Critical Acclaim
Transcendental Etudes
By Harold Rolnick
ConcertoNet.com
July 19, 2010
(From a longer review of the July 19, 2010 Lincoln Center Festival program, Varèse: (R)evolution. Click here to read the review in its entirety.)
Analogous to this was the Etude pour Espace, never finished by Varèse, but here re-orchestrated with choir and soprano, by Chou Wen-chung, who was in the audience. This was the first time I had heard the music, and again I had to revel. Not so much in Varèse’s orchestration as the Musica Sacra choir. Whether he meant to or not, much of the vocal music reflected 14th Century Burgundian church music: the major-fifth harmonies, and the unison lines with trombones resonating like choirs in Notre-Dame or Chartres. I could not believe how Varèse (or Mr. Chou) could bring together the most advanced composer of the 20th Century seamlessly with that of the earliest Church music.
Reigning for Ever and Ever, Gloriously
By Anthony Tommasini
The New York Times
December 23, 2009
We are in the midst of the holiday season, which means ubiquitous performances of Handel’s “Messiah” in New York and beyond. Some pieces suffer the burden of their popularity badly. Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” tops my list of such works.
But Handel’s “Messiah” bears its overexposure amazingly well. Even in routine performances, the piece gives audiences pleasure. When presented with musical skill and stylistic insight, as it was on Monday night at Carnegie Hall by the Musica Sacra Chorus and Orchestra, the “Messiah,” for all its familiarity, emerges once again as a work of utter distinction.
The concert, the first of two on consecutive nights, was led by the eminent choral music conductor Kent Tritle, who became music director of Musica Sacra last year when its beloved founder, Richard Westenburg, died. Mr. Tritle has repeatedly demonstrated that there is no one way to perform the “Messiah.” As director of the Oratorio Society of New York, an ensemble of some 200 dedicated avocational singers, Mr. Tritle had conducted the “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall just a week earlier, the society’s 136th annual performance.
On Monday, with the select 32 members of the Musica Sacra chorus and a chamber orchestra of experienced players, Mr. Tritle conducted an impressively transparent and vibrant “Messiah.” He has worked extensively in the early-music movement. Yet there was no interpretive agenda evident here. The tempos tended to be fleet and the textures clear. But from the first phrases of the orchestral sinfonia that begins the piece, played with crisp but unexaggerated articulation of the dotted-note rhythms, the music-making was beguilingly natural.
The choristers sang with full-bodied and admirably unforced sound. The robust basses never bellowed. The radiant sopranos sang effortlessly when lines soared above the staff — for example, the joyous “And the glory of the Lord.” In the extended choruses when Handel conveys the drama of the narrative through complex contrapuntal writing, like the fraught “Let us break their bonds asunder,” the choristers deftly dispatched the intricate vocal lines, thick with 16th-note passagework and leaping intervals.
Mr. Tritle had four strong vocal soloists. Though the soprano Julianne Baird sometimes sounded tight in her upper register, she is an admired exponent of early music and sang with focused sound and grace. The lyric tenor William Ferguson combined tenderness and appealing impetuosity in his arias. During the exuberant “Trumpet shall sound,” the stentorian bass Kevin Deas sang the repeated “the dead shall be raised incorruptible” and “we shall be changed” with such prophetic vigor that the prospect seemed almost terrifying.
And Anthony Roth Costanzo, a young countertenor who sang the alto arias, had a great night and won a big ovation. His sweet voice carried well. He sang the words clearly and was unfazed by ornate passagework. He is an artist of promise.
Following tradition, almost everyone in the audience that packed the hall stood up during the “Hallelujah” chorus. It amused me that quite a few people who stood with such participatory zeal during this chorus, which ends Part 2, headed for the exits before Part 3. The “Messiah” is a long piece. But for most of the audience, including me, the time sped by during Musica Sacra’s exceptional performance.
A Decisive Bach Moment, Delivered With Drama
By JAMES R. OESTREICH
The New York Times
October 25, 2008
A crucial moment in Bach’s “St. John Passion,” toward the end of Part 1, has been made more vital in recent years by charges of anti-Semitism against John, if not Bach. Were the Jews to blame for the murder of Jesus, as some of John’s words seem to suggest?
“Who has struck you so, my Salvation, and beat you up so badly,” asks the first verse of a Lutheran chorale, in a translation by Michael Marissen, the author of the book “Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism and Bach’s ‘St. John Passion.’ ” The second answers, “I, I and my sins, which are as the grains of sand on the seashore.”
