Musica Vitale Performs Really Good Holiday Concert at St. Paul's Cathedral December 9

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Saturday, December 9. at 7 p.m. I went to the concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral featuring ensembles collectively known as “Musica Vitale” (Google translates “vitale” as “life-giving”). The concert was billed as “Oratorio de Noël by Camille Saint-Saëns and other works for the season,” though the “other works” were a pretty eclectic bunch. Musica Vitale consists of a women’s chorus (Lisa Parente, Jenn French, Rachel Fields, Nicole Baller, Lizzie Gaitan, Penelope Hawkins, Julia Rose Rahm, Sarah-Nicole Carter and Steph Ishihara); a men’s chorus (Daniel Moyer, Samuel Buse, Brad Fox, Richard Dawes, John Yokoyama, Eric Carter, Michael Sokol, Ron Hilley, Tomas Lokensgard and Andrew Nam); a small string group, the Ghukasyan Ourchestra (Dámaris Brambila, Erik Ghukasyan and Ottmar Mastachi, first violins; Yanelí Millán, Karla Alcocer, Gibran Aguilar and Bettina Preciado, second violins; Ronaldo Laztra, Ricardo Arreola and Allafí Ruiz, violas; Rubén Ghukasyan and Yolanda Millán, cellos; and José Luis Rodriguez, bass – Rodriguez is a diminutive young man who spent most of the evening plucking rather than bowing the bass, and since the bass is a head taller than he is he reminded me of Weather Report’s original bassist, Miroslav Vitous, who also looked more like he was wrestling the bass than actually playing it); and a young, tall, rail-thin, drop-dead gorgeous harpist named Stefan Wendel. He wears his hair long and curly, and for some of the songs he was the singers’ only accompanist. Musica Vitale’s conductor and artistic director is a short, stocky woman named Elena Vizuet, and the organist was Martin Green – a bit of a surprise since Gabriel Arregui had substituted for him the day before at the Friday afternoon half-hour mini-recital and had said Martin’s household injury was so severe it didn’t sound to me like he’d be available to play last night either. But there he was, though it probably helped that most of the shorter pieces didn’t involve organ at all and the larger works either just basically used the organ to give the right pitch to the singers or played Celtic-sounding drones. Only briefly, during an interlude in the Saint-Saëns, did Green the organist get to show off a bit.

Both parts of the program were introduced with seemingly interminable lectures by someone named Dr. William Proff, which were way too long but still offered valuable information about the works, the composers and the performers – including guest conductor Rafael Mikaelian, a bi-national Armenian-American who led the mini-orchestra in a medley of themes from ballets by Aram Khatchaturian (also Armenian by ancestry), including the ultra-familiar “Sabre Dance” from Gayaneh, and a truly haunting choral work, an excerpt from “Patarag,” an attempt by Armenian priest and composer Komitas (1869-1935), birth name Soghomon Soghomonian, to reconstruct the divine liturgy of the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church after Armenians were nearly wiped off the face of the earth by Turks in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. (Not only was it a genocide, the word “genocide” – the murder of an entire people – was actually coined to describe it.) Mike Silverton’s review of a complete recording of the Divine Liturgy in the March-April 1991 Fanfare paints a much grimmer picture of Komitas’s life and career: “The 1915-17 Ottoman massacre of the Armenians marked a grim personal turning point. He was arrested and deported to the interior, and while his life was spared — many of his friends were not — he returned to Constantinople to find his life's-work — papers, manuscripts, exhaustive research into Armenian notational systems — scattered and destroyed. (Scholars have not yet managed to put it back together.) Ultimately, the genocide unhinged his mind. He composed no music after 1919 and, having settled in Paris, passed his remaining years (he died in 1935) in periods of madness.”

