In its concert this past weekend of J.S. Bach and holiday music, the Master Chorale of South Florida both continued in its traditions and explored a newer path that may pay bigger dividends for the group in the future.
In its first appearance under its new director, Karen Kennedy, the chorale offered up a seasonal program that began with J.S. Bach’s Magnificat (BWV 243), accompanied by four soloists and members of the Miami Symphony Orchestra. At the Wold Center for the Performing Arts at Lynn University on Saturday night, the chorale sounded strong and well-drilled.
Kennedy opened the Magnificat with the proper Bachian briskness, and suddenly it was all trumpets and praise, a classic sound of the holidays. The chorale has 90 people, an unusually large complement for the Magnificat, but I enjoyed hearing it in XXL, and Bach, who famously complained about the inadequacy of the forces he had in Leipzig, would surely have liked it, too.
The chorus sounded good in the Bach, handling its flowery melismas ably, and it also sounded well-balanced, with a sturdy tenor complement more than holding its own, especially in the Fecit potentiam. Entrances were pretty good considering the size of the group (the Omnes generationes was slightly shaky at the very outset), and when the chorus sang, it commanded.
The soloists demonstrated good Baroque chops; mezzo Misty Bermudez is a regular member of Seraphic Fire, and tenor Tony Boutté is the founder of Arcanum, a Miami-based Baroque-music ensemble. Soprano Ah Young Hong had the warmest, biggest voice of the four, offering a very nice Quia respexit humiltatem. Bermudez and Boutté blended well on Et misericordia, their lightly colored instruments matching admirably, and both sang their solo pieces (Deposuit and Esurientes, respectively) capably.
Bass David Newman has a strong if not especially resonant voice, but he could have done with some more help from the continuo on Quia fecit mihi magna, which was played here with almost no — well, continuo; all I could hear was the bare notes of the cello and bass. One hopes there was a technical issue with the volume on Matt Steynor’s organ rather than that this no-mayo accompaniment was intentional.
The accompaniment in general from the Miami Symphony was fine, with impressive work from concertmaster Daniel Andai and principal cellist Aron Zelkowicz in the Deposuit. Woodwind work was also good in the various solos, and the only real blotch on this sturdy performance of this work was the ending of Suscepit Israel, in which Hong and Bermudez were joined by mezzo Jamie Cartright; the final measures went sharply awry, and the threesome’s arrival at a consonant B major chord at the end came as a relief.
The second half turned to smaller works, including two Hanukkah tunes, Mi Y’Maleil and S’Yivon, in charming arrangements by Joseph Flummerfelt. The a cappella singing was pleasant, though the pitch went south en masse in the second half of Mi Y’Maleil. The Jewish holiday songs were preceded by the Miami Symphony strings in the Christmas Concerto (Op. 6, No. 8) of Arcangelo Corelli, which got better as it went along, ending very sweetly in the famous closing Pastorale; associate conductor Jeffrey Stern led the Corelli and the Hanukkah selections.
Kennedy returned for a medley of three carols specially arranged, on a very short deadline, for the choir by Alexander Schumacker, a graduate student of Kennedy’s at the University of Miami. He has done quite a good job, especially in bringing distinctive colors to each of the carols: Gustav Holst’s In the Bleak Midwinter, followed by the Czech traditional carol Rocking, and ending with the Spanish carol Riu, Riu Chiu.
For Rocking, Schumacker devised a gentle, two-beat open texture that directed the attention to the melody, and for Riu, Riu Chiu, he added some very effective orchestration that made the carol stand out from the rest. Had he more time, he might have resisted the Respighian trills in Rocking, and perhaps rethought the loud dynamics of the last verse of the Holst; it seems counter to the terribly intimate sentiment of Christina Rossetti’s poem.
The chorus closed with a good but somewhat imprecise reading of Eric Whitacre’s Lux aurumque, a piece that shimmers alluringly yet still needs to spot-on to work correctly, and James Bassi’s Carol Symphony, a canny three-movement work that uses the Ukrainian Carol of the Bells, the Irish Wexford Carol, and the English carol Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day. This is a very skillful piece, and chorus and orchestra, plus Bermudez in the Wexford Carol, brought it forth with spirit and life.
The audience at the Wold Center was not very large, though it was supportive, for this opening concert of the chorale’s ninth season. It was a smart move for the Fort Lauderdale-based chorus to collaborate with Lynn and the Miami Symphony to beef up resources and add venues, and chorale officials say the group’s in good financial shape and looking forward to its now-annual Valentine’s Day appearance with poperatic tenor Andrea Bocelli.
But the chorus now stands at an important junction. It has always presented programs that would be typical of choruses attached to orchestras, as it used to be to the Florida Philharmonic. That has led to some programs (such as Haydn’s Creation) in which the main focus was on soloists and orchestra, not the chorus.
It seems to me that what the Master Chorale needs to do now is develop a sense of itself as a real chorus, a group that sings the bulk of the choral literature rather than major orchestral works that also include massed voices. It might be better off, say, doing five concerts a year, with one or two of them in the mold of the Magnificat or some other big work. The other three, though, could be choral concerts, featuring masterpieces from Renaissance to contemporary times, perhaps with smaller units of the chorus broken off for other pieces during those concerts.
It may be time, in other words, for this fine ensemble, which has a uniquely devoted membership, to move away from being a chorus without orchestral portfolio and more toward a chorus whose identity is its own, and not ancillary to a large assembly of instrumental musicians. That would make things more interesting for singers and audiences alike, and open up whole new stretches of the repertoire for the Master Chorale to investigate.