Harvard Choruses Sing Faure, Bruckner

Let me dispel any pious delusions that the Symphony Hall Holy Week program, presented by the Boston Symphony and the two University choruses, was a sacred one. Neither Bruckner's Te Deum, Wagner's Good Friday Spell from Parsifal nor Faure's Requiem limit themselves to liturgical and theological ends. Their Christianity is a useful vehicle for the composers' larger musical or intellectual notions (if indeed the ideas in the Wagner or Faure are really Christian).

I suspect that the late Archibald Davison, to whom the performance of the Requiem was dedicated, would have frowned on church performance of the Requiem. Its grief is a worldly sort too sensuous and lyrical to fulfill Davison's demand that true sacred music lead the worshipper toward the supernatural without such earthly qualities as lush thirds or pictorial arpeggios. Quite to the contrary, if someone had listened to this concert (especially the Faure) with purely religious intent, he would have had to ignore the greatest beauty and genius of the music.

The sensuousness of the Requiem can easily swamp its melodic simplicity, but Charles Munch and the chorus avoided this pitfall perfectly. Munch emphasized heavily but tastefully the continual swelling and falling of dynamics, and the chorus maintained excellent clarity of voices to give their texture a limpid serenity.

What is most striking about the Requiem and this performance was the combination of sweetness with simplicity and order. Faure scored it for small forces and encapsulated loudness and brass entrances within the quietness and reserve of its larger structure; Munch never violated his intention. This combination of restraint and feeling seems to hark back much to the Enlightenment, for Faure's paradise is a place of rest with no harrowing alternative of hell. He is essentially a humanist who finds the Christian forms both beautiful and adaptable to his own feelings.

David Laurent, baritone, sang with a dark, rich tone well suited to this unprtentious work, but Phyllis Curtin, soprano, marred an otherwise good performance with slides where unadorned, precise pitch is vital.

If Faure is a comforter, Bruckner is a seer. In the Te Deum he probes the cosmos with dramatic horn calls, crescendos and sforzandos, threading the strident opening arpeggio throughout his relentless score, and develops leaps of an octave and fifth into a towering mystical insight into the universe. When a Faure melody rises, we feel that it is doing so only to fall back to rest; when Bruckner moves upward his chromatic alterations impel the music to a new height of transfiguration. Indeed, the Te Deum proclaims less traditional Christianity than a musical cosmology, and this performance treated it as such.

Munch never let Bruckner's rhetoric get out of hand. He controlled the volume and balance so well that the work built up to its most massive cannonade of sound at the very end and the removal of one choir, say the brass, did not weaken the motion of the other parts. Chorus, orchestra and soloists blended easily, the trumpets and horns penetrating the luminous tone of the chorus but never over-powering it. The chorus's enunciation was perfect throughout. As in the Faure, here there was no schmalz, and Richard Burgin's violin solo in the Aeterna Fac was even perhaps too clipped.

The militant chordal writing for the chorus contrasted with the complex polyphony of the soloists without jarring the work's virtually symphonic thematic unity. Phyllis Curtin, Mary MacKenzie, John Alexander and David Laurent made this continuity posible by weaving a texture that was never ragged and by providing excellent solos.

The concert opened with an extremely hushed and clean reading of Wagner's Good Friday Spell from Parsifal. The opera is, of course, neither Christian nor religious, but deserves hearing any time. Why then drag it out in Holy Week for "appropriateness"? This bow to the season even caused one Boston critic to express profound shock that the audience broke the "sacred" tone of the concert with applause. Myself, I applauded lustily.