A masterful rendition of 'The Creation'

By Grant Menzies
For The Register-Guard

The clash between past and future is only fascinating (and instructive) when it occurs on the battlefield of art.

Franz Josef Haydn's oratorio "The Creation," a three-part paean to the birth of planet Earth (as given in Genesis, chapter 1), made its Paris première in 1800, when the composer was already beyond the median life span of the age. But no less a man of the future than First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte ignored a near-miss assassination attempt to get to the performance.

Though his stepdaughter had suffered a wound from the bomb, Napoleon stayed long enough to experience what the Viennese had already heard two years earlier: that "The Creation" was not just an extraordinary piece of music, it was one that leaned excitingly out the window of the 18th century to embrace the approaching Romantic period.

So enamored was Napoleon of the composer that when he captured Vienna in 1809, he placed an honor guard around the old man's house - a gesture from the Zeitgeist to an artist born in the era of Bach and Handel. Haydn died with the sounds of French bombs in his ears, but as happens when art and politics contend for immortality, the old man trapped in a house surrounded by French soldiers continues to have powerful currency in our world, while Napoleon has become a cobwebbed curiosity for armchair battle buffs to argue over.

Through his "Creation," Haydn is still speaking to us, and the language doesn't get much clearer than it did Sunday afternoon in Silva Concert Hall, for the final concert of the 2005 Oregon Bach Festival.

This was in part due to three superb soloists - soprano Donna Brown, tenor James Taylor, and baritone Russell Braun, singing respectively the parts of Gabriel and Eve, Uriel and Raphael and Adam - and the Festival Chorus, all in top form.

But Maestro Helmuth Rilling was doing something from the podium that had me sitting at attention from the first measure. What he was doing was of a piece with Haydn's own genius - that of blending past and future, roving freely from Handel to Mozart/Beethoven and back again, in a seamless structure that makes beauty out of old fashioned musical devices as much as it does the modern touches with which "The Creation's" score is rich.

"The Creation" is filled with vivid proto-Romantic descriptions of man and beast, rain and flowers and snow and starshine, set in a classical idiom very much of the 18th century, when rational thinkers put man and his experience of this world above abstract and abstruse meditations on an overarching paternalist deity.

With elegance and verve, Rilling made these pieces of different ages flow together as one. While lavishing attention on brief descriptive passages that would not seem out of place in the tone poems of a later age, Rilling wove them adroitly within the strict tempi and stylistic requirements of Haydn's own era.

This theatrical technique set Haydn's rainstorms, rolling waves, bobbing Leviathan, roaring lion and galloping horses in operatically high relief. But Rilling and the Festival Orchestra made real magic in a famous passage wherein the angel Uriel describes how God ordered lights in the heavens, and called for the moon to be bride of the sun. As sung by baritone Braun, the moon itself seemed to softly rise through night's silence, against a shimmering backdrop of violins and violas, before our eyes, with stars growing in glimmer to fill the "immense azure space of the sky."

Leonard Bernstein, who famously recorded "The Creation," extolled the oratorio's first dark Chaos-depicting measures and the brilliant C major choral shout, "Es war Licht!" as one of the "supreme musical dramatizations" of all time. But this short section toward the oratorio's center has in it as much drama, advanced harmonies, and painterly power as the more famous one Bernstein referred to - indeed, on Sunday afternoon, thanks to Maestro Rilling, it looked directly into the expressive emotional material of Beethoven, von Weber, Wagner, and beyond.

Portland-based writer Grant Menzies has reviewed classical music for Sforzando, The Oregonian, Willamette Week and The Register-Guard, and is a regular contributor to Opera News.