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Alsop, Sykes & Company Play Bernstein "Mass" as Towering Work for Troubled Time |
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by Bruce-Michael Gelbert |
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| Marin Alsop - photo by Grant Leighton |
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Kudos in excelsis to openly lesbian Maestra Marin Alsop and her Baltimore Symphony Orchestra players, director Kevin Newbury, and Jubilant Sykes and the other singers for bringing Leonard Bernstein's 1971 "Mass" to Carnegie Hall on October 24, just a week-and-a-half before Election Day, and making it an apt, towering statement for our time.
Bernstein wrote his "Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers," on commission from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to open the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C., a complex named for her husband, President John F. Kennedy, assassinated eight years earlier. It was a troubled time then, marked by an unpopular war, in Vietnam, and Bernstein's "Mass" reflects its turmoil, while holding out hope for redemptive peace at the end. It is a no less troubled time now, marked by unpopular war in the Middle East, and hopes are fervent that Election Day will bring the light of change at the end of this gloomy tunnel.
Taking the central solo part of the Celebrant of the Mass, Sykes, nominally a baritone, proved himself a man of many parts. In his opening hymn and psalm, "A Simple Song," Sykes sang reverent praises in classical baritone, head tone, and pop/musical theater voice. Sykes' tour de force, though, was "Things Get Broken," his riveting, full-blown Mad Scene, an unraveling replete with pathos, his singing eerily quiet, punctuated by passionate outbursts and, at a partial reiteration of the "De Profondis," an appropriately cavernous vocal descent.
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| Jubilant Sykes - photo by Terrance McCarthy |
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Redemption came at the end in the form of pure sounds of flute and boy soprano Asher Edward Wulfman, offering peace, communion, and "Secret Songs," which were eventually joined by the other singers.
The remaining soloists, dubbed the Street Chorus by Bernstein and colleagues Stephen Schwartz and Paul Simon, who contributed to the text, sang, like Sykes, in English, Latin and Hebrew, danced a rousing hora, voiced questions, doubts and challenges, and issued-in an aggressive "Dona nobis pacem," out of an angry anti-war rally, in the "Agnus Dei" movement of "Mass"-a demand, not a plea, for peace. These accomplished singers, with credits in theater, opera and more, asked to sing blues and rock, among other things, were Sarah Uriarte Berry, Matt Boehler, Susan Derry, Celisse Henderson, Leah Horowitz, Morgan James, Amy Justman, Jodie Langel, Telly Leung, Theresa McCarthy, Mike McGowan, Dan Micciche, Joe Paparella, Max Perlman, Janet Saia, Caesar Samayoa, Timothy Shew (a veteran of Collegiate Chorale's 2002 "Mass," under the late Robert Bass), Kevin Vortmann, J.D. Webster, and Laurie Williamson.
Among the achievements of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus here were whistling and playing kazoos and singing "Alleluja" in the rollicking Prefatory Prayers of the First Introit and, electric 'candles' in hand, bringing a message of peace out into the auditorium and down the aisles at the climax of the work. The Morgan State University Choir sang, like the others, like angels.
Alsop's instrumentalists shone, in particular, in two orchestral Meditations, one delivering moments of respite from the singers' harsh addresses to God, but then caught up in the turbulence, the other full of melancholy yearning.
Paul Simon's quatrain, very much of its time, but worth quoting here, begins, "Half of the people are stoned/And the other half are waiting for the next election." Pax nobiscum. Peace be with us all.
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