Reworked Mozart piece a fitting start

July 3, 2006

From The Register-Guard
By Terry McQuilkin

There could hardly have been a more fitting way to begin the 37th Oregon Bach Festival. With “transformations” as the theme of this year’s festival, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 250th birthday being celebrated this year, music director Helmuth Rilling and the Festival Orchestra and Chorus marked opening night by delivering the local premiere of recently reconstructed version of Mozart’s monumental Mass in C minor, K. 427, Friday evening in the Silva Concert Hall.

The C-minor Mass is often placed in the company of Bach’s B-minor Mass and Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis.” Indeed, no work written during the nearly 75 years separating the Bach and Beethoven Masses compares with the heft of the C-minor Mass.

And yet, there are substantial portions of the Mass ordinary that Mozart left unset, including more than half of the text to the “Credo” and all of the “Agnus Dei.”

Pianist Robert Levin’s reconstruction is a manifestation of his careful scholarship, his imagination and to some extent his audacity. Parts of this reconstruction amounts to revisions in the scoring, but other sections are entirely new choruses, developed by Levin from sketches that Mozart left behind.

What is astonishing is how well Levin’s contributions blend in with Mozart’s original rhetoric. The four separate chorus movements he constructed for the “Credo” and his setting of the “Dona nobis pacem” reveal the Harvard scholar to be a master of both counterpoint and of Mozartian style – at least the polyphonic style Mozart used in the C-minor Mass. It would be a stretch to say that those sections are as good as Mozart’s, but surely they are a good fit. A question does arise, however: Is it better to dispense with the purity of a landmark “Mozart” work to make it liturgically complete, or is it preferable to retain the quality and integrity of the original masterwork? That question is not likely to be resolved soon.

I did find a real shortcoming in Levin’s reconstruction: his decision to retrofit portions of a 1785 Lenten cantata, “Davide Penitente.” Most of the cantata is a resetting of music from the C-minor Mass, but Mozart did compose some new music for “Davide Penitente” and this is what Levin used for one portion of the “Credo” and the “Agnus Dei,” excluding the “Dona nobis pacem.” The 1785 music works serviceably for the “Agnus Dei” text, though I don’t find the music’s quality to be of the same standard as that found elsewhere in the Mass. But the cantata section that Levin recast for the “Et in Spiritum Sanctum” section of the “Credo” emerges as a serious mismatch of words and music; the mood is too light-hearted for the text, “And was incarnate by the Holy Spirit …”

To a listener in the middle of the mezzanine section, all four vocal soloists sounded somewhat faint, although sopranos Simone Nold and Anne-Carolyn Schlüter, who handle the bulk of the solo duties, brought clarity and great expressivity to their lines.

Tenor Corby Welch’s voice did not appear to have the power needed for the Silva Hall, nor did he seem entirely at ease with the melismas in the music. Philip Carmichael gave respectable readings of the limited bass solos in the work, but he, too, was hard to hear.

Rilling led the Festival Orchestra and Chorus in a performance that was every bit up to the high standards one expects at Bach Festival concerts.

The well-balanced chorus sang with considerable nuance and stunning clarity, and the orchestra played with élan and razor-sharp accuracy.