Masters of the Lyric and Profound
Benjamin Britten and Maurice Duruflé
Saturday, May 20, 2000 at 8:00 pm.
Church of the Advent, 30 Brimmer Street, Boston
Benjamin Britten
Hymn to St. Cecilia, Cantata Misericordium
Maurice Duruflé
Requiem
Program Notes Texts and Translations Performing Artists
Review
Spectrum Singers deliver sonorous, moving evening
By Richard Buell
GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
THE SPECTRUM SINGERS
John W. Ehrlich, conductor
At: Church of the Advent, Saturday night
More often than not John Ehrlich's Spectrum Singers have on display the kind of virtues you'd hope for in any chorus that aims high and works hard. Though it may now fall short of outright virtuosity, the singing is sonorous, neat, musically alert. And with Ehrlich at the helm it takes on a shaped, curvaceous, almost personal quality that's nobody else's. What it comes to, really, is that the singers know how to phrase. And you can hear this.
Granted, it did take them a while to warm up on Saturday night, and in Benjamin Britten's "Hymn to St. Cecilia," with its curiously knowing yet childlike tone of voice ("There is no creature/Whom I belong to,/Whom I could wrong") this showed somewhat in tricky rapid-fire "speaking" passages. For a brief and unworthy moment the floor of the New York Stock Exchange came to mind. Would cut-glass British vowels and consonants have made it any less fuzzy? Possibly not. The Advent's spacious acoustic (a mixed blessing) might still have been up to no good. As we say, they did warm up -- instances of admirable dynamic control abounded. And at the end you'd have had to be a cloth-eared Caliban not to realize what a charming, even moving, piece this is.
The "Cantata Misericordium" is later Britten, from the period of the "War Requiem," which is to say severe, intense and, in this case, faultless in its dramatic pacing. The story is that of the Good Samaritan, and the fact that it's told in Latin somehow both distances it and makes it universal. Tenor Rockland Osgood and baritone Mark Andrew Cleveland were a single voice when they sang together, their vocal colors perfectly matched to Britten's oblique, dry, spartan orchestration and, even more important, to the emotional life of the music. You couldn't doubt that you were hearing an underappreciated masterpiece.
The Durufle Requiem? On paper this might have looked like the "big" piece on the program. But, please note, this was not the 1947 original, all purple passages and God-awful movie-palace opulence by some accounts, but the composer's drastic 1961 revision and thinning out. What purple passages? Traces of grandeur do remain, but how personal it all has become; it's as if we'd been taken into the composer's confidence. If you'd forgotten, Durufle's "Pie Jesu" is an almost alarming cry from the heart. Gloria Raymond's radiant, impassioned singing had its true measure; it told no lies.
This story ran on page C7 of the Boston Globe on 5/24/2000.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
