Duruflé: Requiem and Other Works for Chorus and Organ (San Diego Master Chorale and Martin Green, organ; St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, April 27, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon (Saturday, April 27) I went to a quite remarkable concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Bankers’ Hill featuring the San Diego Master Chorale in a performance of the Requiem by Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) along with a first set of selections from various works for chorus and organ by British composer Gerald Finzi (1901-1956), Mark Butler (b. 1965), Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), as well as a shorter work by Duruflé, “Ubi Caritas,” sung a capella by the Master Chorale and its youth group, Honor Choir 2024. The Master Chorale was conducted by its music director, John K. Russell, and except for “Ubi Caritas” and another a capella piece, Butler’s “Dona Nobis Pacem,” the concert featured organ accompaniment by the church’s musical director, Martin Green. I had a bit of anxiety over whether I could get into the concert – I’d ordered my ticket online and had been unable to figure out how to open it on my phone – but fortunately the people staffing the admission table outside the church had my name on a will-call list and they gave me a shiny round silver sticker to show I’d paid. I took a seat next to the Queen’s pew – the one in which the late Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, had sat when they attended a service at the church as part of their visit to San Diego in February 1983 – and when a straight couple actually took their seats on the Queen’s pew, I joked that she was “Queen for a day.” Later an older woman joined them and she told me she’d actually been to the service that the Queen attended – and Prince Philip had participated by reading the Bible lesson. The seat next to me was taken by a really charming woman named Beth, who was wearing blue pants that matched her purse, and who had moved to San Diego from Phoenix two years ago. She had since settled in Oceanside because she likes living near the beach better than living in the desert. Beth had done some choir singing of her own and had been invited to audition for the Master Chorale, but she was on vacation in Ireland when the call came; they said she could audition on Zoom, but she chose not to. I asked her what her voice type was, and she said, “Second alto – definitely second alto,” adding that she had once been able to push her vocal range up a bit but she’d lost that ability during the two years at the height of COVID-19 in which she was unable to sing in public.

Before the concert John K. Russell and Martin Green did a 16-minute lecture on the piece, and Martin said he’d been at the church in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s when Duruflé himself had performed the Requiem from the organ. He said it was a thrill to be touching the same keys the composer had touched when he played the same music on the same organ as part of his last U.S. concert tour. The music itself was quite beautiful, even though my mind started to wander as the Duruflé went on in the same quiet, gentle, reverential vein. It’s not like I wasn’t warned; the opening lecture stressed the pastoral feel of the music, and when it comes to Requiems (I’m not sure what the “correct” plural is, though in the late 1960’s folk-classical-jazz fusion acoustic guitarist John Fahey recorded an LP for Vanguard called Requia) I like the more blood-and-thunder ones by Berlioz, Verdi or Britten better. But it was impeccably performed by the Master Chorale, as were the shorter works that opened the program. The only familiar piece was the Bach chorale from Cantata No. 147, performed here as “Wohl Mir, Dass Ich Jesum Habe” – though I remember it from a Musical Heritage Society LP I got in the 1970’s as “Herz und Mund und Tat und Lieben” and it’s far better known, at least in the English-speaking world, as “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

The Duruflé Requiem has enough dissonance to mark it as the work of a 20th century composer, though in his introduction Russell mentioned that it was basically tonal and avoided the 12-tone experiments that made so much 20th century music relentlessly ugly on purpose. (One thing I’ve come to like about church composers of the 20th century whom I’ve heard at St. Paul’s, like Herbert Howells and Healey Willan, is that they wrote from the heart and totally ignored the tonality vs. atonality debates that roiled the classical-music world of the 20th century.) In his intro Russell also stressed that much of the musical material in Duruflé’s Requiem came from traditional plainchants, though not being all that “up” on traditional plainchants, the only one I recognized was the “Dies Irae,” and that only because 19th century composers like Berlioz and Liszt used it. Also there wasn’t a solemn injunction from the people in charge urging people to silence their cell phones, so there was a mood-damaging intrusion as someone’s phone rang in between two of the movements in the Duruflé Requiem. And the “Pie Jesú” movement features an obbligato part for cello, which was played last night by a young Asian-looking man who’s regrettably unidentified in the program (though it lists all of the 75 or so members of the Master Chorale). Overall it was a lovely musical afternoon, and the Master Chorale was scheduled to repeat it the next day at St.-James-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church at 743 Prospect Street in La Jolla. For more information visit the San Diego Master Chorale Web site at https://www.sdmasterchorale.org.