Toronto Mendelssohn Choir 2022-2023 # 3: The Glory of the B Minor Mass

The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir crowned its season on Tuesday night at Koerner Hall with a powerful, majestic, thrilling performance of one of the most sublime works in the entire choral repertoire: Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in B Minor, BWV232. 

The B Minor Mass is an extraordinary one-off among the great choral works for several reasons. First, its sheer scale renders it virtually unusable for the church liturgy as the music lasts for a good solid two hours, give or take a bit. Second, it is unlikely that it was ever performed in Bach's lifetime, since he finished it only in the last year of his life, 1749 (although there were performances under his direction of the majestic Sanctus and one or two other portions). Indeed, the earliest documented performance of the complete work finally took place over a century after his passing, in 1859. Third, this score makes great demands on the skills of singers and instrumentalists alike, demands which make it one of the most challenging works in the repertoire.

Bach created the B Minor Mass by bringing together numerous works which he had written earlier in his life, and then substantially recomposing many of them for this new purpose. In line with several of his other great works from his last years, it seems quite possible that he composed and assembled the Mass as a kind of textbook or anthology of the many stylistic possibilities for accompanied voices in the late Baroque era. With such a checkered ancestry, it's remarkable that the Mass has such remarkable unity-in-diversity, the music flowing forward with clear purpose and momentum through each of the liturgy's five main sections. 

 

The key designation of "B minor" refers (as with Bach's short masses) only to the key in which the music begins -- that is, the key of the opening Kyrie eleison. From the first notes of the Gloria onward, with the appearance of the natural trumpets in D, the key of D major becomes the centre of gravity around which the remainder of the work revolves.

 

For this performance, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir's Music Director, Jean-Sébastien Vallée chose to feature ten voices from within the Choir's professional core, the Toronto Mendelssohn Singers, as soloists in the various solo and duo numbers.  

While all ten did fine work, special praise is due to counter-tenor Simon Honeyman who sang three of the five numbers allotted to the alto/mezzo-soprano with crystal-clear articulation in the rapid passagework and a real sense of feeling above all in the penultimate Agnus Dei. Also particularly remarkable was the unanimity of style between Honeyman and soprano Sinéad White in their joyful Christe eleison. Due for special praise was Rebecca Claborn's beautifully shaped and phrased Laudamus te.

Above all, the Mass in B Minor stands or falls by the work of the chorus. Scholars have substantially concluded that Bach meant the music to be sung with one voice to a part, and many experts sneer at the idea of a chorus of one hundred as we heard on this occasion.

The Choir's splendid clarity in the interwoven polyphonic lines could well give those scholars pause. The very opening Kyrie eleison displayed absolute clarity of texture, permitting the hearer to follow any one line out of the polyphonic texture with no difficulty. 

The Choir went on from strength to strength throughout the performance, from the lively, enthusiastic In gloria Dei patris to the formally shaped Gregorian chant lines of the Credo in unum Deum, and from the mysterious depths of the Qui tollis and Et incarnatus est to the joyful exuberance, even exhilaration, of the Et resurrexit and Osanna.

 

More than any other moments, the Choir reached the heights of their performance in the grave majesty of the Sanctus and the Dona nobis pacem.

 

With a decent-sized but not overlarge orchestra playing on authentic instruments, the audience was able to hear Bach's instrumental lines much as the composer would have heard them, particularly true of the D trumpets, the natural horn in the Quoniam, and the duet of two wooden transverse flutes. Matthew Larkin's playing on the chamber organ, the sole keyboard continuo instrument, created a secure underpinning for the entire performance.

Music Director Jean-Sébastien Vallée shaped the performance with care, avoiding interpretive excesses and stressing above all the unity of style from movement to movement. In that opening Kyrie, he had directed the Choir to a specially clear articulation of the lines, and his sparing use of that device throughout the evening always heightened the audibility of the parts without spilling over the edge. He also avoided excessively loud fortes and soft pianos in perfect keeping with Baroque-appropriate style. 

With all of these careful touches and many more, Vallée brought the entire world of the B Minor Mass to vivid life. The ecstasies, the meditations, the sorrows, the joys, and the overwhelming majesty were all there, and rightly so. 

