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Finishing with fervor
The Cantata Singers, plus Italian fare
BY DAVID WEININGER

David Hoose, music director of the Cantata Singers, doesn’t have much use for anniversaries. Instead of dwelling on the fact that this season brings the group to its 40th year of existence, he’d rather talk about recent musical highlights, in particular their recent Bach performances. "For us to have a year in which we did, for example, our fifth set of performances of the St. Matthew Passion is emblematic of the fervor with which this organization goes about trying to offer its best self to the public. We expect more out of ourselves each year, and when we came back to the Bach, it was a matter of seeing how much more deeply we could go into this piece, and how much more we could reveal."

The chorus ends its season next week with a pair of concerts for which Hoose chose an unusual program that follows two large-scale works with Heinrich Schütz’s setting of Psalm 150. "I think that Schütz, along with Bach, was one of the great musical preachers. It’s not music that’s quite as exciting to a contemporary listener as Bach’s, but in its subtlety and drama, there’s a sense of his serving that function very clearly. He’s not just writing wonderful music, he’s also talking about our relation to the world. I always try to put Schütz’s music into a concert in which it will inform how we hear the other music on the program. In this context, it seems like a perfect companion and conversationalist with them."

Those conversation partners are Anton Bruckner’s imposing Mass in E minor, for chorus and winds, and Paul Hindemith’s wild Apparebit repentina dies, for chorus and brass. Hoose calls Bruckner’s music "almost not music for today," contrasting it with the "Freudian" works of Mahler, whose works seem to reign supreme in contemporary musical life. By this standard, he says, Bruckner often seems like "a poor man’s Mahler," and his music "seems simpler and slightly removed" next to Mahler’s tortured confessions. "Bruckner comes from a place of faith, and in a certain sense, in all of those symphonies and Masses, he’s saying, ‘I have a relationship with God.’ Every piece is in some sense a prayer. In this piece, Bruckner can write music that sounds like a 19th-century version of Palestrina, and he writes that in connection with music that is extremely dynamic and inventive and exciting. The winds give it a serenity and a grandeur that open the door for a kind of universal emotion — one that is of Bruckner but not about Bruckner. Though it doesn’t sound so contemporary, it has a generosity of spirit that lets us all in."

That generosity contrasts starkly with the common view of Paul Hindemith, a composer known more for rigor than for inspiration. Apparebit is an enormous setting of a seventh-century Advent hymn that paints a vivid, almost garish portrait of judgment and redemption. You mightn’t think that this occasional piece — commissioned by the Harvard music department and first performed in 1947 — would shine amid Hindemith’s œuvre. Hoose, however, argues that it’s "one of the inspired pieces of the 20th century. It’s amazing how much freedom of expression this ‘bound-up’ composer finds in this mediæval acrostic that’s very dark, grisly, and convoluted. And it works its way into a vision of eternal life. The freedom of this music breaks through the rigor of his music. It’s completely inspired. I am in awe of this piece for its freedom, its exuberance. He’s asking a lot of the singers, players, listeners — and when he asks a lot, the rewards are enormous."

The Cantata Singers perform May 7 and 8 at 8 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, 11 Garden Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $20 to $48; call (617) 267-6502.

ITALY-ON-CHARLES: We may not get Italy’s weather, but its culture is all around Boston these days, and that’s not even counting the Gardner Museum. Boston Baroque wraps up its season with performances of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespro della Beata Vergine, a pinnacle of Renaissance music and a work that conveys in sound the architecture of San Marco in Venice. Performances, led by music director Martin Pearlman, are May 7 and 8 at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street in Boston. Tickets are $21 to $44; call (617) 484-9200. And the Boston Lyric Opera concludes its "Italian Season" with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte, a fun fable about the high jinks that ensue when you bet on your lover’s fidelity. William Lumpkin, a late replacement for Charles Ansbacher, conducts. Remaining performances are April 30 at 7:30 p.m., May 2 at 3 p.m., May 4 and 7 at 7:30 p.m., May 9 at 3 p.m., and May 11 at 7:30 p.m., all at the Shubert Theatre, 265 Tremont Street in the Theater District. Tickets are $33 to $152; call (800) 447-7400.


Issue Date: April 30 - May 6, 2004
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