MUSIC REVIEW
First-class flight from Spectrum Singers
By Richard Buell, Globe Correspondent, 06/02/98
CAMBRIDGE - No dumbing down from these folks. With this concert the Spectrum Singers were paying their audience the ultimate compliment. They took it for granted that that audience had come to listen - really listen. Not all benefit concerts are like that.
The proceeds, in this instance, went to the Hospice of Cambridge, and in return listeners got to make the acquaintance (or deepen it) of some really first-class Haydn and Stravinsky. In certain places the Stravinsky Octet (1922) was actually, would you believe, dissonant. And the two major works - the Stravinsky Mass (1948) and Haydn's ''Harmoniemesse'' (1792) - violated yet another taboo: They called for voices.
John Ehrlich's Spectrum Singers wouldn't know how to give an indifferent performance if they tried. And that was true, too, of the guest performers, most of them familiar to readers of these pages.
This got demonstrated nicely in the ''Harmoniemesse,'' which is typical of Haydn's approach to the Mass - it affirms life. Thinking about God, he once said, always made him cheerful. The 1802 ''Harmoniemesse,'' one of his late pieces, goes even further; something about it surprises performers, who find themselves in a rather different performance from the one they started out in. That's what happened when the Handel and Haydn Society did it recently, and that's what happened Saturday night. Luellen Best (soprano), Gloria Raymond (mezzo), William Hite (tenor), and Mark Risinger (bass) were the featured soloists. At the end the chorus was practically in fighting trim.
If they - the chorus - or the listener was surprised, it's because the warm, the lyrical, the curvaceous, has often seemed what they were best at. This, it has to be said, counted as a something of a demerit in the Stravinsky Mass (1948), where the vocal sonorities were markedly more Congregational than Russian Orthodox - which sound (according to Robert Craft) this composer always had in his head when he was writing for chorus.
In the instruments-only part of the program, Paul Perfetti brought a big tone but a wieldy technique to the Haydn Trumpet Concerto. The wind virtuosi assigned to the Stravinsky Octet were appropriately crisp about it, even if the First Congregational's diffuse acoustics seemed to have something else in mind.
This story ran on page E05 of the Boston Globe on 06/02/98.
© Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
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