Bach festival opening has high, low notes

By Janos Gereben
From The Oregonian

EUGENE -- Bach is big in Eugene at this time of year.

A capacity crowd filled the 2,400-seat Hult Center Friday for the 33rd opening of the Oregon Bach Festival in downtown Eugene. During the next two weeks, 35,000 people will attend performances by 350 musicians in works that range from Bach's lofty choral music to water-inspired sounds by Tan Dun, the Academy Award-winning Chinese composer.

As he has done in past years, Helmuth Rilling, the German conductor who began the festival in 1970, opened with Bach's magnificent Mass in B Minor. Bach never intended the two-hour work for practical use in church. Rather, it is an ideal, a grand summation of the Mass tradition that symbolizes the nature of sacred music in the 18th century.

As such, the B Minor Mass is a good place to begin a festival because it is a communal effort: a large choir, an orchestra whose principal players perform key solos, and a quartet of vocal soloists who bring the elevated music down to a personal level.

Friday's performance contained many fine moments, beginning with Ingeborg Danz, the superb German alto. Danz reflected the music's intensity with keen inflections of the words and a variety of tone colors. Her voice, a mix of purity and sweetness, moved smoothly from high to low registers.

Instrumental solos provided other wonderful moments. Alan Vogel's warm oboe playing paired well with Danz in the "Qui sedes" section. Canadian trumpet player Guy Few hit his high notes all night and captivated the ear with the baritonal-sounding corno da caccia, a cross between a French horn and a cornet, in Thomas Quasthoff's bass solo, "Quoniam tu solus sanctus."

But these and other highlights contrasted with disappointments. The most serious was the choir's bland singing. In this, of all Bach's works, the chorus provides the central focus. Bach took exquisite pains to "paint" the words with vivid phrasing, but, despite an elegant sound, the Festival Chorus did not inhabit the words with enough detail to breathe life into them. The choir's generalized tone, middle-of-the-road volume and lack of clear diction sucked vitality from the music.

Rilling's plodding tempos didn't help. The opening and closing "Kyrie Eleison" sections, which can rise to powerful, curling waves of sound, instead trudged along, weighed down by self-conscious pauses between syllables. Rhythms that should rock and roll -- the "Cum sanctu spiritu," for example -- didn't. The eruption of the "Et resurrexit" sounded merely polite.

Robbed of life, the performance took on a devotional quality, sincere and deeply felt for all that, but reminiscent of a previous generation of conductors, Otto Klemperer, among them.

Festival concerts continue through July 14.