Philadelphia Singers: A lesson in economy

The Philadelphia Singers took a new tack a few seasons ago. They largely abandoned the Baroque and classic choral repertoire to focus on more modern scores. They still sing the standard repertoire in their appearances as the Philadelphia Orchestra's resident chorus. But their own programs offer less familiar fare.

Their first concert this season produced a triumph for the new approach, as well as a four-part lesson in the relationship between music and words.

The late-Victorian opener by the Anglo-Irish composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was the kind of piece you listen to exactly the way you'd listen to an instrumental work. Once you've glanced at the short one-sentence text (to get some sense of the general thrust), you can concentrate on the musical effects and the interplay of the different sections, without worrying about whether a particular musical passage is depicting "those who are undefiled" or those who "walk in the law."

"'Unworthy of the Lord'

The Mass for Double Chorus, by the Swiss composer Frank Martin, is another matter. Martin wrote it in 1922 but put it away because he felt it was "unworthy of the Lord." Consequently it wasn't performed until 1963. The words obviously meant something to the composer, and you'd miss much of his achievement if you didn't follow the text as you listened.

Soprano Elizabeth Hohwieler called the mass "one of the choral masterpieces of the 20th Century" when she introduced it with a brief talk. And Martin's mass lived up to its billing.

In the standard mass, the Credo and the Gloria present a lengthy series of statements. Martin's score runs through both sections with almost no repeats of the words, but he gave every sentence a unique musical treatment and a unique emotional color.

Compared to Bach

Bach also gave every sentence a special treatment in his Mass in B Minor. But each of Bach's settings is a complete aria or chorus, lasting several minutes, with repeats of the words. Martin, by contrast, poured a maximum creative effort into one rendition of each sentence and moved on to the next sentence without pausing to add extra elaborations.

The final moment of the mass is a moving example of Martin's succinctness. His setting of the Agnus Dei, with its reference to sin and its appeal for mercy, begins with the different sections of the double chorus engaging in tense, conflicting interactions and flows into a final moment of harmony: a single unelaborated statement of the prayer for peace, Dona Nobis Pacem. The music seems to be leading up to the kind of big, extended treatment that Martin's illustrious predecessors bestowed on the final sentence of the mass. Instead, the tension resolves, the journey reaches its destination, and the mass ends with one unembellished perfectly harmonized phrase.

Martin created that ending about the same time Ernest Hemingway transformed economy into a primary 20th Century literary virtue. The composer's final beautifully unadorned statement is as memorable as Hemingway's pregnant last sentences in The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Message from a prison cell

The second half of the concert featured Alberto Ginastera's 1946 Lamentations of Jeremiah and Bach's motet Jesu, meine Freude. The Ginastera's most notable connection between words and music takes place in the middle section. Ginastera could have set the text as a wail or an angry outcry. Instead, he chose a subdued treatment that sounds like a message from a dark prison cell.

The Bach, on the other hand, is a piece in which it's best to ignore the text. The words reflect attitudes that most moderns, believers or non-believers, will probably find sentimental and narrowly personal. The music communicates something more universal.

All the works on the program divided the Singers into a double chorus, as in the Martin, or played different sections of the chorus against each other. You didn't have to be an expert in choral music to understand that the entire program required a group of highly trained professional vocalists led by a skilled, understanding conductor who could keep all the components of a complex apparatus working the way they're supposed to.