Revivifying Liturgical Gems

Liturgical reconstructions usually do not make for successful concerts. So it has been a relief to see this trend in early music performance diminish over the past two decades. The main problems, as performers learned through experience, are length and entertainment value. Polyphonic music was often reserved for the most important feasts of the year, which could last an ungodly number of hours. People who enjoy hearing early music live already spend a lot of time in churches, whether they like it or not. Nor should liturgy be equated with musical entertainment. A concert is a concert, and a religious service should remain as such. Among my own collection of recordings, liturgical reconstructions involve lots of skipping over tedious bits spoken in foreign languages. Something sizable is lost in the translation from cathedral to living room, and recordings never seem able to make up the difference.

I say all this for two reasons. The first is that I think the world of Magnificat, although I did not much like the idea for the concert it programmed this past weekend, which I heard on Saturday at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Berkeley: a reconstructed performance of the 1607 Mass for the Rededication of St. Gertrude’s Chapel in Hamburg. The second is that I should never lose faith in Magnificat, because the concert was exceptional in every respect, liturgical reconstruction and all. A service rededicating a chapel in Hamburg is not on par, say, with the coronation of a doge (to name one recording that springs to mind), either in length or in pompous display. At the same time, it is clear that Hamburg’s Lutheran population enjoyed the same high quality of music that could be heard on the finest of occasions at San Marco in Venice. I do not know a more marvelous composer of polychoral motets — or of motets in general — than Jacob Handl, rightfully famous in the early modern world as the “German Palestrina” yet woefully underheard today (where is Hans Pfitzner when you finally need him?). Joined by the Whole Noyse and the Sex Chordæ Consort of Viols, Magnificat presented choral antiphony with instruments as it was practiced at the time. For Handl’s three-choir motet Cantate Domino, one choir of singers was placed opposite another choir of sopranos and winds, while the organ constituted the third choir alone. The performers divided into similarly unequal groups for Hieronymus Praetorius’ four-choir Herr Gott dich loben wir. When an organ constitutes one entire choir in a choral matrix, words can be lost, as they were in this piece. Nonetheless, this is how Hamburg’s Lutherans could well have heard such music, so Magnificat’s choral divisions were justified.

Swirling Sonic Effects

The Praetorius was a breathtaking work, exhibiting all the magic of polychoral music. Like Handl, Praetorius employed interlocking choirs, echo effects through spatial dispersion of the choirs, and the harmonic interplay of “incomplete” choirs. Polychoral music often has qualities we associate with 20th-century minimalism. One way to put 16 simultaneous polyphonic voices together is to have the choirs sustain a single modal sonority, which, over time, becomes a swirling wash of layered sound. Praetorius did not disappoint in this regard, and Magnificat pulled it off with confidence and verve. This motet marked the climax of a program conceived as having a sort of narrative arc. It can be difficult to work your way through an entire evening of motets alone. Motets should not be presented in such a manner if you want to hear them at their most glorious advantage. Small threads of plainchant beautifully sung by Martin Hummel were an excellent way to pass through the Epistle, Gospel, and other staples of a 17th-century Lutheran service. Organ preludes played by Rodney Gehrke added more color, while conductor Warren Stewart engaged the audience in two congregational chorales (with a brief rehearsal at the start of the concert). The overall effect was one of tasteful moderation. Nothing was too long so as to take away from the performance as a whole, nor did everything add up to much more than an hour and a half. The program notes, written by Frederick Gable, were outstanding, including a translation of the original German description of the ceremony and an image of the chapel before its destruction by fire in the mid-19th century. St. Gertrude’s was built in the form of an octagon with side wings and a nave, an ideal space for choral antiphony. In such a church, choirs could be elevated and positioned to surround the listeners on all four sides. If only Magnificat could have done the same. Unfortunately, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church is not an ideal space, given that two choirs would have been relegated to the side aisles. The choirs sang around the crossing instead, and thus minimized the antiphonal effects, from the audience’s perspective. On the other hand, had the choirs been deployed on all sides of the church, Stewart would have been faced with the immense challenge of keeping everyone together. In light of these circumstances, I believe that Magnificat’s decision to present a superior performance without the perils of choral dispersion was, as for everything else about the evening, the right one.