The capacity audience in Koerner Hall were moved to sustained cheering at the concluding standing ovation. And no wonder -- this was, in every way, the finest B Minor Mass I have ever heard in a live performance.

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Following that memorable concert on Tuesday night, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir released news about the upcoming 2023-2024 season on Wednesday morning. The programme combines established masterworks with commissioned new work and innovative programming concepts. Two of the concerts will be performed by the Mendelssohn Singers, the professional chamber choir which forms the core of the larger Mendelssohn Choir.

The season brings such established favourites as Orff's Carmina Burana and Verdi's Requiem, and less well-known works by Brahms (Schicksalslied), Handel (Dixit Dominus), Bach (Christ lag in Todesbanden), together with music by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Clara Schumann and commissioned work from Composer in Residence Tracy Wong. A new arrangement of Schubert's song cycle Winterreise for soloist, piano, and choir, will feature baritone Brett Polegato. The favourite Festival of Carols will launch the Christmas season, and the annual collaboration with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in Handel's Messiah will be another not-to-miss highlight.

For full details, here's the link to the new season information on the Choir's website:

Toronto Mendelssohn Choir 2023-2024

 

 

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A Personal Note on my Experiences With the B MInor Mass

 

In my lifetime, I have only heard the Mass in B Minor performed live four times. Indeed, I probably shouldn't count the first one since I was singing for my first and only season in the Mendelssohn Choir in February of 1978, just a slight 55 years ago! I vividly remember the intensive rehearsing, with the choir and at home, trying to master Bach's vocal lines -- which have a knack of going to the most unexpected but absolutely logical places. Worlds apart from Handel, whose lines are much easier to sing because they don't play those kinds of tricks on you! Even after all these years, I can still pick out and recognize those tricky spots every time I hear the music in recordings, or live, as last night.

 

I heard the work again in the late 1980s, at the Carmel Bach Festival in California. At that time, the Carmel Festival was still using a 1950ish style of performing, heavy, ponderous, and stately, which made for a reverent but not totally exciting performance.

The third time was with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, quite a few years back (early 2000s?) at St. James Cathedral in Toronto. Much as I loved the Cathedral as a building and still do, it proved to be a far from ideal venue for large forces, the sound hovering between washy and muddy. Sadly, that venue was not kind to the Choir's undoubted skills.

Last night though, in Koerner Hall, I heard as fine a Mass in B Minor as I could possibly want, sung and played with skill, precision, and passion, directed with great insight, and blessed with a well-nigh perfect acoustic for a performance on this scale. A joy to any lover of Baroque choral music!

National Ballet of Canada 2022-2023 # 2: The Energy In the Mix

While the larger audiences flock to the established classics of story ballet, there's no denying that an artistic director's imprint on a ballet company is far more visible through the modern dance works, the commissions, and especially the mixed programmes of shorter ballets.

 

For this reason, I have been especially eager to see the first mixed programmes of Hope Muir's tenure as artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada.

 

Sadly, I had to miss the first one in November as I was out of the country, so this week I have finally gotten a chance to experience her touch in person.

 

This month's mixed programme marries one established classic of the National Ballet's repertoire with two premieres, one of them a world premiere of a commissioned work. Both choreographers of these new pieces are being introduced to National Ballet audiences for the first time. 

First, though, the established classic, which also led off the programme. George Balanchine's 1947 work Symphony in C, set to the sole symphony composed by Georges Bizet. It's always puzzled me a bit that some commentators refer to the "icy" quality of this work, because it's never struck me that way. Brilliant it certainly is, but I don't find it at all cold. It winds up to the most spectacular grand finale of any ballet I've ever seen, with over fifty dancers on the stage all at once in the final moment.

 

The National Ballet has a long and fruitful record of staging many major Balanchine works, largely thanks to their long-standing thirty-plus years relationship with legendary Balanchine répetiteur Joysanne Sidimus. Generations of the company's dancers have benefited from her insights into Balanchine's  unique and distinctive style, to say nothing of her ongoing concern for the artists' well-being. Sadly, this show marked her final engagement before retiring. I know her work will be missed.

 

As for the performance, the Symphony in C requires a lead couple and subsidiary couples in each of the work's four movements, but the work of the corps de ballet is also critical to the piece's success, and with the diverse casting of those lead and subsidiary couples all around, it can quite fairly be regarded as a "company piece" -- certainly not just a vehicle for a couple of principal dancers.

