, but this could be my own imagination. The Mass was specifically written for the Roman Catholic Liturgy as the Russian does not allow for the instrumentation, but at the same time, Stravinsky was familiar with the music of the Russian Orthodox church and it is not odd to think some influence is present.
I am going to quote from the program notes here:
"The mass that resulted is indeed spartan but also evocative of chant, especially the syllabic chanting of the Orthodox Church. The unusual orchestration, consisting of ten wind instruments, provides a cool, sonorous, and usually independent accompaniment to the four-part chorus. As Robert Craft, Stravinsky's music assistant and friend, once observed, "The orchestra which Stravinsky says "tunes" his choir never plays quite the same music. It adds tones, sounds different root tones than appear in the vocal parts, stresses, underlines, imitates, counterparts, sets off and augments the chorus".
I am very glad I went to this concert. The choir performed fairly well, and at times with ethereal beauty. They did not capture the magic of this piece, its deep liturgical flow and meaning, but I am sure with more time and more practice, were they so inclined, they could. The orchestra itself, generally needed more work. There were moments that were good, but generally there was too much horn. It seemed to me they took that phrase "usually independent accompaniment" to heart, although it simply could have been a lack of familiarity. Music is something we never master completely, even with pieces we know intimately, and there were moments where the horns reminded me of a recent piano recital, where the children were happy just to hit all the notes, loudly and with no inflection, but at least hitting the notes. In a truly good performance we get something closer to what Craft describes at the end of the paragraph above, and the horns are softer and the effect far more subtle. True the orchestra does not play quite the same music, but the overall effect is one of harmony, of subtle wave-like shifts in sound that build and add shadings to the meaning of the words, the words being Stravinsky's primary focus.
In the Kyrie, the horns and woodwinds set the tone, and aside from volume, there were lovely moments where, in the simple rhythmic recitation of the simple phrases, the choir achieved a kind of ethereal beauty, enhanced by the way Stravinsky manipulates the stresses of the meter, placing the normally unstressed syllables on the stressed beats, a technique that woks well with this music and brings focus to the words themselves and their meanings, and actually acts as a foreshadowing of what will come later in the text. Unfortunately, but also understandably, there were also parts of the Kyrie where the choir slipped back into the more common, meter-centered inflection, with the unfortunate effect that the listener would be startled out of the beginnings of reverie.
The second movement, Gloria, was a more successful conversation between instrumentation, chorus, and soloist, with a clearly articulated pulse and a sense very reminiscent of the kind of early polyphony, or parallel organum, found in Medieval sacred music. In the third movement, the Credo, the choir alternated between great beauty and a bit of a stumbling sense of disconnect, again probably due to changes in meter. The stumbles did not help the rather stark, sonorous coldness of this movement, meant to be a serious statement of faith, but generally that sense was present.
The work concluded with the grandness of the Sanctus, even if the horns were a bit heavy handed, and the ending a bit more dissonant than it should have been. This final chord of the sanctus uses a system known as Pythagorean tuning, again a technique used in Medieval sacred music, which relies on using perfect fifths and a major third. In this case, the chord is G. The point is to sound the fundamental first (G) then the perfect fifths -- D, A, and E accordingly, culminating with C#, a major third, which completes the sound. Successfully rendered, each pitch plays on the pitch below it, in the way the ear wants to hear it, forming a kind of complex consonance with great depth. Misplayed and dissonance runs rampant. I suspect this color shift is more natural for the choir, as they came far closer to achieving it, than it was to the orchestral accompaniment. I suspect, for the horns, all that was necessary was the subtlest shift in color rather than full shifts in pitch, the end result being that, rather than being lifted to the heavens, the audience was jarred back to earth.
I do think the audience was very grateful that the concert ended with the Rutter, which may be one of the most beautiful Requiems in regular performance. The form of the music was certainly more comfortable for both the musicians and the audience. Unlike Stravinsky, Rutter is known primarily for his sacred music, and also unlike the Mass, this piece is intended to be performed in a concert setting. Aside from the composers marked difference in style, this makes for a wide difference in the flow and sound of the music overall. Whereas the focus of Stravinsky's Mass was on the words themselves, and the music was meant to move one into and through the words to the meaning behind them, with the Rutter, the music itself is the point, and it is the music that is meant to be transformative. Stravinsky was also a composer who was perfectly capable of exploring darkness in his music, whereas Rutter's compositions, for the most part, are lushly beautiful and markedly avoid the darker sides of the human condition.
The piece was very lush and beautiful and mostly well performed. Rutter writes music that is very easy to listen to and this piece was indeed soothing and uplifting for the audience. My personal favorite was the second movement "Out of the Deep", which is a setting of Psalm 130, with heavy reliance on the music and cadence of Spirituals to begin the movement in darkness and gradually arise to hopes for glory. The echoes of the second movement, which continued throughout the work, also brings an underlying hint of sadness to the work, although this sadness is far from the dominant theme. Overall, it was a beautiful work, and a lovely performance.
I would conclude by saying that there is a part of me that wishes there was any likelihood that there could be greater exploration of the Stravinsky. I acknowledge that it is not likely to happen. Even if the musicians were interested in devoting more time and effort to the piece, I am not convinced the audience would be willing to give the work a second chance, at least in the near future. I am nonetheless happy to have heard this concert, happy that the group took on such an ambitious program, and I can hope that someone, other than me perhaps, will have discovered something heretofore unknown, and this discovery will lead them to destinations as yet to be revealed.
