Final Concert a Rich Display of Talent

By Grant Menzies for The Register-Guard.

No more fitting pair of composers could have been chosen for the Oregon Bach Festival's final concert of the season than Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. and not just for the obvious reasons.

It was a delayed encounter with Bach’s music, during the last 10 years of his brief life, that prompted Mozart to construct his music with a contrapuntal complexity he had not used before.

Put it this way: If Mozart’s unfinished Mass in C Minor (K.427) can be inelegantly described as a pudding, the proof of Bachian influence is all over the recipe.

But this Mass and the other work on the festival’s Sunday afternoon program, Bach’s Magnificat in D Major, share another similarity: Both provide the soprano voice with some of the most beautiful music ever composed for that vocal range.

And as with all things Mozartean, there’s a beguiling human touch to the super-human beauties of the 1783 Mass.

Mozart wrote it as a wedding gift for his new wife, Constanze Weber, and framed the solo “Et incarnatus est” especially for her. (Reports of Constance’s performance are not glowing- her father-in-law Leopold thought his son had married not only the wrong woman but the wrong soprano, but then Leopold had a pretty pedestrian ear.)

There is something bouncingly operatic about both the Magnificat and the Mass in C Minor- both works leave you whistling bright tunes, as if you’d just sat through a Rossini comedy.

But both also call for something we don’t often get even in a respectable opera house: a chorus that exudes as much energy, passion and commitment as the star of the show.

The Festival Chorus gave us that and much more in their Silva Concert Hall performance.

Their crisp diction and curvaceous phrasing delivered all the color, texture and exuberance that Bach or Mozart could have asked for.

A good part of this had to do with conductor Helmuth Rilling. He is one musician specializing in early music whose greater acquaintance and handling of that music, year after year, only deepens and burnishes its luster.

He can approach a masterpiece of three hundred summers with all due reverence yet dig into it so intelligently that it always has something fresh, even surprising, to say.

Rilling has a talent for shaping his gifted choir with a care for the overall picture that still preserves all the rich detail of a single voice’s interpretation. He does the same with his equally gifted orchestra.

They, too, are encouraged to sing, and sing they did, with strings articulate and soulful, winds all floating poetry and brass rife with wit and muscle.

Of course, it helps to have the caliber of soloists the festival has enjoyed this summer: Elizabeth Keusch’s precise and pretty soprano; Anke Vondung’s noble, refined alto; James Taylor’s sterling tenor; and the quietly majestic tones of bass Sanford Sylvan.

Bach’s duet “Et misericordia” perfectly paired Vondung’s dusky sensuality with Taylor’s ringing brilliance.

Later, in Mozart’s “Laudamus te,” Vondung indulged in all the creamy phrasing you might expect from one of the composer’s operatic heroines, declaring secret love in a yearning arioso d’amore, yet her interpretation also worked as a profoundly moving prayer of praise.

Sylvan gave Bach’s “Quia fecit mihi qui potens est” (“Because He that is mighty hath done great things to me”) a confessional intimacy, while Keusch infused Mozart’s quasi-operatic “Et incarnates est” with a clear, cool purity.

And Taylor, who must be as much a pleasure to hear doing warm-up scales as he is singing Bach and Mozart, made Bach’s “Deposuit potendes de sede” (“He hath put down the mighty from their seat”) a fanfare of fervor and beauty.