Choral Music in Lübeck and Lisbon, some Frozen

The Christmas/New Years holiday is generally a boom period for choruses, one in which many see their largest audiences (and, in the US, income). Repertory varies. Besides the usual carols and regional songs, Handel's Messiah is the go-to piece in the USA, even though 2/3 of it has to do with death and resurrection, not Christmas. In much of Europe, Bach's Christmas Oratorio is used instead, even though it is essentially six back-to-back cantatas with a tenor narrator, and makes for a very long evening. This season I saw two choral concerts which remarkably featured neither of the above.

On my German trip, I took a daytrip from my base in  Hamburg to the old trading town of Lübeck, famed as the birthplace of novelist Thomas Mann, and where he set my favorite of his novels, Buddenbrooks (BTW, read it in the translation by John E. Woods). It's a charming old town with signs of its past wealth as a Hanseatic trading port--especially its four large churches, several damaged severely in WWII. I saw an advent concert in the most famed of the churches, St. Mary's (Marienkirche), built around 1300. This was the home church of Buxtehude, and the original organ is still in use.  It's got impressive Gothic brick architecture, with soaring vaults. But they don't heat it, and it is cold, very cold. There is even a big bin of blankets near the alter to help the shivering masses. It's actually very German to sit suffering in a church; for example, the Bach passions were debuted as 4-hour spiritual uplift experiences that included an hour sermon, all held held in unheated churches, while seated on hard wooden benches. I guess the Germans believe in tough love. The concert I heard was exactly in this vein. Its 40 minutes of music by Bach, Hammerschmidt, Schutz, and others, was nice enough, sung by a fairly accomplished church choir (although the sopranos sometimes lost their blend). But I do not blame the defects too much, since the church temperature was about 40F (5C), and there was steam coming out of all of the singers' mouths, and out of the mouths of those in the audience. Also, they sang from an unsightly metal scaffold that replaced the medieval choir screen destroyed in the war. It doesn't quite fit.

The temperature was actually colder than it was outside, so maintaining focus was difficult. Outside, the lively Christmas market was selling gifts and mulled wine, but inside the church we shivered. A classic German cultural experience!

More satisfying in comfort was the concert by Lisbon's professional Gulbenkian Choir at the Church of São Roque. This fantastically elaborate Baroque church built by the Jesuits in 1515 was one of the few major structures to survive the enormous (8.5-9 Richter) 1755 earthquake that mostly devastated Lisbon. In typical over-the-top Jesuit style, almost every surface of the large church is covered in gold or paintings. Not all of the paintings hold up to individual scrutiny, since Portugal lacked artists of the renown of Michelangelo, Bernini or Caravaggio, but the overall effect is stunning....I think it's one of the great church interiors of Europe. Make sure you see it when you visit Lisbon.

The concert was mostly double-choir music of JS Bach and Mendelssohn. This is a good pairing, since Mendelssohn revered Bach and revived performance of many of his pieces 60-70 years after Bach's death. For example, the concert paired motets by both composers on the text Singet dem Herrn ein Neues Lied (Sing to the Lord a New Song). The Mendelssohn version was short, homophonic, and rather straightforward, while the Bach version is a complex three part structure that exemplifies Bach's development of fugue and counterpoint. From my memories singing this a few decades ago, the big test of the choir here is the fugue "Die Kinder Zion" that ends the first part. Here there is dense counterpoint and difficult, intricate part writing. I could not quite hear all the fugue entrances from the Gulbenkian choir, which I attributed to the slightly muddy acoustics. But maybe it was in fact conducting or choral execution. After further research I found that it is a rare performance on record in which one can hear every one of the eight fugue entrances (one for each part in a double choir). We should be able to, since such clarity would be expected on an organ, but this seems to be hard to execute by even professional choirs. If you want to hear that, check Apple Classical or Spotify for the performance by Helmuth Rilling and the Gaechinger Kantorei (with choir boys no less, suggesting a good conductor). The fugue aside, the Gulbenkian ensemble of about 32 singers delivered the motet with good energy and dynamic variation. 

The other "Bach motet" on this this program was Lobet dem Herrn, which most do not think was written by Bach, yet perversely still is included in most complete sets of Bach Motets.  I don't think Bach wrote it, in part based on a VERY pedestrian and academic ending fugue and lack of chromatic harmony. As for the rest of the program, I did not know the Mendelssohn Te Deum or Deutches Liturgie. Both were works from later in the composer's career, when he turned mostly to religious themes (he had converted from Judaism to Catholicism), and when  he sometimes composed in a gentle, tuneful, sometimes dull style (think of some overextended parts of Elijah). The Te Deum text usually is set grandly, but here it was very gentle, contrasting full choir with a quartet. Neither this nor the Liturgie (settings of the Protestant liturgy) was very compelling, but they were well performed with good intonation by the choir. 

Overall, this concert was well performed, but a bit low in energy, especially for a New Years concert. The selection music pairing these composers was innovative, but in practice did not quite deliver enough top-tier music. Perhaps picking a real Bach double-choir motet with some zip like Der Geist Hilft rather than Lobet den Herrn would have improved things. But it was fun seeing well-executed choral music in this spectacular church.