The intent of Musica Vitale’s program was to showcase a broad array of cultures and nationalities, including three medieval Christmas carols from France arranged by John C. Phillips (born 1921 and apparently still alive at 102), including one called “Sleep No Longer” that incorporated text from the Magnificat (the hymn of thanksgiving sung by Mary when she was told she would be giving birth to the Messiah) in Latin and verses supposedly sung by Palestinian Jews … in French. (When Dr. Proff announced that, a lot of the audience laughed at the absurdity of having choristers supposedly representing Palestinian Jews from over 2,000 years ago sing in French instead of Hebrew or Aramaic.) The French carols – including “Listen to the Sounds in Heaven” and “Wake Up, Arise Straightaway, My Good Friend” – were sung by the women’s chorus with only Stefan Wendel’s harp accompanying them. After that the men in the choir sang two Estonian songs, “Vistel-Vastel” (a hymn for Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday) and “Liulaskmise-Laul,” a sledding song. Dr. Proff conceded that this doesn’t have anything to do specifically with Christmas, but the same could be said of “Jingle Bells,” which has likewise become part of the Christmas canon even though it’s a song about winter travel that doesn’t particularly mention Christmas. After the Khatchaturian and Komitas pieces – the Khachaturian was an instrumental and the Komitas was sung by both choirs from the back of the church; I was expecting them to march forward and take the altar stage as the church’s own choir does during Evensong services, but they didn’t – they did a Ukrainian song called “Dobriy Vecher” (“Bountiful Evening”) and then, just to cover both sides, a Russian song called “Kulyada” by Gyorgy Spiridov (1915-1998).

The second half of the concert consisted of just two pieces, a haunting setting of the “Ave Maria” by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) and the Oratorio de Noël by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). Dr. Proff began the second half with a lecture on how both Mendelssohn and Saint-Saëns were true child prodigies – which Mozart wasn’t; Mozart was certainly a great composer, but, at least according to Dr. Proff, little of what he wrote before his late teens survives in the repertoire. (I’ve seen that argument before in a BBC Music Magazine article that argued that Schubert was the greatest musical child prodigy of all time.) Then again, most of Mendelssohn’s early music wasn’t meant for professional performance; he, his parents and his prodigiously talented sister Fanny (who probably could have had a career rivaling his if it weren’t for the entrenched sexism of the day; the Mendelssohns’ father reportedly told Fanny to regard music as an “ornament” that would make her more salable in the marriage market, while Felix was encouraged to pursue it as a career) would have musical evenings at their home and Felix and Fanny both provided original scores for them. Mendelssohn’s “Ave Maria” is an adult work (composed in 1830, seven years before his death) and an extraordinarily beautiful one for tenor solo, chorus and organ (though the organ has little to do but serve as a sort of giant pitch pipe to keep the singers in tune). Just why this piece has been forgotten when it’s easily as good as the far more famous Bach-Gounod and Schubert settings is a mystery to me – as is the near-total disappearance of Mendelssohn’s “Infelice!,” a 13-minute scena for soprano, chorus and orchestra written in the 1830’s for soprano Maria Malibran and then set aside until 2007, when Cecelia Bartoli unearthed it and made the first recording for a Malibran tribute CD.

The Saint-Saëns Oratorio de Noël is a 40-minute long work (a surprise in itself given that most oratorios are big slabs of music on the order of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Handel’s The Messiah) consisting of 10 numbered sections. The opening orchestral prelude is specified by Saint-Saëns as “in the style of J. S. Bach,” though frankly it didn’t sound anything like Bach to me; it sounded almost Celtic, with the organ giving a good imitation of bagpipes. Then there was a movement called “Recitative and Chorus” featuring tenor, alto, soprano and baritone (in that order) soloists and a final chorus on the text, “Glory to God in the highest, and upon earth peace, and good will to men.” Next comes a tenor aria, followed by another aria for mezzo-soprano and chorus, a duet for soprano and baritone, a chorus based on the text, “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?” (a gentler and quite different setting from “Why do the nations rage?” in Handel’s Messiah!), a soprano-tenor-baritone trio, a quartet for soprano, mezzo, alto and baritone, a quintet for all five soloists that leads into Saint-Saëns’ version of the “Hallelujah” chorus (once again, far gentler and quieter than the one by Handel we all know), and a final chorus on the text of Psalm 96: “Bring an offering and come into His courts. Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad, before the Lord: for He cometh. Hallelujah.” Oratorio de Noël is a relatively early work by Saint-Saëns – it premiered in 1858, when he was just 23 – and it’s certainly charming and reverent in a low-keyed way. One thing that upset me about the program was that, while it named all the chorus singers, it didn’t specify which ones took the solos. I was particularly impressed by the tenor who sang lead in the Mendelssohn (who I think was different from the far taller, more striking tenor soloist in the Saint-Saëns) and the stunning soprano in the Oratorio de Noël. She wore a skin-tight red dress and she sang with such soaring elegance I could easily imagine her going after a career as an opera singer: she’s certainly got the vocal chops for it!