And the moment was stunning in Kent Tritle’s performance of the Passion with Musica Sacra at the Rose Theater on Wednesday evening. Mr. Tritle, who became music director of this venerable institution after the death of its founder, Richard Westenburg, in February, has carried on Mr. Westenburg’s recent practice of supplementing the 32-voice Musica Sacra Chorus in the chorales with a chorale choir, here 155 additional voices surrounding the stage in the first balcony and circling the auditorium in the second. The effect was to pull the audience into the performance, though still leaving it a step short of singing along, as a congregation would have in Bach’s time.
Mr. Tritle let the massed chorus sing out in the first verse but pulled it back sharply in the second, as if in sudden, dumbstruck recognition of the real source of the guilt: “I, I and my sins.” Here was eloquent support of Mr. Marissen’s arguments absolving Bach of those charges, if not, entirely, John.
But neither was John a patsy here. In fact, Rufus Müller, born in Kent, England, and described on his Web site, rufusmuller.com, as a British-German tenor, gave the strongest theatrical performance of a Bach Evangelist that I have encountered, and one of the most musical. That he sang the long, taxing and tortuous role without a score was itself remarkable, the more so since he undoubtedly has the Evangelist role of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” similar and yet subtly different, banging around in his head too.
A fleeting slip was a small price to pay for a feat of memory that gave Mr. Müller unusual freedom to engage the audience fully as well as the other characters onstage. He seemed almost as much in command of the proceedings as Mr. Tritle was, and their partnership was utterly compelling.
Among the other vocal soloists, the lower voices were the standouts. Matt Boehler’s performance as Jesus conveyed full measures of affronted innocence and wounded dignity, if not the ultimate in warmth. That was provided by Tyler Duncan in the bass Arioso, “Betrachte, meine Seel” (“Ponder, my soul”). He was also fine as Pilate and in the other bass numbers; he could not quite muster the depth and agility needed for the aria “Eilt, ihr angefochtnen Seele” (“Hurry, you besieged souls”), but then, few can.
Mr. Tritle gave the excellent Musica Sacra Chorus full and exciting scope, notwithstanding current arguments in favor of minimalist Bach choruses. The group has obviously landed in expert hands, and if Mr. Tritle can bring the Music Sacra Orchestra to a similar level, the organization will have a new lease on life.
Musica Sacra’s next performances, of Handel’s “Messiah,” are on Dec. 22 and 23 at Carnegie Hall; (212) 247-7800, musicasacrany.com.
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For a Beloved Conductor, Bach’s Monument of Music
By Anthony Tommasini
The New York Times
April 10, 2008
In the months before his death in February, at 75, the renowned choral conductor Richard Westenburg, who founded the estimable Musica Sacra Chorus and Orchestra in 1964, was still hoping to conduct the performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor that took place on Tuesday night at Carnegie Hall. Though grappling with colon cancer, Mr. Westenburg kept playing through the score from beginning to end in his mind, as Kent Tritle, Mr. Westenburg’s former student, close colleague and handpicked successor as music director of Musica Sacra, wrote in a program note.
It fell to Mr. Tritle to conduct the ensemble in Bach’s monumental Mass on Tuesday. The performance was dedicated to the memory of Mr. Westenburg. As an additional tribute, the insightful program notes that Mr. Westenburg wrote for his last performance of the Mass with Musica Sacra in 2001 were reprinted in the program booklet.
As Mr. Westenburg explains in the essay, during the last decade of his life Bach “brought together his only complete setting of the text of the Mass.” There is no evidence that the Mass was performed complete during Bach’s lifetime, he adds. But the insight most salient to the performance was Mr. Westenburg’s call for musicians today to find a balance of historical knowledge, intuition and practicality in presenting this astounding score. Like Mr. Westenburg, Mr. Tritle, best known as the director of music ministries at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, balances informed knowledge of the history and performance practices of the Baroque era with savvy practicality.
With a roster of 41 choristers and 27 orchestra players, Mr. Tritle set the tone for this reverent, vibrantly realized performance of Bach’s daunting score in the first Kyrie chorus. Often conductors cannot resist milking the anguished opening chords for maximum impact. Here, true to the text (“Lord, have mercy upon us”), the music came across as a full-voiced, respectful and slightly hesitant plea. That attitude of poignant urgency was maintained as the complex movement continued. It was not from amassed volume, but through the steady pileup of contrapuntal voices in the climax of the Kyrie that the power of the prayerful music registered. Surely hearing the sheer multiplicity of voices, the good Lord would have to heed this soulful plea.
