February 16, 1998
MUSIC REVIEW

MUSIC REVIEW; Masur Rethinks 'St. Matthew Passion' From All Angles
By JAMES R. OESTREICH

As Kurt Masur revisits the scenes of his early triumphs at the New York Philharmonic, it is tempting to think that he is coasting, if only a little. In the case of Bach's ''St. Matthew Passion,'' which he presented to great effect in 1993, a listener might even have wished for a more or less literal revival.
But Mr. Masur is having none of that in the current run of the ''St. Matthew'' at Avery Fisher Hall, with one more performance scheduled for tomorrow evening. He has rethought everything, with admirable enterprise and often, though not invariably, admirable results.

The master stroke is to import the Thomanerchor, the 744-year-old boys' choir of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany, which Bach himself directed from 1723 to 1750 and with which Mr. Masur had a long and close relationship in his former life as Kapellmeister of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. He displays the chorus proudly here, at the front of the stage on either side.

This unusual forward placement not only gives the group greater prominence, which it brilliantly exploited on Friday evening, but also affords greater separation to the choral division Bach often uses for purposes of dialogue and contrast. And the Thomanerchor, 80 or so strong, was wonderful to hear: unfailingly full of spirit, secure in pitch and beautifully balanced (a good thing, since its director, Georg Christoph Biller, was close at hand throughout, playing continuo harpsichord).

Bach's incomparable counterpoint has seldom sounded so richly flavorful, and it was given added crunch by the group's splendid articulation and emphasis. Kids love consonants, it seems, the way dogs love trucks (or so television commercials tell us).

All of which left the instrumentalists somewhat in the shade, not an entirely bad thing with a powerful modern orchestra in such music. But it also relegated some players with important roles to the far reaches, where they were hard put to establish intimate relationships with vocal soloists.
As in his earlier ''St. Matthew,'' Mr. Masur used about half of the orchestra, generally playing lightly. And that is where the larger problems entered.

Mr. Masur seems increasingly to subscribe to early-music orthodoxy in terms of scale and tempo. Here, the forces were often reduced to a whisper, and the performance was pushed ahead somewhat unyieldingly within and between movements.

There was little of the warmth remembered from the earlier ''St. Matthew.'' Still less of the monumentality; though now politically incorrect, that quality is essential to the opening and closing choruses of this work, especially in so large an auditorium.

The most impressive of the vocal soloists were the mezzo-soprano, Annette Markert, and the baritone, Olaf Bar.

John Aler was effective as the Evangelist, William Stone slightly less so as Christ, in a late substitution. Stanford Olsen was a bit edgy in the tenor arias, and Sylvia McNair, the soprano, who can often be so expressive, here seemed caught up in the sheer beauty of her sound.
Still, when all else, failed, there remained the beauty and expressivity of that choral sound, literally one of a kind. And if Mr. Masur, who has thought longer and harder about Bach than most, was thrilled with the outcome, he was entitled.

February 8, 1998
CLASSICAL MUSIC

CLASSICAL MUSIC; Extending Bach's Long Shadow
By JAMES R. OESTREICH

Following Bach: it is a problem every composer faces in some degree, but few face it as starkly as Georg Christoph Biller. Mr. Biller holds the same position Bach held from 1723 to 1750, as Thomas kantor, or music director of St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig, Germany.

Bach was the 20th Thomaskantor in a recorded succession begun in 1435, following such illustrious predecessors as Johann Hermann Schein, a century earlier, and Johann Kuhnau, immediately before. (Improbably, Schein figures in the current Grammy nominations, with a beautiful recording of his ''Fountains of Israel,'' a set of spiritual madrigals, by Philippe Herreweghe and the Ensemble Vocal Europeen on Harmonia Mundi France.) Mr. Biller, who took over in 1992, is the 36th Thomaskantor on the list in the Bach Museum in Leipzig.

''If you thought about it every day, it would be very intimidating,'' Mr. Biller said a year ago in German, over coffee in his studio behind the church. ''Bach is such a towering figure for the whole music world, and there is hardly a composer anywhere who is not overwhelmed by his genius. For me, it is a remarkable experience to work where Bach worked and to live where he lived, even though the actual building he lived in is no longer here.''

One of Mr. Biller's chief duties, as it was for Bach, is to direct the Thomanerchor, the boys' choir of St. Thomas's Church. With appropriate symmetry, the group will perform at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue on Tuesday evening as part of its first tour of the United States, with Mr. Biller conducting works of Bach and others. Then, beginning on Thursday, the choir will join Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic in Bach's ''St. Matthew Passion'' at Avery Fisher Hall.

