Distinguished Concerts International New York (DCINY) Presents Mozart’s Requiem in Review
Jonathan Griffith, DCINY Artistic Director and Principal Conductor for Mozart: Requiem
Distinguished Concerts Singers International; Distinguished Concerts Orchestra
Mark Hayes, Composer/Conductor for Kindness (World Premiere) and The Field
Penelope Shumate, Soprano; Teresa Bucholz, Mezzo-Soprano;
Chad Kranak, Tenor; Christopher Job, Bass-Baritone
David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, NY
May 26, 2024
In a Memorial Day weekend program billed as Mozart’s Requiem, Distinguished Concerts International New York (DCINY) presented not only that masterpiece, left unfinished by Mozart in his last days, but also new music by American composer, Mark Hayes. It was a thought-provoking concert, with its music spanning over 200 years, bridging the centuries through themes of suffering and love, human and divine.
With the composer Mark Hayes at the podium, DCINY’s chorus and orchestra opened the program with his short work entitled The Field and continued with his lengthier work, Kindness, a Chorale and Fugue in the Baroque Tradition (a World Premiere, courtesy of the DCINY Premiere Project).
The Field was a captivating start, drawing the listener into a soulful text by the 13th-century Sufi mystic, Rumi. Expressing the world’s oneness through the metaphor of a field, the work expresses the need for humanity to transcend language and other barriers and come together. The music and emotion build very early in the piece (some might say surprisingly so) to large, lush sonorities that convey the expanse of a universal “field” – before dropping to quieter levels in the intimate line, “I’ll meet you there” – a moving moment and a welcome reminder that it all starts with individuals. The expanse of the “field” was like a full orchestral embrace. The imitative setting of the words “ideas” and “language” conveyed just the right sense of “clutter” to support the poem’s sentiment of moving beyond them, into a world that is “too full to talk about.” Using familiar hymn-like harmonies colored with the Lydian mode and some motifs reminiscent of spirituals, The Field projected a timeless grace. DCINY’s combined choruses and orchestra performed it with clear dedication.
The next work by Mark Hayes was Kindness, a Chorale and Fugue in the Baroque Tradition. It is an ambitious and lengthy work (around thirty minutes) that sets out, through a rhetorical approach of alternating questions and answers, to solve the central universal problem of “How shall we live?” The responses to the question are many (“We embrace. We welcome all.”), but the answer is essentially and repeatedly “kindness.” It is not hard to see the need for such a project in today’s world, though pulling off such a text has obvious challenges.
Though Kindness may employ a Baroque rhetorical approach, even inviting a reference in the program notes to Bach’s B minor Mass and Handel’s Messiah, those predecessors had very different texts with certain dramatic trajectories built into them, including highly specific events (the crucifixion, as an example). Though a work avoiding plot lines to focus on a broad concept of “kindness” may be more universal, such a work also risks feeling more generic unless the text is highly specific and the music exceptionally vivid. A text without some dramatic catalysts or opportunities for dissonance or contrasting darkness can lose differentiation and direction – and the listener’s attention. Just reading the text in advance of the concert and knowing this composer’s penchant for steady and sweet consonance, this listener had some concerns. One was that, with the composer setting his own text, that quality might only intensify. Some of these concerns turned out to be justified, and extensive repetition in the text became part of the issue. Such sweeping terms as “comfort” and “compassion” – and yes, “kindness” – can drain of color with each reiteration, rendering the experience rather amorphous.
Some of these concerns, though, were diminished by some effective decisions, including adding tonal relief through several harpsichord interludes. These interludes broke up the choral segments with contrasting keyboard material that included hints of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring (as mentioned in the program notes) and textures reminiscent to this listener of Bach’s C minor Prelude from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Alternation of solo voices also helped alleviate a tendency toward the monochromatic – and this was especially welcome with the exchanges between soprano Penelope Shumate and tenor Chad Kranak. One has been impressed for many years by Ms. Shumate’s performances, but Chad Kranak had particularly dazzled in last year’s Messiah with DCINY, so it was great to hear him again in fine form. The subsequent blending of Shumate and Kranak in duet illustrated the text eloquently in the words, “our kindness is magnified” (further reprised by the full chorus). The cumulative energy (signifying the growing resolve to be kind) was achieved well in the latter part of the piece. The final chorus, if extracted, seemed like it could become an anthem of sorts, and the final line “Kindness will change the world” brought the work to an optimistic conclusion. Many in the audience clearly enjoyed the experience, applauding heartily.
