There is a contemporary conceit that serious musicology and a healthy respect for the music of the past didn’t exist until Christopher Hogwood descended godlike from the firmament three decades ago to show us the error of our ways and instruct us in the proper reverence and historically informed homage due to masters of the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Besides marking the centennial of the death of Johannes Brahms, the season-ending concert by His Majestie’s Clerkes Sunday evening at Quigley Chapel provided a valuable historical corrective, presenting performances of Brahms’ infrequently heard choral music, skillfully interwoven with Renaissance and Baroque a cappella works that the German composer studied intensively and that subsequently influenced his own writing for voices.
Under Anne Heider’s alert direction, the singing was scrupulously balanced, cleanly projected and, apart from a couple of shaky moments at the top of the soprano range, mostly technically assured.
Johannes Eccard’s “Uber’s Gebirg Maria geht” was notable among the early settings for its fervent and committed ensemble vocalizing, nicely matched by the spirited rejoicing reflected in the buoyant vocal lines of Bach’s “Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf.”
The Clerkes are an exceptionally talented group of singers, yet polished and well-prepared though the performances were, many of the works — including the Brahms motets — suffered from Heider’s coolly objectivist approach, with a generalized expression and interpretive sameness that did little to convey the roiling passions and titanic spiritual struggles of these deeply felt settings. While deftly balanced and sung with distinction, the all-purpose ardor and monochrome interpretive manner failed to reflect the essence of the different settings’ texts; the piercing angst of Schutz’s “Ach Herr straf mich nicht mit deinem Zorn” little differentiated from the grim pessimism of Brahms’ “Ach, armer Welt” or the sanctifying renewal of “Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein rein Herz.”
The sole contemporary work on the program received the most convincing performance. In “Most glorious Lord of lyfe,” by Canadian composer Leonard Jacob Enns, Heider’s singers were at their best, the Clerkes’ director carefully marking the widely terraced dynamics and coaxing wonderfully hushed and gentle singing in this lovely and individual Spenser setting.
