The progress that the Master Chorale of South Florida made in its first concert of the current season was gratifyingly on display again Saturday night for its second and last concert of the season, this one devoted to music by child prodigies.
New artistic director Brett Karlin chose three very eminent prodigies (rather than say, William Crotch or Camille Saint-Saëns) for the concert — Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn — with the major work being the Schubert Mass No. 2 (in G, D. 167), and the standout performance of the evening coming from a young soprano named Lauren Snouffer.
Karlin, an energetic, passionate 27-year-old from Boca Raton, has very wisely chosen to treat his chorale as a real chorale, rather than a large collection of volunteer enthusiasts who would provide the icing on the cake of huge orchestral works, leaving the audience wondering why the chorus itself had so little to do.
Appearing at the Wold Performing Arts Center on the campus of Lynn University in Boca accompanied by the Symphonia Boca Raton’s string section, Karlin programmed six choral works, a solo vocal motet and a string serenade, a mix that gave everyone on stage plenty of things to do without shortchanging the chorale.
Snouffer, a 26-year-old Texan who holds degrees from Rice University and the Juilliard School, is a graduate of the Houston Grand Opera Studio and has sung in London, Toulouse and Vienna as well as with Chicago’s Lyric Opera and at the Tanglewood Festival and with the New York Philarmonic. It’s an impressive career already, and the relatively small but hugely enthusiastic audience at the Wold saw and heard why.
Snouffer has a flexible, pretty but muscular voice that has a mature tone and silvery vibrato, and she supports it with excellent breath control. It is an ideal voice for Baroque opera and Mozart, and one expects to see her sometime soon in one or another of the great Da Ponte operas on some first-rate stage.
She sang Exsultate, jubilate (K. 165), a Mozart motet from the composer’s youth that is nevertheless recognizably his. In addition to the confident and stylistically accurate way she sang this motet, her command of its flashy display, in the body of the three movements as well as the tasteful cadenzas, was most impressive. Snouffer simply let the scales unspool with consummate naturalness, one well-formed rapid note right after the other.
Perhaps most of all, she knows how to make her voice sound like a part of Mozart’s instrumental battery rather than oversinging it simply because you happen to be the soloist. Her voice was like another violin in the Symphonia, sighing and yielding along with them, and that made it much more deeply musical. Karlin led the closing Alleluia, the best-known part of the piece, a little too fast, but Snouffer was up for it, and also nailed the traditionally interpolated high C in the closing cadence.
She also sang with the same kind of smooth, ensemble-aware beauty in the Laudate Dominum, the best-known section of Mozart’s Vesperae solennes de confessore (K. 339). The choir’s first entrance was somewhat heavy-handed, but it was hard to resist the bigness and warmth of this group’s sound once things got past the first small bump.
Franz Schubert was following in Mozart’s footsteps with the missa brevis format for several of his masses; Mozart was adapting to new church directions that called for much shorter pieces of music to go along with the mass. Schubert’s Mass in G, written in 1815 when the composer was 18, is a much-loved compact work that carries the missa brevis forward without going too far in a theatrical direction.
Snouffer was joined by tenor Brandon Mowry and bass Dennis Ryan (just seen earlier this month in a bit part in Florida Grand Opera’s production of Tosca). This was a swift, energetic reading of the mass, carefully worked out and well-drilled, especially in the fugal Osanna in excelsis, which is heard twice. Snouffer’s singing was lovely, and blended agreeably with Mowry’s strong, reedy tenor and Ryan’s large, round bass.
Still, some of Karlin’s tempos were too fast for the music to really speak fully, particularly the opening Kyrie, which raced along as though there was a looming deadline he had to meet. That’s not to say the music needs to be slow and reverential; far from it. It’s just that we can hear better what Schubert was up to in the Kyrie if that beautiful tune with which it starts gets a moment to breathe.
In addition to the accompanied pieces, the chorus opened the concert with three a cappella part-songs by Felix Mendelssohn. This is unfairly neglected repertoire (as is much German vocal music of this period, Schumann and Brahms in particular), and it was wonderful that they were on this program. The Psalm 100 setting, Jauchzet dem Herrn, which came first, demonstrated how much power you can have with almost 100 people singing on stage, opening as it does with an epic burst of praise.
In the second piece, Zum Abendsegen, the tenors introduced the fugue subject with strength, which bade well for the rest of the concert, and the choir delivered a moving, darkly shaded reading of this plea for divine intervention. The set closed with a richly pretty miniature, Ruhetal (Op. 59. No. 5).
The Symphonia Boca Raton strings (along with organist Jared Peroune) proved to be fine accompanists for the chorale throughout, and the strings alone got a chance to shine on their own with a performance after the Mendelssohn songs of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (K. 525), the G major string serenade that, as Karlin noted in brief remarks, is among the best-known pieces of classical music in the canon.
Karlin is a committed, physical conductor, moving constantly on the podium, and doing things such as marking phrases with his upper body, in the manner of someone like Michael Tilson Thomas; the case in point here was that Mannheim rocket that launches the theme of the finale: it’s a key part of the movement’s structure, and Karlin emphasized each note of it with his shoulders. Again, tempos were quite brisk, and in the finale, overly so, which left the orchestra sounding like they were trying to keep up, and cleanliness and precision suffered.
Overall, though, it was a good and welcome rendition of this classic, and it buttressed the overall sonic palette of the program. The concert closed with a sweet, sensitive performance of another Mozart choral standard, his late Ave verum corpus (K. 618), composed not long before his death in 1791.
It has been a pleasure to hear the Master Chorale this season, with its much greater focus on the breadth of the choral literature rather than continuing to sing just the orchestral choral works. The next season will feature four programs rather than just two, and include crowd-pleasers such as a Messiah singalong and Carl Orff’s deathless Carmina Burana. But it will also include a program of Leipzig-associated music by J.S. Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann, and should mark a further advance for this group into the mainstream of area classical organizations.
With Brett Karlin at the helm, this community chorus’s future is wide-open, and with soloists the caliber of Lauren Snouffer, it can achieve the kind of excellence that led the Wold audience on Saturday night to jump out of its seats and demand a third curtain call at the end of a nourishing, fulfilling concert of core and unusual repertoire.
The Master Chorale of South Florida performs this program again this afternoon at the First United Methodist Church in Coral Gables. The concert begins at 4 p.m. Tickets are30; call 954-418-6232 or visit www.masterchoraleofsouthflorida.com.