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Review: Bach festival is unforgettable
Web Posted: 06/25/2004 12:00 AM CDT
Mike Greenberg
San Antonio Express-News Senior Critic
VICTORIA — Until Monday night, the most memorable performance of a choral masterwork I had ever heard was the Victoria Bach Festival's traversal of Bach's Matthew Passion in 2000 under conductor Craig Hella Johnson.
That concert now drops to second place, supplanted by Johnson's gripping, fleet, cogent account of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis to close the Victoria Bach Festival's 2004 season.
Johnson, the festival's artistic director since 1992, has always impressed with his conception of major choral works. In the past few years, he has grown markedly in conducting technique. In this Missa Solemnis, for the first time, one had the impression that he was fully in control and that his forces were delivering everything he had in mind.
In control, but also seemingly totally free. Through all the amazing ebbs and flows of dynamics, the radiant balances, the seamless connection of episodes, the theatrically astute tempo relations, the unified structural arc, the music shone forth with organic naturalness. Nothing sounded fussed over. Everything just sounded right.
Certain moments were especially memorable — the deep mystery Johnson conveyed in the passage "et incarnatus est" and the startling crispness of the words "et resurrexit" in the Credo, the irrepressible joy and the superb performance of the chorus in the fugal section of the Gloria, the shimmering close of the Agnus Dei.
The vast chorus — about 120 voices — sang with the astonishing precision, clarity and nimbleness of an elite chamber choir. It must be counted something of a miracle that Johnson could get such results from a group cobbled together from three different choral organizations based in three different cities — the Houston Masterworks Chorus, the Victoria Bach Festival Chorus and the professional Conspirare vocal ensemble of Austin.
The four vocal soloists were first-rate singers individually, but they also blended as ideally as a matched set of Guarneri strings. Full equals in musicality and in the liquid smoothness of their vocal projection, they were soprano Linda Mabbs, mezzo-soprano Emily Lodine, tenor Karl Dent and the venerable bass John Cheek, whose oceanic depth and ringing top were magisterial in the Agnus Dei.
The festival orchestra, drawn in part from the Austin and San Antonio symphonies, was polished and responsive. Concertmaster Stephen Redfield had a particularly sweet solo turn in the Sanctus.
The only shadow concerns the acoustics of Our Saviour's Lutheran Church, which had sounded clean and spacious for smaller ensembles earlier in the festival, but proved a bit muddy and harsh for the oversized forces of this concert.
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