Opinion: Rare Masterpiece, Laudable Performance

On Sunday the Choral Society of the Hamptons gave its spring concert at the Presbyterian Church in East Hampton.

The highlight of the afternoon was a performance of Maurice Durufl‚'s Requiem. Living from 1902 to 1986, Durufl‚ was an accomplished organist, but, as a program note remarked, "one of the least prolific composers" of the 20th century. Nevertheless, in the requiem he wrote a masterpiece of French choral music.

It is a strange and compelling work. Taking Gregorian chants for its musical base, it manipulates these earliest of religious melodies with counter melodies and harmonies that are distinctly modernist. And distinctly French.

Forgiveness To Come

This is not a requiem on the grand and passionate scale of Mozart's or Verdi's. Rather, it is a work suffused with tranquil French mysticism that also surfaces in Faure's earlier Requiem and in much of Olivier Messiaen's music.

Following the traditional Latin text of the mass for the dead, each part moves at a floating andante pace interrupted only rarely, as in the Dies Irae, by a more urgent tempo. But even there the terrors of the Day of Anger and Judgment are quickly subdued by strains expressing a quiet confidence in ultimate forgiveness.

The prevailing spirit of the music is one of calm acceptance of death and trust in a peaceful afterlife. Even the phrase "dona eis requiem aeternam" ("Give them eternal rest") repeated throughout the mass sounds more like the affirmation of a promise than a plea.

Met The Challenges

The Choral Society performed the work with a moving intensity. The sound of this music - voices floating above rippling or flowing contrapuntal figures in the organ accompaniment - is a deceptively simple one. It is unusually difficult music to sing.

Instead of the crisp attacks a chorus makes in most baroque church music, for instance, the voices here make entrances as if drifting into audibility and often on notes set high in the vocal range.

But except for an occasional weakness in initial pitch or timely entrance, the Choral Society met the challenges of the score with confidence and sensitivity. Under the conductor, John Daly Goodwin, they sang with a finely tuned variety of vocal texture that never allowed the music to lose its measured forward movement or its haunting seductiveness.

The mezzo-soprano, Mary Ann Hart, and the baritone, Christopher Schaldenbrand, sang the requiem's solo parts. In the Pie Jesu, Ms. Hart revealed a voice well matched to the swell from gentle to passionate pleading and back again.

And Mr. Schaldenbrand's clear, ringing tones brought instant authority to the Hostias and the Libera Me. David Gifford's organ accompaniment was perfectly tempered throughout, and his registration for the organ sounded eloquently French.

The concert opened with a performance of Johannes Brahms's a cappella motet "Warum Ist Das Licht Gegeben." A late religious work, it begins with a loud asking of Job's Why? of his affliction, and moves through a lightening of mood in a second movement ("Let us lift up our hearts"), written in a gentle waltz tempo to the final calm assurance of a Bachlike chorale using a hymn tune by Martin Luther.

Frisky To Reflective

But Brahms's initial Why? remains unanswered, and its full poignancy was beautifully expressed in the chorus's sudden drop in vocal volume from a penultimate "Warum?" to a hushed repetition of the word.

Between the Brahms and the Durufl‚ were three four-part songs by Haydn sung by a chamber chorus of 15 Choral Society members. These songs, to texts in English, find Papa Haydn in a frisky mood extolling the virtues of marital harmony, in a reflective one looking back on a "life like a joyful song," and in a playful one in which he avers that "water makes you dumb."

These songs provided a nicely calculated break in the seriousness of the rest of the program.

In presenting the Durufl‚ Requiem so ably and with such well-projected feeling, the Choral Society allowed a large audience to hear an exemplary performance of a rare choral masterpiece. It was a fitting undertaking in the continuing celebration of the society's 50th anniversary season.