When it comes to the concert season, says Brett Karlin, it may be that we’re all taking it a little too easy.
Consider: A music-loving South Florida resident in the winter months is a lucky creature, with performers from around the globe as well as much closer to home willing to offer almost any kind of musical experience he or she desires. But maybe a majority of those concerts aren’t focused on challenging the audience, or indeed, the performers.
Karlin, director of the Master Chorale of South Florida, wanted to do something epic for the first concert of the new season. “This area needs something like this,” said the Boca Raton native. “A lot of the concerts in this area are shorter, lighter fare.”
His choice was one of the most monumental of all choral works: The Mass in B Minor of Johann Sebastian Bach, which the group, five soloists and The Symphonia Boca Raton will perform three times this month from Nov. 18-20.
“It was time for the Chorale to eat an elephant, albeit one bite at a time,” Karlin said.
This colossal piece is one of Bach’s greatest achievements, and ergo, one of the loftiest achievements in all of Western music. It’s a compendium of a dazzling variety of sacred music styles that were in the air in early 18th-century Germany, and the devout Lutheran Bach uses all of his compositional power to make them all work with the ancient Catholic Latin text in an unforgettable way.
“Without a doubt, performing Bach’s Mass in B Minor is the most difficult, wide-eyed, significant thing the Master Chorale of South Florida has done in its history,” Karlin said. In its past, the Chorale has performed large pieces such as Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Haydn’s Creation, both of them with significant cuts, he said. Those are big pieces, “but nothing compared to the B Minor Mass, which is about a two-hour show with intermission. It’s a huge amount of music, just massive.”
The Master Chorale, which was created for the late Florida Philharmonic, survived after the orchestra’s demise in 2003 and has had four directors since then. A community chorus made up largely of non-professionals, it currently has 121 members, Karlin said. The chorus will be accompanied by a Baroque-oriented version of The Symphonia Boca Raton holding about 30 players.
For the work’s five soloists, Karlin has landed some of the best early music singers working today, including sopranos Jolle Greenleaf and Nola Robinson; countertenor Doug Dodgson; tenor Dann Coakwell and bass Paul Max Tipton. The combined forces of more than 150 people will perform the entire Mass, uncut, in each of the three metro counties: Nov. 18 at Fort Lauderdale’s Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church; Nov. 19 at the First United Methodist Church in Coral Gables; and Nov. 20 at the Roberts Theater on the campus of St. Andrew’s School in western Boca Raton.
Training the chorus to tackle this masterwork took much more than the usual preparation time.
“We elongated our rehearsal period, nearly doubled it from our normal rehearsal period for a concert,” Karlin said. The Chorale’s singers got their scores at the end of July, and have been working on the music since then.
“In addition, we’ve done extra rehearsals, so in addition to our regular Mondays, I had all our sopranos and altos come in on a Saturday, all the tenors and basses come in on a Saturday … We just had a Wednesday rehearsal, and we’ll have a Sunday rehearsal in two weeks,” he said, speaking in the last week of October.
He’s also had some of the professional musicians in the chorus lead section rehearsals for each voice type, so that the singers can “really focus on the nuanced introduction of those parts, those pitches, those rhythms, as well as the language.”
Scholars generally agree that Bach assembled the final version of the Mass in 1748 and 1749, not long before his death in 1750. But it contains “parodies,” or rewrites, of earlier works dating to 1714 and 1724, and includes two sections (the “Kyrie” and “Gloria”) that were performed in 1733 in Dresden for the new Saxon Elector August III.
Throughout the Mass, large-scale choral movements alternate with duets and solos accompanied by much smaller sections of the orchestra, and in a multiplicity of styles ranging from Palestrina-like counterpoint to arias that could have come out of contemporary opera.
Holly Strawbridge, a publicist for the Chorale who also is one of its two female tenors, said in an email that the work has indeed been a great challenge.
“It’s by far the most difficult work we’ve ever tackled, mostly because the lines are not predictable,” Strawbridge wrote. “It’s like a tapestry: Each voice part doesn’t make much sense on its own, but woven together, they create a profoundly beautiful work of art.”
The long hours of technical preparation are leavened by a big-picture approach Karlin brings to the rehearsals.
“I will share with the chorus that I listened to something on NPR that morning about absolute travesties and terrifying things that are happening around the world, and [say] how lucky we are as human beings to be making music with each other,” he said.
The power of the music also leads Karlin, who is descended from Russian Jews on his father’s side and Irish Catholics on his mother’s, into describing the music’s effect on him less in a religious than in a spiritual and metaphysical way.
“This piece, musically and aurally, encapsulates private moments that we all have, but don’t talk about. Those moments when we are sobbing, hitting our hand on the wall, or those moments when there is absolutely no one or nothing there for us. [Then there are] those moments that are absolutely uplifting and celebratory and profoundly joyous.
“I know it might sound hyperbolic, but in this piece, I don’t just see it as a prayer or religious meditation or dedication to God, but rather an aural representation of what the human experience is … The real attraction to this piece for me is it’s everything I feel, everything we all feel, in a kaleidoscope of movements,” said Karlin, who turns 30 this month.
For Strawbridge, preparing the “big sing” that is the Bach B Minor Mass is paying dividends as the piece takes shape.
“We’ve been nibbling away at this work for a couple months and are starting to feel rewarded,” she wrote. “When five soloists and an orchestra are added, we have full confidence the audience will be awestruck.”
The Master Chorale of South Florida performs J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 18, at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale; at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 19, at the First United Methodist Church of Coral Gables in Coral Gables; and at 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 20, at the Roberts Theater at St. Andrew’s School in Boca Raton. Tickets are $30. Call 954-641-2653 or visit www.masterchoraleofsouthflorida.org.