concert review: Bloch in the synagogue
Jul. 8th, 2008 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacLast Tuesday I mentioned that I was going to a concert that evening, but I refrained from saying anything more about it until I could link to my review. Yes, here I am doing choral music again. There's lots of art music, designed more for listening than for worship, based on liturgical texts: great Catholic composers write Masses or Requiems, great Protestant composers write Passions or whatever it is that Protestants have; but until Ernest Bloch came along in the 1930s, so far as I know no great Jewish composer had written the Jewish equivalent. The text of Bloch's Sacred Service is based on the standard Reform Sabbath morning service of the time, and it's about 80% Hebrew, so that should put to rest the stereotype that Reform services are entirely in the vernacular. (And I had to put in that bit in the review about the Ashkenazic and Sephardic pronunciations, just to show off my erudition. I didn't go to Hebrew school for nothing.)
My favorite work of Bloch's is his 1925 Concerto Grosso, a neo-baroque work of fantastic bite, particularly in the old Howard Hanson recording. The Sacred Service is not quite like that: more lyrical and swelling, less angular. But the harmonic language is similar, and the mood is likewise serious. I don't much recommend the Bernstein recording I mentioned; try the one by Geoffrey Simon on Chandos - a lot better than the performance I heard, but not so much so that I couldn't fairly give this a good review.
Plans to go up to the City for this were complicated by deciding to attend an evening worship service earlier. This required infiltrating, so to speak, into the convention of synagogue cantors going on at the same time, which was also the occasion for reviving the Bloch. I have to say - and I said it in the review - that there's nothing like being part of a congregation consisting almost entirely of cantors. When they sing the responses, they really sing. The plan first didn't, then did, then didn't again, include an invitation to the supper being served the convention in the social hall. Emanu-El is only a couple blocks from Clement Street, the City's richest vein of Asian restaurants, but there wasn't time to do anything more than pop down to the pizza parlor at the corner of Arguello. It would be very unprofessional to risk being late for a concert I was reviewing, though I see from another review this week that for the third time this year one of my fellow reviewers (different one each time) has been just that. Tisk.
The program thoroughly identified the seven cantors and the choir members, but said not a word about the orchestra. So after the concert I slipped down to where the brass and violins were packing up, identified myself as a reviewer, and chatted with them a bit; they were, as I suspected, a contract ensemble, and all the info in the review about the orchestra came from them (except the opinion of the Fremont Symphony, which I've heard for myself). They seemed pleased with how the performance had gone, and so was I.
My favorite work of Bloch's is his 1925 Concerto Grosso, a neo-baroque work of fantastic bite, particularly in the old Howard Hanson recording. The Sacred Service is not quite like that: more lyrical and swelling, less angular. But the harmonic language is similar, and the mood is likewise serious. I don't much recommend the Bernstein recording I mentioned; try the one by Geoffrey Simon on Chandos - a lot better than the performance I heard, but not so much so that I couldn't fairly give this a good review.
Plans to go up to the City for this were complicated by deciding to attend an evening worship service earlier. This required infiltrating, so to speak, into the convention of synagogue cantors going on at the same time, which was also the occasion for reviving the Bloch. I have to say - and I said it in the review - that there's nothing like being part of a congregation consisting almost entirely of cantors. When they sing the responses, they really sing. The plan first didn't, then did, then didn't again, include an invitation to the supper being served the convention in the social hall. Emanu-El is only a couple blocks from Clement Street, the City's richest vein of Asian restaurants, but there wasn't time to do anything more than pop down to the pizza parlor at the corner of Arguello. It would be very unprofessional to risk being late for a concert I was reviewing, though I see from another review this week that for the third time this year one of my fellow reviewers (different one each time) has been just that. Tisk.
The program thoroughly identified the seven cantors and the choir members, but said not a word about the orchestra. So after the concert I slipped down to where the brass and violins were packing up, identified myself as a reviewer, and chatted with them a bit; they were, as I suspected, a contract ensemble, and all the info in the review about the orchestra came from them (except the opinion of the Fremont Symphony, which I've heard for myself). They seemed pleased with how the performance had gone, and so was I.