Throughout the performance here were excellent, well-rehearsed and self-effacing musicians presenting one of the monuments of music. Though the Gloria swept by in a joyous triple meter, the chorus and orchestra played with articulate clarity. During the animated “Cum Sancto Spiritu” chorus that concludes the Gloria, the spiraling lines of elaborate 16th-note passage work sounded like large swaths of shifting, pulsating, almost Impressionistic harmonies.
The vocal soloists did honorable work in the arias: the soprano Jamet Pittman, the countertenor Michael Chance, the tenor Jonathan Goodman and the bass Kevin Deas.
Mr. Westenburg would surely have been pleased.
Click here to read the original article at www.nytimes.com
With Vigor Once Again, Only a Little Bit Different
By Allan Kozinn
The New York Times
December 21, 2007
If you walked past Carnegie Hall early this week, you would have seen posters announcing performances of Handel’s “Messiah” on either side of the main entrance. One advertised the annual reading by the Oratorio Society of New York, on Tuesday evening. The other was for the version by the highly regarded Musica Sacra on Wednesday and Friday. Both listed the same conductor, Kent Tritle.
For the Oratorio Society, which Mr. Tritle has directed since 2006, that was always the plan. But Musica Sacra was to have been led by Richard Westenburg, who founded it nearly 40 years ago. When Mr. Westenburg withdrew because of illness, the group turned to Mr. Tritle, its associate conductor. (He also directs Sacred Music in a Sacred Space at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, where he led performances of “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” last weekend.)
It would be silly to suggest that Mr. Tritle’s stint as Mr. Westenburg’s deputy included conducting “Messiah” as Mr. Westenburg would have. Yet Mr. Westenburg’s influence was clear in Mr. Tritle’s preference for brisk but fluid tempos and transparent textures. The textures, in any case, are largely Mr. Westenburg’s creation. With a taste for the robust, grandly scaled “Messiah” performances of an earlier time, but also with an ear cocked in the direction of the early-music world and its discoveries, he made Musica Sacra a relatively compact group, with 34 singers and 27 instrumentalists.
The group can produce enormous power, but it did so sparingly on Wednesday: in the “Hallelujah” chorus, for example, and at the start of “Worthy Is the Lamb.” But its real drawing card is its focused, trim sound, which puts the choral texts consistently in high relief and keeps Handel’s vivid, painterly orchestration – the flames of the refiner’s fire, the raging of the nations – equally lithe.
Mr. Tritle’s most interesting interpretive touches included expanding the contrast between the ebullient first line of “Glory to God” and the calm rejoinder, “and peace on earth,” and having several of the choruses – “He Trusted in God” and “Lift Up Your Heads,” for example – rendered with crisp, almost clipped articulation.
The soloists provided a few surprises as well. In “Comfort Ye,” instead of filling in sustained notes with modest embellishments, as most tenors do, Rufus Müller simply varied the dynamics, first building to a fortissimo, then pulling back to almost a whisper. It was an unusual but striking approach. He used flexible dynamics elsewhere too, though not usually in place of ornamentation. He also brought an appealing, centered timbre to the tenor arias.
Leslie Fagan was more adventurous in her embellishments and took a few risks as well, soaring fleetingly into an upper range where she was slightly underpowered. Mostly, though, she gave “How Beautiful Are the Feet of Them” and “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” with the dignified grace they require.
Ian Howell, the countertenor (filling in for David Walker, who was ill), has a lovely sound that grew in strength and confidence through the evening. The bass-baritone, Benjamin Clements, has an attractively light timbre but an unfortunate tendency to swallow the text. And Dominic Derasse gave a zesty reading of the solo trumpet line in “The Trumpet Shall Sound.”
A ‘Messiah’ With Silvery Sopranos, Flowing Lines and No Bombast
By ANNE MIDGETTE
The New York Times
December 23, 2006
You could say that the stylistic measureof Handel’s “Messiah” lies in one of its soloists: the contralto. Inthe early 20th century the part was the province of doughty dames like ClaraButtor Ernestine Schumann-Heink, well-upholstered figures with stentorianvoices. At Musica Sacra’s ‘Messiah’ on Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, it was taken by Ryland Angel, a countertenor with the voice of a grown British choirboy,light and sweet and angelically clarion, and ever so slightly mischievous.
