Many singers win in Bernstein & Brahms
The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra comes up with a concert for mass chorus and orchestra every couple of years, but I cannot recall a better one than Saturday night’s Bernstein & Brahms at the Maumelle Performing Arts Center.
The bigger choral forces — the Arkansas Chamber Singers and six college choirs (from, in alphabetical order, Arkansas State University, Harding University, Lyon College, Southern Arkansas University at Magnolia, University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Central Arkansas) — crammed onto the stagerear risers for Johannes Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem). The several hundred singers were diction-perfect; just about every German word was crystal clear even for listeners who don’t speak German. (Brahms took his texts not from the liturgical Latin mass for the dead, full of eternal hellfire, but from biblical passages focusing mainly on comforting the grieving.)
Music Director Philip Mann obviously worked extra hard on that, as well as on maintaining a refreshing transparency in the orchestration, which among other wonders includes having the violins sit out the entire first movement and giving the melody to divided violas.
For two-thirds of the piece, it may have come at the expense of the piece’s emotional impact, which didn’t really reach out and grab the audience until the hell-for-leather sixth movement, “Denn wir haben hie” (“Here we have no continuing place”), including the massive fugue. Baritone Robert Holden did yeoman work here and in the third movement, “Herr, lehre doch mich” (“Lord, make me know mine end”); soprano Maria Fasciano aced the fifth movement, “Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit” (“And ye now therefore have sorrow”).
The curtain raiser was the less well-known, but beautifully written and just as beautifully performed, Leonard Bernstein’s celebratory Chichester Psalms, sung in Hebrew, with fine work by the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff Vesper Choir and countertenor Ray Chenez.
Choirs, soloists, orchestra and conductor repeat at 3 p.m. today at the Maumelle Performing Arts Center, Maumelle High School, 100 Victory Lane, Maumelle. Ticket information is available by calling (501) 666-1761, Extension 100, or online at ArkansasSymphony.org.