One of the more tantalizing aspects of the career of Mozart is his work in sacred music, and that’s primarily because it feels somewhat unfulfilled.
There is much great music in the Coronation Mass and even in the epistle sonatas, and choral ensembles across the land would be lost without the motet Ave verum corpus, but the finest of his sacred music was unfinished: The Mass in C minor, and the Requiem, left incomplete at his early death in 1791. Both works, as it happens, have been given contemporary completions by the formidable pianist and Mozart scholar Robert Levin.
The Master Chorale of South Florida has now performed both of these completions, the C minor mass a couple of seasons ago, and the Requiem this weekend. In concerts Friday, Saturday, and this afternoon, the chorus paired the Requiem with the early Te Deum (K. 141), written in 1769 when Mozart was only 13 and back in Salzburg, where he and his father Leopold were planning their next move.
Joined by the Boca Symphonia, chorale director Joshua Habermann led decent, unobjectionable readings of both these works Saturday night at the Boca Raton Community High School’s Lindgren Auditorium. The Levin completion is quite logical and also very modest; his major contribution is the Amen fugue at the end of the Sequence. Levin’s fugue is based on a Mozart sketch discovered in the 1960s, and it’s a very good one, persuasive, entirely plausible and suitably grand.
Assistant conductor Richard Skirpan led the chorale for the Te Deum, a brief work modeled (as is the opening of the Requiem) on a work by Michael Haydn. It’s well-written and appropriately joyous, and the chorus sounded strong in the first and third sections, and surprisingly soft in the middle for such a large group: the program roster lists 114 names.
While the sound was big and diction was clear, the blend of all those voices was somewhat ragged at the high and low ends, and the Symphonia, too, was not consistently smooth, which made the piece sound more unfocused than it really is. Skirpan’s tempos were good, and his direction clean and clear.
For the Requiem, the chorale and orchestra were joined by four soloists — soprano Susan Williams, mezzo Misty Bermudez, tenor Tony Boutté and bass Teppei Kono. Williams has a sweet, smallish voice, as does Boutté, and both sang with professional polish. Kono has a bigger, rounder sound, and he sang well in the Tuba mirum, though the trombone soloist almost overwhelmed him at times. Bermudez, a familiar feature at Seraphic Fire concerts, has a lovely dark coloring to her voice that was especially compelling here.
Habermann evidently is a stickler for precision, and the chorale’s entrances were sharp and unhesitating. In the past, this has been a chorus with a weaker male contingent, but Saturday the men sounded a good bit stronger, and with the sole exception of some tenor softness in the higher registers here and there, the men held up their end of things with impressive solidity.
In general, this was a reading of the Requiem that was very much along traditional lines, with tempos on the slow side, and a very cautious approach to the music-making. The Dies irae, for example, started with a punch but ended up being large rather than violently dramatic, and while that section doesn’t have the gigantism of Romantic masses for the dead of Berlioz or Verdi, it does have something Cherubini mostly doesn’t, and that’s inner fire. The same goes for the Confutatis, which needed some more drive and vigor to make the right contrast with the passages beginning Voca me, in which the supplicant pleads for mercy as his life weighs in the balance between redemption and perdition.
Despite its incomplete nature, this is music that always makes a strong impression, and Levin’s additions are respectful enough not to detract from its essential power (and I would contend that the Amen fugue makes this completion to be preferred). We’ll never know what Mozart would have made of the work had he lived even a month or two longer, but the text itself, and the way the composer has set it already, should have led to a Master Chorale performance that was a little less solemn and careful, and a little more urgent, a little more vital.
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The Master Chorale of South Florida’s next season will contain two seminal masterworks. Haydn’s oratorio The Creation is scheduled for Nov. 19-21, and the Requiem of Verdi is set for March 25-27, 2011. For more information, call 954-418-6232.