This sound quality set the tone for aperformance that was as light and bright and dry as Champagne. Richard Westenburg, the group’s music director, brought a lithe reading characterizedby silvery sopranos, flowing lines and no bombast at all, even when timpani andtrumpets (fine work here by Raymond Mase) came into play. The booming bassphrase “And peace on earth” in the chorus “Glory to God”was simply melodic, not hammered.
The entrance of the soprano soloist,Judith Pannill, in “He shall feed his flock” was a smoothcontinuation of the countertenor’s line, rather than evoking, as it so oftendoes, a game of poker. (“I’ll see your line, and raise it.”) Even the”Hallelujah” chorus was springy and light, as Mr. Westenburg movedbouncily around the stage, wearing evening clothes, a red carnation and blacksneakers.
The chorus, 34 members strong, sang withcrisp nuance, and struck such a balance with the other singers that it seemedlike a fifth and strong soloist. Of the others, Ms. Pannill had a prettyribbon-candy voice, small and sweet and bright, that she couldn’t alwayssustain; the tenor, William Hite, used his light instrument wisely; and theydid not try to force their voices to be more than they were. Richard Zeller,the baritone, exuded a warm fog of sound. As for the contralto: I have always hada personal preference for using a woman for this part. But Mr. Angel showed that casting a countertenor can make sense.
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“Musica Sacra…just this side of perfection” The New York Times
“This chorus is easily the best in this city if not in the country…” The New York Daily News
“The composer could not have asked for a more elegant performance.” The New York Post
“Musica Sacra’s last concert was all gold” The Village Voice
“. . . Mr. Westenburg clearly paid attention to the sense of the words: the ways, for example in which the incarnation and crucifixion are portrayed in sound. He also relished the contrasts provided by a full-scale chorus and the use of trumpets; there were times when there was an exuberant thrill to the sound. . . . . And by the end of the [B Minor] Mass there was no question that something was being said with conviction and faith. That can make a greater difference than almost any performance practice.” The New York Times
“Westenburg is one of the great choral conductors of our time. His Musica Sacra singers are outstanding, every word not only understood but crafted.” The Star-Ledger
“Conceivably [Bach's St. Matthew Passion] has the most thrilling opera libretto ever written, and Westenburg’s forces performed with all the drama that could be wrung from it. The orchestra and the choral singing. . . were technically flawless, often incredibly wide-ranging in tone and almost demonically inspired.” The New York Daily News
“The Musica Sacra Chorus, twenty-four strong, met the challenge. It is an expert body. Its tuning was impeccable. The harmonies sounded without fuzz. Words were clear, rhythms precise.” The New Yorker
“Endearingly, Richard Westenburg’s annual presentation of Handel’s `Messiah’ with the Musica Sacra Chorus and Orchestra appears to resist the dead hand of routine….The interpretation seemed freshly imagined: lively, spontaneous and often unpredictable…” The New York Times
“It’s a joy to hear the Musica Sacra chorus…it’s a sound that could change one’s perception of choral singing forever.” The Record
“…it’s no secret now that every member of Musica Sacra, whether singer or instrumentalist, is a first-desk performer. The chorus is easily the best in this city if not in the country, while every member of the orchestra is a virtuoso player.” The New York Daily News
“There are period-instrument ensembles and choruses that favor fleet tempos, crisp rhythms and light textures; and modern-instrument ensembles that value full-bodied choral sound and richer orchestral textures. Richard Westenburg’s performance . . . combined the best aspects of both approaches. His work was informed by qualities that are prized in period-instrument groups. The orchestral playing was lithe, articulate and rhythmically incisive. The modest-sized chorus (35 singers) kept the contrapuntal textures clear; yet the choral sound was resonant and unforced. . . At the same time, in the manner of modern-instrument interpretations going back to Thomas Beecham, Mr. Westenburg conducted a spacious, richly textured performance.” The New York Times
“Mr. Westenburg’s highly professional ensemble performed the complex program with precision. [His] approach incorporated modern means in search of an older style. The famous [Christ lag in Todesbanden] elaborations were as beautiful as ever.” The New York Times
“Nothing was bland; the composers were Hildegard von Bingen, Meredith Monk, and Libby Larsen. . . I found it [Hildegard] chantingly beautiful, directly emotional in swift responses to text and shrewdly spaced for antiphonals. Six pieces demonstrated the superb tone, balance, and diction of Westenburg’s 16 choristers. . . Musica Sacra’s last concert, June 15, was all gold. Gregorio Allegri. . . was richly served with a dramatically performed Miserere. . . Magnificent performances of masterpieces by Monteverdi and Bach, including the latter’s Christ lag cantata, completed the concert.” The Village Voice