For the second half, Jonathan Griffith conducted Mozart’s Requiem in the Robert D. Levin completion. It is not every week that one hears this Requiem twice, once in the famous Süssmayr completion and next in the Levin one, but it just so happened that this reviewer attended the N.Y. Philharmonic’s Süssmayr performance under Jaap van Zweden (also at David Geffen Hall) just four days before the DCINY one. Faced with a feast of possible preferences, this listener will just say that both performances were extremely compelling. There is a message here on the importance of the performers themselves – and certainly on how even a few kernels of Mozart bore magnificent fruit.
The Süssmayr completion has frequently been faulted for not being “Mozartean” enough, for various voice-leading and other weaknesses, and for being too thickly orchestrated, with frequent instrumental doubling of vocal parts. There have been other completions since, but it is Robert Levin’s version, commissioned for a 1991 bicentennial of the composer’s death and recorded a few years later, that has been the most highly regarded alternative since then, with good reason. Mr. Levin chose to work with the Süssmayr version, rather than replacing it completely (a wise decision, given the version’s two centuries of becoming ensconced in our minds), but he created, in his own words “a more transparent instrumentation” derived from Mozart’s other church music (placing the choir more “in the foreground”), in addition to a non-modulating Amen fugue, a newly composed Hosanna fugue – and a host of other subtle and ingenious changes. His work is a marvel of scholarship and musicianship.
The DCINY performance of Levin’s version Sunday did indeed have a transparency in which the chorus was supreme, though undoubtedly some of this was owed to the chorus’s enormous size. (One imagines they might have retained sovereignty through the Süssmayr version as well.) The participating choruses included the Greater Lake Area Chorale, Reclaim Arts Academy Chorale, New Dominion Choraliers Of Prince William County, Belin Memorial United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, Yelm Community Choir, Celebration Community Church Choir, First United Methodist Church Of Arroyo Grande Chancel Choir, Jonathan Griffith Singers, Johnson County Choral Ensemble, Weymouth Choral Society, Pilgrim Choir, First Congregational Church, Joyful Band Of Singers, Bach Society Of Dayton, North Decatur Presbyterian Church Community Choir, The Manassas Chorale, SoJo Choral Arts, St. Louis County Community Chorus, Dickinson County Community Chorus, Ipswich River Community Chorus, Stuyvesant High School Oratorio Choir, and the Richmond Choral Society & Arcadian Chorale. These DCINY choruses constituted, as ever, a virtual army of singers. By contrast, the chorus with the New York Philharmonic was considerably smaller – though any lack of transparency issues in the Süssmayr score there had been minimized by the superb listening and control of the conductor and ensembles.
DCINY also benefited, as ever, from terrific orchestral players. The Tuba mirum enjoyed outstanding brass playing, and the full forces of chorus and orchestra combined to a thunderous effect, particularly stirring in the Rex tremendae. The dynamic contrasts were striking in the Hostias movement, and the solos were admirable from soprano Penelope Shumate, mezzo-soprano Teresa Bucholz, tenor Chad Kranak, and bass-baritone Christopher Job.
It was mystifying that neither the Benedictus nor the Sanctus (nor Hosanna) was included in the otherwise full printed text of all the other movements – they were definitely heard (though this big double-Requiem week caused one momentarily to doubt oneself) – and they were excellent. Where the text of the Benedictus should have been, your reviewer scribbled “Christopher Job is superb” and “vocal quartet high point.” Whereas the NY Philharmonic had chosen to segue from the Lux Aeterna into Mozart’s profound Ave Verum Corpus, K. 618, this DCINY concert ended on a triumphant note with the Cum sanctis tuis. The audience stood for a loud ovation. Bravi tutti!
