Temple University Concert Choir: Frank Martin's Mass for Double Choir

The first part of the concert could be heard as a reverential tribute to the human voice, the most beautiful and sonorous of all instruments. The Temple University Concert Choir is a remarkable relatively compact ensemble that has honed itself into a perfect vehicle for nuanced, carefully crafted interpretations. Their sound resonated across the high arched ceiling of the basilica, creating a sacred musical space, while the emanations from each voice came directly to the ear, giving definition and clarity to the specific compositions.

A series of short liturgical pieces from the romantic and modern repertoire, each based on a prayer, evoked holiness appropriate to the setting. Of special interest were Leo Sowerby’s Eternal Light and Joan Szymko’s Illumina le tenebre, both of which had a modern, expressive quality. Taken together, the 10 short pieces, while they represented varied styles, evoked a cohesive feeling of a devout church service.

Cloud of unknowing

This sampling of ceremonial sacred music served as a prelude to the second part of the concert, a single work by 20th-century Swiss composer Frank Martin. The Mass for Double Choir, a full-scale masterpiece of the choral repertoire, has the sinuous, sometimes troubled feeling of the “cloud of unknowing” rather than the reassuring sanctity of the liturgical music that preceded it. This is the work of a composer coming into his own and exploring every musical device and genre available to him.

Curiously, Martin wrote it for himself alone as a musical and spiritual meditation. While the work was composed in the 1920s, Martin did not permit it to be performed until the 1960s, when his students persuaded him to make it public. From then on, it quickly gained a place in the choral repertoire, attesting to its accessibility and coherence despite its great complexity and shifting palettes of genre, harmony, rhythm, and emotion.

Inner transformation

The first movement, “Kyrie,” is a simple prayer, “Lord Have Mercy,” a chantlike melodic line uttered in the style of Renaissance composers like Josquin and Palestrina. After such a mild and plainly stated beginning, however, the “Gloria” is jolting in its expression of awe rather than elation, the composer employing a personal polyglot musical language that mixes Gregorian chant with French Impressionism and a touch of modern dissonance. The listener is taken into a world of inner transformation where gravitas is mixed with uncertainty and hesitation, suddenly ending in a reverential “Amen” that almost doesn’t belong there.

The “Credo” begins with a soft French Impressionism and an absence of counterpoint, perhaps signifying the unity of the believers. At the point where Jesus ascends to heaven and the Holy Ghost appears, the tempo increases and Bach-like contrapuntal lines take us swiftly to the remission of sins and the world to come.

The “Sanctus” returns to an Impressionist style reminiscent of Fauré’s Requiem. But soon there is a surprising eruption of pulsating rhythms that have been compared to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The delicate interweaving of the eight parts of the double choir, also reminiscent of The Rite, constitutes one of the most subtly complex passages in the choral literature. “Osanna” — the coming of the messiah — is portrayed as an exciting, transfixing event. Finally, the “Agnus Dei” bears uncanny musical resemblances to the more contemplative passages of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. For Martin, the plea for mercy and forgiveness of sins echoes the modern realization of the erotic.

Stylistic coherence

Thus, stylistically Martin’s Mass is a smorgasbord of choral flavors drawn from various sources, yet it possesses a coherence and inner beauty that can only be achieved by a composer of remarkable sensitivity and musical resources, as well as access to an inner core of silence and solitude that undergirds the whole.

Martin’s untethered use of diverse forms of musical expression perhaps can be compared with Mahler, although their musical vocabulary differs as much as Viennese culture differs from the French tradition. Mahler’s Sturm und Drang is replaced in Martin with an inward, contemplative turn. Nevertheless, from a religious perspective, the Martin Mass could almost be seen as heretical, as were the writings of the early Christian and Jewish mystics.

When one turns inward, the unconscious surfaces. In contemplation, doubts and demons emerge in the process of awakening to the light. Liturgy as such is meant to quell these demons, and it takes courage to let them surface in a holy mass. But such, like it or not, is the soul’s journey, and Martin’s Mass embodies just such an inner struggle hallowed by human striving toward the sacred.

The Temple Choir under the direction of Paul Rardin performed this difficult work with care, skill, and interpretive depth. In the first half of the concert, Graduate assistant conductors Kevin Crouch and Kelly Wyszomierski took turns at conducting the shorter compositions, and it was a pleasure to see young aspirants at the podium, a practice that happens all too rarely today. This chorus, not unlike the Curtis orchestra, reminds us that young musicians are often as talented and competent as the older, more experienced ones. This youthful choir performed difficult scores with great skill and glowing voices. George Bernard Shaw bemoaned that “Youth is wasted on the young,” but these gifted and devoted singers remind us that such is not always the case.