HRO, HGC, and Radcliffe Choral Society

The excitement of an event is magnified if it is preceded by boredom. Thus, the excitement of the best moments of a baseball game. This is the kind of effect that this year's Christmas concert seems to have been aiming at. For in each half of the program, a sensationalistic Te Deum was preceded by a dull, plodding piece of music-to-vacuum-clean by.

The first half of the program, conducted by the HRO's James Yannatos, opened with Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll" for orchestra alone. This piece is performed fairly often, I suppose because it has a pretty tone and absorbing orchestration. But the development is not especially interesting or moving, and the piece lacks that boldness that is so attractive in much of Wagner's other music.

The orchestra performed it pretty well, however. The strings had good tone and intonation. The horns are improving. And a number of tricky entrances were handled accurately in the evening, though not in the afternoon, performances. Still, the work isn't exciting, and there wasn't much the orchestra could do.

The Verdi Te Deum, performed by the multitudes of the Glee Club, Choral Society, and Orchestra, was in contrast, a thrilling piece. Verdi uses a number of effective emotional techniques. He alternates short phrases between the men's and women's choruses, contrasting an esoteric female sound with the rich, luscious chords that a male chorus can provide. He goes from one extreme of the dynamics spectrum to the other in a relatively short period of time. And he startles you with sudden harmonic shifts into big, massive, stirring chords.

Both choral groups sounded beautiful in this piece. The sopranos, especially, have an impressive, lyrical sound. Even the loudest sections were done musically, sounding solid and intense rather than percussive. And the concluding pianissimo section was sung, breathtakingly well. Unfortunately, the effect was ruined by an awful sound at the very end that turned out to be a sustained violin "harmonic" (a very high note in which the string, instead of being pressed down, is merely touched so that it vibrates in sections). It didn't work. The sound was squeaky, scratchy, and of questionable tonality--so bad that it made my back teeth feel funny.

The second half of the concert was conducted by Eliot Forbes. There is striking contrast between the two conductors. Yannatos is like a triode: his conducting style is reserved and his baton movements short, and the orchestra is used to giving big reactions to little movements. So when you see this little man (he must be barely five feet) controlling so much sound with so little movement, you get an impressive picture of power effortlessly exerted. Forbes, on the other hand, is very active and fun to watch. His face is so expressive that it is worthwhile sitting on the side to see him.

All of this activity was powerless, however, to put interest into Brahms Ave Maria for women's chorus and orchestra. Like the Siefried Idyll, it is pretty and pleasant, but dull. More than most composers, Brahms wrote music that varied from the great to the mediocre, and this piece is not one of his best. The performance was up to the music, competent, but a bit yawn-inducing.

As in the first half of the program, this piece contrasted with the incredibly powerful Kodaly Te Deum. Kodaly achieves the same effect that is so exciting in much of Shostakovitch's music: a pounding rhythm carried over from a previous phrase into a huge, loud, added-note chord that floods the concert hall with a sound that feels like it's going to go through your whole body. Kodaly uses silence very effectively after these moments, much as a polished public speaker will pause after particularly emotional apostrophe.

The vocal soloists sang well throughout the Kodaly, but especially in a contrapuntal section which was sung simultaneously to an eerie "quaesumus subveni" chant in the full chorus. Soprano Sandra Jarrett ended the Te Deum with a lyrical solo that went up to a high A. Her tone was so beautiful that it made me shiver.

The chief defect of the concert was the atrocious choice of music. (I know some habitual concertgoers who decided to skip this one when they saw the program.) Three of the four selections were late nineteenth century romantic, and the fourth--though written later--was largely in that style. Now it is good to have some sensationalism from the Romantic period, but all of the world's music was not written after 1850. At Christmas time, when there is so much really great and profound music from the baroque period that is especially appropriate, it is criminal that the whole program should come from one narrow period, especially when two of the four pieces are poor choices intrinsically.