Whatever may be happening in the country’s musical life, choral singing and volunteer music-making persists thanks to some 500 organizations in the Bay Area and more than 50 million community chorale members in 270,000 choruses nationwide.
Among them, approaching its 60th anniversary, the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra (BCCO) continues its remarkable mission of accepting singers without audition, presenting all its concerts for free, touring abroad, and performing unusual and demanding works — for example, Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky Cantata, and Felix Mendelssohn’s St. Paul oratorio.
The group’s next concerts, June 7–9 at UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall, fit well into that pattern, with a program of Ernest Bloch’s Avodat Hakodesh (Sacred service) — composed and premiered in the 1930s — and Maurice Duruflé’s 1947 Requiem. The soloists are contralto Sara Couden and baritone Simon Barrad.
BCCO Music Director Ming Luke says of the program:
“These are both special works that look forward and backward at the same time. The Duruflé Requiem sets medieval Gregorian chant in a gorgeous, fluid, modern orchestration of the Requiem mass, while the Bloch brings the Jewish liturgy into an oratorio and concert setting for audiences beyond its Jewish origins.
“The vocal lines are beautifully set, whether the gentle undulations of the chant in the Duruflé or the vibrant setting of the text by Bloch, each phrase vivid and energized by Bloch’s writing — powerful and beautiful works.”
Bloch’s decades-long career in the Bay Area — at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and UC Berkeley — included the creation of the Sacred Service, commissioned by Temple Emanu-El in 1929, a time when Reform Judaism was on the rise.
Bloch’s piece follows the text of the Jewish Sabbath service but puts that text into a modern orchestral arrangement meant to be heard in the concert hall as well as in a Sabbath service.
The work is described by the Milken Archive as “the first successful and most enduring exploration of the Hebrew liturgy for serious artistic possibilities and universal applications. In equal measure, it is a virtual oratorio based on the Sabbath liturgy and a musically sophisticated service for practical use in the context of the aesthetic format of Reform worship that once prevailed in America — a confluence of high art and Jewish sacred music.”
The score being used by BCCO was prepared by violist and Bloch scholar David L. Sills, who says Bloch didn’t know any Hebrew when he started working on the composition but, after studying the language for three years, set the piece in Hebrew. However, at every performance, Bloch wanted one part spoken by the celebrant in the last movement to be in the language of the country in which the work was being presented. He provided English, French, and Italian versions.
The English reads in part: “May the day come when all men shall invoke thy Name, when corruption and evil shall give way to purity and goodness. … O may all men recognize that they are brethren, so that one in spirit and one in fellowship they may be forever united.”
The work uses a Hasidic scale, which, Luke says, gives the music a haunting “Jewish” quality. An article from the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington describes the scale as “common in many musical cultures: in Arabic and Ottoman music, North and South Indian classical music, Iranian music, Spanish music, and more. The Yiddish name for it is Freygish, the Hebrew name is Ahava Rabbah, and Western music theory labels include ‘Phrygian Dominant’ [and] ‘Harmonic Minor Mode 5.’”
Both works on BCCO’s program have ancient musical roots — the chanting, or cantillation, of Hebrew prayers originated during the Babylonian exile (after 586 B.C.E.), and Duruflé’s Requiem refers back to medieval chants but also puts the lines in a modern context.
Duruflé wrote of his piece: “My Requiem is entirely constructed on Gregorian themes from the Mass for the dead. At times the text is uppermost in importance, and therefore the orchestra is there to support or provide a commentary on the meaning of the words. At other times an original musical backdrop, inspired by the text, takes center stage.”
The creation of Duruflé’s Requiem goes back to World War II, when France’s Nazi-collaborating Vichy government offered commissions to some prominent French composers. Duruflé accepted a commission to compose a symphonic poem, but as was the case throughout his life, self-doubt and debilitating perfectionism caused him to make extremely slow progress.
Eventually, he abandoned the idea of a symphonic poem and turned his attention to writing a requiem Mass. He was still at work on it in 1944, when the Vichy regime collapsed, soon to be followed by France’s liberation. Three years later, Duruflé completed his Opus 7.
At the heart of the Requiem’s musical language is plainsong, specifically the medieval melodies from the Mass for the dead. Duruflé retained the fluid, elastic approach to rhythm that is characteristic of chant, with its constantly fluctuating groupings of twos and threes.
“This Requiem is not an ethereal work singing of detachment from human concerns,” Duruflé wrote. “In the unchanging form of Christian prayer, it reflects the anguish of humanity faced with the mystery of its final end.”