The Thomanerchor, which claims a history of more than 780 years as Leipzig's oldest cultural institution, tours widely in Europe and elsewhere; it has traveled to South America and, several times, to Japan. It is merely a coincidence, Mr. Biller said, that it never before visited the United States.
But it is no accident that it is here now. Mr. Masur, who is also closely identified with Leipzig, having served as the Kapellmeister of the Gewandhaus Orchestra from 1970 through 1996, was the moving force. Mr. Masur, who presented the ''St. Matthew Passion'' with the Philharmonic, the Westminster Symphonic Choir and the American Boychoir five years ago, is trying to transplant some of Leipzig's Bach tradition at the Philharmonic, as he has already done with the music of Mendelssohn, who was his ancient predecessor at the Gewandhaus.

''I am very glad that Biller agreed not to conduct himself, to allow me to take the choir and do the performance,'' Mr. Masur said. ''What we want to create at the New York Philharmonic is a Bach tradition which it never would have had.'' In the next seasons, Mr. Masur is to conduct performances of Bach's ''Art of Fugue'' and ''St. John Passion.''

But the ''St. Matthew Passion'' remains the touchstone: the work most closely identified with the Bach tradition in Leipzig, a tradition that had to be recreated there as elsewhere. To a large extent, in fact, the ''St. Matthew Passion'' defined the very notion of classical music with a lowercase c.
Music lovers today like to be smugly amazed that so much of Bach's output was neglected for a century after his death. But that stance puts the cart before the horse. More to the point, it was largely Bach, through the sheer, stunning quality and power of his music, who -- taken up by the likes of Mendelssohn and Brahms -- first turned listeners' collective gaze backward, from a living present to a storied past. In a more extreme form, this antiquarianism is a matter of pressing concern in concert halls today.

''In Bach's time, it was always the custom to perform contemporary music,'' Mr. Biller said. ''Certainly listeners did not understand everything Bach put before them, but there was in general a greater sympathy for contemporary music than there is today. It was perfectly normal.''

Mendelssohn led the way back to the future with his famous revival of the ''St. Matthew Passion'' in Berlin in 1829, and his later performances of the work included another momentous one, in Leipzig in 1841. ''This masterpiece, which has made an enormous impression in so many other towns in Germany,'' Mendelssohn wrote at the time, ''has never been heard here since the death of the composer.''

What Leipzig offered in return was an institution virtually tailor-made to foster the Bach revival, the Thomanerchor. And over the next century, it took on a more curatorial role, becoming again, in a very real sense, Bach's choir. Though by no means exclusively so: a program heard in the church supplemented Bach's music with works by Bruckner, Reger and the Wagner contemporary Robert Volkmann. (It also afforded a thrill to a first-time visitor to the church, crammed into Bach's loft near the choristers; the sound of the group in this setting was glorious for reasons both objective and subjective.)

As a result of the concentration on Bach's music, Mr. Biller is relieved of the obligation to compose major new pieces week after week, as Bach did for several years: ''Cantata No. So-and-So,'' in Mr. Biller's vivid phrase. ''It might be welcomed, but it's not expected,'' he said. He supplies his own music occasionally, and programs works by other living composers.

The choir is his main responsibility. ''In Bach's time, there would have been 18 boys,'' Mr. Masur said, ''and not all of them could really sing.'' Today the Thomanchor consists of about 100 young men from 10 to 18 years old. They live and study together in the Alumnat (the Box, they affectionately call it), with the older ones helping to oversee the younger ones.

Mr. Biller, 42, and with boyish looks that belie a serious manner, is a Leipzig native and himself a former Thomaner, as the individual choir members are called. His conducting studies included work with Mr. Masur, and he prepared choruses for some of Mr. Masur's programs at the Gewandhaus.

With the Thomanerchor, he records for Philips, though the CD's are not generally available in the United States. In that respect, too, he is continuing a rich tradition established by such predecessors as Hans-Joachim Rotzsch, Kurt Thomas and Gunther Ramin, some of whose recordings are available on Capriccio or Berlin Classics.

Ramin, who became Thomas kantor in 1940, when Karl Straube resigned in protest of the Nazi regime, carried the Thomanerchor into murky political waters. In occupied Czechoslovakia and Fascist Italy, they celebrated the ''victory of European art, German style,'' Michael H. Kater reports in his book ''The Twisted Muse''; at St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig they performed Bach for SS soldiers, ''the very same troops, or at least comrades of those troops, putting in service at the eastern liquidation camps.''
Yet Mr. Masur recalls the Thomanerchor as a potent force for renewal. ''When I went to Leipzig after the war, I was 18 years old, and the first thing I experienced was a Bach cantata sung by the Thomanerchor,'' he said. ''You can't imagine after that horrible experience going into a church and hearing this imagination of Bach, this tradition and this humanistic message. It makes you hope for the world. It makes you hope for mankind.''
 

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS REVIEW

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS REVIEW

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS REVIEW