The highlight of the evening was Francis Poulenc's Concerto in G minor for Organ, Strings, and Timpani, featuring J. Reilly Lewis adeptly at the cathedral organ. Poulenc's concerto, written in 1938, is a study in diminished chords, driven home ever so forcefully with the organ's ability to sustain the sound. This has long been one of my favorite organ works, and I used to drive the interstate highways of the American Southwest with a recording blasting from my car stereo. I've heard the concerto live twice, once in an auditorium with a "temporary" electronic organ and once in a church with an anemic-sounding 33-rank organ. None of that prepared me for last night.
As you can see in the ("illegally" taken) picture above, I was seated in the middle of the north transcept for this performance. It's not an area I would normally choose for a concert, but it's my friend's favorite place to sit in the cathedral for church and that preference defaults to concerts as well. Since I was fifteen minutes late for our agreed meeting time (see earlier post with my rant about Metro buses!), they went ahead and picked our seats without my input. It turned out to be a fortuitous choice. The majority of the organ pipes are in the Great Choir, which you can see to the left, behind the rood screen, with the sound pouring out from there. The orchestra's sound came from the center and from the right. This combination gave me an antiphonal effect I've never had before from listening to recordings or sitting in front of an orchestra with organ speakers over head. What an experience!
The first half of the concert was devoted to Charles Gounod's Messe Solennelle de Sainte Cécile with the Cathedral Choral Society Summer Chorus joined by the Fairfax (Virginia) Choral Society. The soloists were Jessica Swink, soprano, Tim Augustin, tenor, and Jon Bruno, bass, and CCS's music director, J. Reilly Lewis, conducted. Unfortunately I was not able to see the conductor or the soloists from my vantage point, and only noticed during curtain calls that the soprano had long auburn hair and wore a rich beige, satin dress, one of the men was in a black tuxedo and the other was in a dark suit. The entire crossing of the cathdral was filled with musicians, with the orchestra on the floor level and the singers filling the chancel steps and supplemental risers to the sides of the lecturn and the pulpit. I was disappointed by their decision to mike the soloists and chorus. As was so aptly demonstrated last Sunday at the Thomas Tallis Quincentenary Concert, no amplification is needed in the cathedral space. The high treble balance of the speakers was particularly disconcerting, and, in fact, at one point where the tenor soloist came in, the treble was so prevalent that I did a double take to see if there was an alto somewhere!
Because of my seating location, I was right by the "live" sound of the chorus, and occasionally had to wrestle with the several millisecond delay of the amplified sound and the few second delay of the cathedral reverberation (there is about a four to six second sound decay time in the cathedral). Even cutting through the acoustical issues, though, the chorus struggled a couple of times during some of the faster sections of the Gloria (I had to slap my hand at one point when I spontaneously conducted a couple of beats in my lap, trying to help the chorus stay together!). The Credo was a bit muddy at times, but otherwise, the rest of the choral portions were fine. I liked the bass soloist's voice, and it's unfortunate that Gounod didn't write more for him to sing. The soprano was ok, though I thought her voice had more of the character of a mezzo-soprano than a full-fledged soprano. The tenor didn't impress me much. I thought his voice lacked maturity and richness (which may have been the fault of the miking), and he covered his top notes too early.
The most interesting thing about the entire Mass for me, though, was the inclusion of the eighth movement of the Mass, Domine Salvam, which is something I'd vaguely read about but never before heard and certainly never sung. This final movement follows the Agnus Dei and is a rather patriotic setting of the text "God save our Republic! And hear us in that day when we shall call upon thee." It's a politically interesting inclusion, since the Mass was written about six or seven years after the second French Revolution of 1848.
The second half of the concert, which opened with the Poulenc, was conducted by NSO's associate conductor, Emil de Cou. At times, I think I like de Cou's work better than music director Leonard Slatkin's, since the NSO always sounds warm with de Cou and I've often felt the orchestra sounded either under-rehearsed or soul-less when I've heard Slatkin conducting. After the Poulenc, they played Maurice Ravel's "Pavane pour une infante défunte," or as it is more popularly known, "Pavane for a Dead Princess," or, as I prefer to translate the French, "Dance for a Dead Baby." I was a little bored with the idea of the Pavane, since this is one of those "top forty" classical songs one hears incessantly on the national classical music radio feeds. NSO's interpretation was pretty enough, but what made the moment magical—and something which can only happen in a live performance—was that, as the orchestra was making its final ritardando and diminuendo, a baby in the back gave a bit of a cry.
The final selection was another "top forty" war horse, Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. I was tempted to leave early along with many other members of the audience (especially since the festival director was making announcements before the piece started), but I'm glad I stayed. They took liberties with the music. In fact, they rearranged the score to include a part for pipe organ! It was magnificent. This piece is really a set of variations on a theme by Purcell, and the theme is introduced in this big, pompous, ponderous way, bolstered in this case with the mighty sound of the cathedral organ. Throughout the rest of the piece, the organ occasionally wove its way unobtrusively through the music, only to return triumphantly with the final chords of the finale. The windows rattled. Wow. Britten will never be the same again.
If you look again at the picture above, you'll see the orchestra and chorus facing to the right towards the conductor and the nave. Did you notice that the double basses have their backs to us? I thought that was interesting, since the basses usually sit on the opposite side of the stage. The performers were also dressed in an interesting "summer uniform." The men of the orchestra were wearing starkly white dinner jackets (my summer dinner jacket is cream, a color I've always preferred), which I thought an interesting choice, given the white marble and white limestone surroundings of the performance space. If you've never been in the cathedral, you can't see it from the picture, but the bulk of the audience sitting in the nave looks through the rood screen, directly at the high altar, which is an enormous bit of carved white marble. So, there wasn't much contrast between the costumes and the backdrops. Of course, I was particularly appalled by the costuming decisions for the chorus men, who wore white shirts (some even inshort sleeved shirts! :::gasp!:::) with black bow ties and no jackets. One might have thought it was a caterer's convention with hundreds of waiters let loose and having abandoned their aprons. There was a standing room only crowd in the cathedral for the concert, and people were sitting every where. They accomodated people sitting in the aisles (think formal cathedral definition of "aisle"), side chapels, and niches with big screen plasma TV monitors on every two pillars out in the nave. giving them a closer view of the conductor's back. Didn't see many people I knew, but H.E. the Norwegian Ambassador to the United States was seen in the audience.
The cathedral's music festival continues on for the rest of the month, with a concert of the words of Albert Schweitzer and the music of J. S. Bach tonight.
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