August 24, 2009: "That's amore!"

It is too often forgotten that the noun "amateur" has its origin in the Latin noun "amator" (lover).  The amateur works for love of the task, without giving much (if any) priority to compensation.  Nevertheless, many amateurs approach their work with a serious of purpose.  Such seriousness may best be viewed through the model of the wedding vows that make it a point to couple "love" with "honor."  This seems particularly appropriate for the amateur musician.  It is not just a matter of "loving" the music (whatever that may mean);  it is also necessary to "honor" the music with a level of understanding that does justice to both the text being performed and the spirit of the composer behind that text.

Last June the amateur members of Symphony Parnassus demonstrated such a coupling of love and honor in the performance they prepared of Gustav Mahler's fifth symphony.  In writing about that performance, I observed:

The fact that the orchestra, as a whole, was able to acquire that same "ear" provided compensation for the occasional missed cue. The flesh may not have been up to every challenge that Mahler set, but the spirits were there in full force. The result was far more stimulating than more routine approaches that never seem to get beyond jumping through all of the requisite technical hoops.

Without the "honor of the ear," some of those missed cues could have turned into train wrecks.  Instead, a proper balance of love and honor justified my use of the adjective "stimulating."

Needless to say, some composers are more conducive to such honor than others.  It is hard to imagine Mahler being particularly generous to amateur efforts.  However, he was from Vienna, which has long been a city in which amateurs practice music, rather than just listen to it.  Thus, for all the prodigious virtuosity that Franz Schubert's music can demand from both instrumentalists and vocalists, when it came to setting a mass, he appreciated that it would be sung by a church choir consisting primarily (if not entirely) of members of the congregation.  Thus, his D. 167 G major mass, scored for soprano, tenor, and bass soloists, mixed chorus, strings, and organ, makes relatively straightforward homophonic demands of the chorus, confining his compositional adventurism (he was only eighteen at the time) to subtle shifts in harmony and rhythm.  Furthermore, the overall scale of the sound is relatively limited, probably because the church for which he composed the music was not particularly large.  Nevertheless, that small scale succeeds just as well in larger spaces, since it never tries to compete with natural reverberations.  In other words this music is perfect for the amateur musician committed to both love and honor.

That commitment was clearly evident in the performance given by the San Francisco Lyric Chorus this weekend under the direction of Robert Gurney.  Indeed, Gurney even honored the "amateur's love" by having two sopranos (Cassandra Forth and Kathryn Singh) alternate in performing those solo parts.  The accompaniment was provided only by organist Robert Train Adams with a selection of stops suitable for the relatively lightweight scale of the setting.  This scale was similar honored by all the performers in the six selections of music by Felix Mendelssohn that concluded the concert.  These included two excerpts from Christus, two from Elijah, a five-part setting of the "Kyrie eleison" text, and the "Beati Mortui" from the Two Sacred Works for Men's Chorus (Opus 115).

The only composer who did not fare well in the Lyric Chorus program was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose K. 339 Vesperae Solennes de Confessore was deprived of that honor that had been given so readily to Schubert.  The key problem probably had to do with the "Solennes" adjective, which, as the program book indicated, carried the connotation of orchestral accompaniment.  This composition is thus a shining example of Mozart's orchestral writing in dialog with his vocal writing.  Whether or not any organ performance could have done justice to the orchestral score is debatable;  but Adams' selection of stops (and, probably, a general agreement over tempo), reduced Mozart's elegant scoring to a blur within the opening measures of the performance;  and that blur was only further exaggerated by the chorus.

I suspect the critical difference is that, while the Schubert composition was, as I observed, primarily homophonic, Mozart could never resist an opportunity to exercise his contrapuntal chops;  and K. 339 saw him at the top of his game.  This work is certainly up there with his requiem setting, his C major mass setting, and the perfectly serene (and homophonic) "Ave Verum Corpus" (K. 618).  Indeed, all the intricacies of its composition would probably put a strain on the acoustics of just about any church or cathedral setting, making the concert hall the preferable environment.  Only in the "Laudate Dominum" movement, in which a solo soprano is accompanied by the chorus, did Gurney succeed in scaling back the resources to honor the sense of dialog among soloist, chorus, and "virtual orchestra."  Mozart deserved better, but we could still enjoy the love and honor given to Schubert and Mendelssohn.