ELIJAH MAKES DOUBLE COMEBACK
St. Lawrence Choir and OSM will perform Mendelssohn’s underappreciated oratorio
For an ancient prophet without a biblical book named after him, Elijah cuts quite a swath. He makes his first appearance in 1 Kings, railing against Baal and denouncing King Ahab for leading the Israelites into idolatry.
But Elijah is not all talk. He raises a child from the dead, defeats the Baal worshippers in a spectacular public demonstration of what a real God can do, escapes the persecution of Jezebel and goes into exile (where he survives an earthquake) before being taken up into heaven by a whirlwind.
These are just a few of the epic highlights that await those who take in one or both renditions this month of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, an 1846 oratorio that was grouped with Handel’s Messiah and Haydn’s The Creation as the greatest hits of English-speaking choral societies.
Now it trails its former companions. The performance by the St. Lawrence Choir with the McGill Chamber Orchestra and the Vanier Choir under Philippe Bourque on Tuesday in St-JeanBaptiste Church will be the first in a while. The performance by the OSM under Kent Nagano on May 21 at the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim synagogue in Westmount will be the second.
James Westman takes the role of the fiery prophet on Tuesday, Russell Braun on May 21. By a curious coincidence, these baritones are now playing opposite each other in the Canadian Opera Company production of the Harry Somers-Mavor Moore opera Louis Riel (which will be presented by the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on June 15 and 17 and by the Opéra de Québec on July 30, Aug. 1 and Aug. 3). “Opposite” requires some qualification: Braun plays Riel and Westman plays Sir John A. Macdonald, who interact at a distance but never meet.
Elijah does have a direct confrontation with his main adversary, Ahab, who musters only five fleeting bars of recitative in the section titled As God the Lord of Sabaoth (“Art thou he that troubleth Israel?” he asks). Shaar Hashomayim cantor Gideon Zelermyer will be in the interesting position of giving voice to the words of a monarch who, to quote the King James version of the Bible, “did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.”
In fact, this tenor (Michael Colvin, another member of the cast of Louis Riel, is his counterpart in the St. Lawrence performance) has more to do as Obadiah, a secondary prophet who urges the Israelites to heed Elijah’s message and (notably in the aria If With All Your Hearts) seek out the true God.
Several solos are for anonymous commentators or angels. The lead soprano (Mendelssohn had in mind Jenny Lind, the so-called Swedish Nightingale) portrays the widow whose son Elijah raises from the dead. She also opens Part 2 with the exhortation Hear Ye, Israel. The alto performs a similar function in the mellifluous aria O Rest in the Lord. Aline Kutan is the soprano for the St. Lawrence, Layla Claire for the OSM. Lauren Segal does alto duty in both performances.
Choruses, sometimes contrapuntal, range from muscular to angelic. He, Watching over Israel is a favourite that is occasionally pressed (as are other excerpts from Elijah) into liturgical service on Sunday mornings.
At the centre of the oratorio, of course, is the prophet of the title, delivering both soothing assurances (Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel) and frightening premonitions (Is Not His Word Like a Fire). Elijah asserts himself at the very beginning, before the overture, and is a continuous presence. His aria It is Enough is either admired or scorned for its approximation of Bach (I take the former view).
No one disputes the outward virtues of Elijah. Both the
wavering loyalties of the Israelites and the personal travails of the title prophet imbue the oratorio with natural suspense. There is much descriptive writing, including rainfall for the “thirsty land” in the concluding chorus of Part 1.
Some observers have found Elijah less satisfying as art than the Handel oratorios and Bach passions on which it is based. George Bernard Shaw in an 1892 column discussed (and praised) many elements of a performance in Albert Hall before remarking that “our pet oratorio, as a religious work of art, stands together with … the poems of Longfellow and Tennyson, sensuously beautiful in the most refined and fastidiously decorous way, but thoughtless.”
Of course, the Victorian genesis of Elijah did it little good in the anti-Victorian later 20th century. The explicit endorsement of Prince Albert was taken as a strike against it.
In a chapter of his 1995 volume The Romantic Generation meant partly to defend Mendelssohn, the analyst Charles Rosen calls the composer “the inventor of religious kitsch in music.” Elijah and the Symphony No. 5 (Reformation) are among the works he cites as cases in point.
Listeners without prior briefing might be baffled by Elijah as it relates to Mendelssohn’s religious identity. Jewish by birth and famously the grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Felix was baptized as a child. Of course, this did not prevent the suppression of his music during the Nazi era, but the fact of the matter is that Mendelssohn lived his adult life as a Lutheran.
Before Elijah, Mendelssohn wrote the oratorio St. Paul. He started another, Christus. Elias, the original German-language version of Elijah, was given its première after the composer’s appallingly early death at 38.
Like most of Handel’s oratorios, Elijah draws its story and words from the Hebrew Scriptures. There is, however, an exquisite chorus (“He that shall endure to the end shall be saved”) that sets the words of Jesus as rendered in Matthew 10:22. Several numbers are based on Psalms.
Bear in mind the prestige of Elijah as a prophet survives into the Christian era. Most notable is his appearance along with Moses in the Transfiguration of Jesus as reported in the Gospels. Elijah’s stature is considerable also in the Islamic tradition.
What is clear is that Mendelssohn’s oratorio has musical and dramatic appeal to listeners of all creeds and indeed all who are prepared to leave their antiVictorian prejudices at home. It is perhaps a rare example of a musical work that is most effective on first hearing.
Between rival Elijahs comes a performance on May 13 by Les Violons du Roy and La Chapelle de Québec under Bernard Labadie of Henry Purcell’s hard-to-describe King Arthur. But it’s not hard to like: “After a career spanning 30 years, I am still overwhelmed by the beauty of Purcell’s music,” Labadie says of this multi-faceted late-17thcentury score.
“Incidental music to a courtly drama by John Dryden is the best capsule description,” I reported after a 1995 performance by the same forces, “although ‘preHandelian oratorio’ is a helpful means of describing its soundworld.”
I was duly impressed by “one astonishing sequence, with rustic words, (that) brought to mind an Edwardian glee club, and maybe a bit of Monty Python.”
Keep in mind that Labadie’s title with Les Violons du Roy is founding conductor, Jonathan Cohen having been named music director in October. Cohen will make his Montreal debut in this capacity (having already done a guest gig) next season.
Meanwhile, this week Labadie was named principal conductor of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, a New York ensemble of flexible size that often works in the baroque-to-classical corridor for which he is best known. He begins his four-year term in 2018-19.
The St. Luke’s appointment completes an extraordinary comeback from a bout with lymphoma, diagnosed in May 2014, that kept the conductor off the podium for more than a year and a half. Last Saturday, Labadie was in typically fine form as a guest with the OSM in a program of Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart. He walks confidently on stage but now conducts seated, using his long arms expressively, without a baton.
More than 60 performers, including four soloists, will occupy the Maison symphonique for King Arthur.
Nagano and the OSM return to Carnegie Hall on Oct. 18 with Maxim Vengerov as soloist in Brahms’s Violin Concerto. This will be the orchestra’s 28th visit to the New York temple and the first since March 2016.
The other works on the program are Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Samy Moussa’s A Globe Itself Infolding, a concerto written for the 2014 inauguration of the Grand Orgue PierreBéique in the Maison symphonique. Jean-Willy Kunz is soloist.
The concert is presented by Opus 3 Artists, a New York agency, rather than Carnegie Hall, which in 2016 featured the OSM as part of its International Orchestras subscription series — as it did regularly during the Charles Dutoit years. The same program will be given in the Maison symphonique the day before. Visit osm.ca or carnegiehall.org for more information.