The Gathering Note

By: Philippa Kiraly

Around Puget Sound at Christmastime, we can hear Handel’s Messiah performed on a dozen different nights by several different organizations. While I wish we heard other great Christmas works as well, like Berlioz’ L’Enfance du Christ, or Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Messiah heralds Christmas for us and adds greatly to the mood.

However, until recently we haven’t heard so much of the great works written for the week before Easter, notably Bach’s two great Passions.

Kudos, therefore, to Choral Arts and conductor Robert Bode for taking on the St. John Passion, which they performed Friday night at Plymouth Church. While shorter and less well known than the St. Matthew, the St. John is still a huge challenge for a small choir, and Choral Arts did an admirable job.

At a quick count, there are 17 choruses and 13 choralesto be sung. The choruses are an essential part of furthering the story, each having its own importance in creating and furthering the drama. From the first, sober “Herr, unser Herrscher”(“Lord, our master”) to an appallingly eager mob mentality in “Kreuzige, kreuzige!” (“Crucify, crucify!”) and more of similar, chilling mode, to the peaceful acceptance of “Ruht wohl,” (“Rest well”) near the end, the choir caught and conveyed the emotions. In the Chorales, the stand-back commentary on the story, the feelings are gentler but still there: faith, grief, thankfulness among them.

The roles of the Evangelist, Jesus, and Pilate were excellently sung by tenor Ross Hauck, baritone David Farwig, and bass Norman Smith respectively, while the instrumental side consisted largely of Seattle Baroque Orchestra players.
Although the St. John is a more intimate Passion than the St. Matthew and does not have the same structural coherence as a work, I would have liked more of a sense of majesty about this performance, more of a sense of decisiveness. The performance didn’t sag, but it didn’t lift far off the ground in the first half, the second being considerably more engaging.

Partly this seemed due to frequent imbalances in the orchestra or between orchestra and singers. Some of this may be due to acoustics in the church, but from my seat midway back at left center, I could only hear the violins when playing by themselves and I never heard the violas at all. Even with just a soloist singing, the violins were too light, so that their line in the polyphony was rarely audible.

At the beginning, the flutes were too obtrusive even in their prominent (and well played) role, while all through, the most consistent sound came from the lower instruments, grounding the entire performance and always to be heard.
Occasional uncertainties left the impression that the orchestra had had too few rehearsals with choir and soloists.

I could also not hear runs clearly, whether instrumental or vocal, with the notable exception of soprano Linda Strandberg’s two arias. The male soloists all had vibratos which muddied the line somewhat, but I think the lack of clarity was more attributable, again, to the church acoustics, which left a certain murkiness to all the singing. Had alto Stacey Sunde sung quietly in her aria “Von den Stricken,” (“From the bonds”) as the music sometimes needed, she would have been overpowered by the oboes playing obbligato.  Hauck did his most expressive work as Evangelist in the second half. The excitement of the temple being torn in half came across as though he was an on-the-scene reporter, and at other times his narrative took on tones of deep sorrow. Farwig’s moving “Es ist vollbracht,” (“It is finished”) was the quiet heart of the work.