 

Balanchine made extensive use of symmetry as an element of the choreography here, at every level ranging from the precise degree to which hands are turned up or arms lifted all the way to entire symmetrical stage pictures. All of the company did themselves proud on this occasion by nailing all these aspects of required symmetry to virtual perfection, while still dancing with plenty of energy in the outer movements and a lovely lyrical sense of flow in the second slow movement. The hurtling bodies of the high-speed scherzo still maintained an absolute sense of control, even in Balanchine's most fiendish moments of complex footwork. A treasurable performance.

 

One final note about Symphony in C: with this run of performances, the National Ballet became the first dance company ever to present this work with the dancers wearing flesh-toned tights matched to their individual skin tones. Balanchine's work is closely hedged around with copyrights and legal protections, and this switch from the original pure white tights was remarkable even more because the copyright holders permitted it than because the National Ballet wanted to do it. By the way, the effect is almost unnoticeable, certainly unremarkable, in performance -- unless you are specifically looking for it. Baby steps? Perhaps -- but small changes can have large impacts on the individuals involved.

 

After the first intermission, we moved on to Rena Butler's Alleged Dances, a work commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada, here receiving its world premiere.

 

Where so much of contemporary dance can seem angular and very unlovely at times, what struck me more than anything about Butler's vision here was the fluidity of the movement, the frequent use of curved positions, of smooth flowing movements, with more continuous movement overall and less moments of stasis than in many contemporary works. It would be possible to trace many different artistic currents flowing through different moments in Alleged Dances, but I think that kind of blow-by-blow analysis would diminish the overall impact of the work as a whole. 

 

I wish I could say the same for the music. Fruitful it may have been for Butler in stimulating her dance-making, but I found John Adams' music in John's Book of Alleged Dances to be among the more sterile examples of so-called minimalism in music that I've heard. I have nothing but praise for the work of the onstage string quartet, or the smoothness with which their playing melded with the pre-recorded track played on the sound system, but a little bit of Adams' music goes a very long way with me.

 

There were two curious (or perhaps not so surprising) overlaps between Butler's work and the final piece on the programme, David Dawson's Anima Animus. Both used musical scores stemming from the realm of minimalism. Both shows were costumed in effectively gender-free costuming by using plain leotards with solid-colour sections of varying shapes applied over the neutral-toned base -- brilliant red in Alleged Dances and stark black or white in Anima Animus. The effect in both cases was the same, although the means used were different; gender basically vanished as an element of the show, leaving a core fluidity of humanity to come through more clearly.

The contrasts of white and black in Dawson's work gave strong connection to his theme of working within the duality proposed by Carl Jung, of the anima as the feminine element in the masculine soul, and the animus as the masculine element in the feminine soul. In dance terms, this meant that the choreographer worked with a strong dose of classical technique, but having the male dancers in key moments performing movements normally performed by female dancers, while the women performed movements more usually reserved for the male dancers. It was a fascinating piece for me, but also a bit frustrating, as I found it hard to get beyond trying to parse all the gender shifts that were going on. A second viewing would be helpful to allow me to focus on other elements of this complex, multi-layered work. 

I'd be more than happy to see either Alleged Dances or Anima/Animus restaged in the future, and certainly glad to see more work from either or both of these choreographers.

In closing, a shout-out to the busiest performer of the entire show. The performance started with all the high-speed and high-energy cascades and notes in the string parts of Bizet's symphony. I hope the orchestra was led by someone else for that, but I don't know. Then, this busy musician had to lead the quartet in the equally energetic music of John Adams for Rena Butler's half-hour work. And finally, he was faced with the dizzying acrobatics of the solo violin part in Ezio Bosso's Violin Concerto No. 1, EsoConcerto for Dawson's Anima/Animus. This 2017 work included seemingly endless roulades and ostinato passages, along with lengthy stretches set in the high harmonics -- among other challenges. So, a definite shout-out is in order for the National Ballet Orchestra's Concertmaster, Aaron Schwebel, and the huge roar of cheering for him when he appeared at the curtain call was surely no more than was his due.

Hope Muir has certainly moved the National Ballet into new territory with this programme, and I look forward to more of her choices of repertoire in future seasons.