Making a strong case for Cherubini’s worth
Beethoven and Luigi Cherubini were near-contemporaries, operating in parallel in the major musical capitals of Vienna and Paris, respectively. Both were giants in their day, and yet modern concertgoers only ever hear music by one of them in the regular course of events. People, that has to change. The season-ending program by Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, which had its first airing in a splendid concert at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall on Wednesday, April 25, drives home the point with forceful elegance. It pairs two big and reasonably familiar choral works by Beethoven — the Mass in C and the “Choral Fantasy” — with Cherubini’s 1805 funereal tribute to Joseph Haydn.
And although all of it was
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra: 8 p.m. Friday, April 27, Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Ave., S.F.; 8 p.m. Saturday, April 28, and 4 p.m. Sunday, April 29, First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley. $28-$125. (415) 252-1288, www.philharmonia.org
brilliantly executed on Wednesday, with a superb array of vocal soloists and Bruce Lamott’s Philharmonia Chorale in peak form, it was Cherubini’s music that made a listener sit up and take notice. There’s a constellation of distinctive colorations in this work — instrumental, harmonic and expressive — that stands wholly apart from the Germanic tradition that Beethoven spearheaded, and that registers like nothing we usually run across.
Well, almost nothing. Where we do continue to encounter the Cherubinian legacy is in the music of Berlioz, who regarded him as a formative role model. And if Cherubini’s work could be nudged back into the performance mainstream where it belongs, it would not only enrich our performing repertoire but also help put Berlioz’s music in context.
At the very least, it would ensure more performances of a piece as gripping and imaginative as the “Chant sur la mort de Joseph Haydn,” which uses the resources of opera and public utterance to celebrate the not-quite-dead older master. (Cherubini was commissioned to write the piece based on false news reports of Haydn’s demise, proving that fake news is by no means an exclusively recent phenomenon; he revived the piece four years later, when Haydn actually expired.)
The piece calls for three vocal soloists, but the magic starts during the long orchestral opening, as each instrumental section in turn weighs in — first the basses, then the cellos, and so on until the brass and woodwinds have all had their say. To hear everything else fall silent while the cellos alone eulogize the fallen master is a breathtaking moment.
Only after the orchestra is through do the singers get their moment, and the expostulations of soprano Chantal SantonJeffery and tenor Thomas Cooley and David Kurtenbach — first individually, then in sumptuous harmony — made a glorious case for Cherubini’s expressive gift.
Santon-Jeffery and Cooley were also among the prime attractions, along with alto Avery Amereau and bass Hadleigh Adams, in the magnificent account of the Beethoven Mass that occupied the first half of the evening. It’s rare to hear a solo quartet so evenly matched at such a lofty level, and the chorus sang beautifully throughout — explosive and clear in the forthright “Gloria,” hushed and insinuating in the “Sanctus.” McGegan oversaw the proceedings with a blend of fervor and tenderness.
In conclusion, there was the “Choral Fantasy,” the misbegotten musical jackalope that is a hybrid of piano concerto, choral ode and who knows what all. Eric Zivian was a dynamic fortepiano soloist, channeling the composer’s improvisatory zeal, and the various vocal contributions were perfectly swell. In defiance of the Beethoven worshipers, I still decline to take the piece seriously.