AVA's "Jubilate!'

The music behind the religious words

TOM PURDOM

The Stabat Mater is one of the less upbeat religious texts composers have set to music. The Latin words begin with a description of Jesus’s mother weeping as she sees her son hanging on the cross and continue with references to the sad and afflicted mother, the mother suffering with her son, and so on. All the Stabat Maters I’ve heard have been, as you would expect, rather somber affairs.

I thought a Stabat Mater was an odd choice for an opener when I looked at the program for Jubilate!, the Academy of Vocal Arts’ annual program of religious music. I became even more puzzled when I realized this exercise in unrestrained melancholy would fill the entire first half.

Jubilate! has become a major event on my annual calendar. AVA is primarily an opera school. Jubilate! exposes its audience to a different part of the vocal repertoire-- the masses, oratorios and cantatas that constitute some of the best music Western composers have produced. Most of the regulars who haunt Philadelphia’s music halls can be seen in the audience. How could anybody with any sense of showmanship offer them an opening 45 minutes that didn’t include a single rousing Gloria?

Rossini did it his way

The Stabat Maters I’ve heard have mostly been Baroque efforts— part of a long tradition that goes back to the master composers of the Renaissance and their settings of a Latin poem that may or may not have been written by a 13th-Century poet/saint named Jacopone di Todi. The Stabat Mater chosen by AVA was composed by a 19th-Century opera composer, Gioachino Rossini, and it was a perfect showcase for the elite vocal students currently honing their instruments at a school that’s primarily focused on the world of big arias and stormy emotions. Rossini didn’t let a little matter like the nature of the text cramp his style. He even provided an all-out triumphal ending, complete with trumpets, chorus and all four members of the vocal quartet celebrating at top volume, notwithstanding the fact that the final words merely express a pious hope that we’ll all make it into paradise through the guidance of the Virgin.

Puccini’s operatic arias were meat and drink for the four AVA students who served as soloists. Angela Meade and Jennifer Hsung commanded, respectively, a warm, round soprano and a full mezzo. Ben Wager contributed a strong bass. Tenor Stephen Costello soared and swooped with the classic 19th-Century flair Puccini undoubtedly had in mind. Conductor David Lofton put Holy Trinity’s layout to good use when he strung the chorus (the New Jersey MasterChorale) along two-thirds of the left balcony-- a position that let it fill the sanctuary, with no danger it would be drowned out by an orchestra that included violinist Igor Szwec, cellist James Cooper and other foundation stones of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.

Soprano Jessica Julin got the second half off to a good start with an effective, musically simple setting of Psalm 100 that consisted of a series of trumpeting, one-line announcements— Praise Ye the Lord…Praise God in his Sanctuary-- echoed by the chorus. A Sanctu and a Gloria by Gounod and a Benedictus by Schubert provided the customary exhilaration attached to appropriate texts. Selections from Mendelssohn’s Elijah and a Seven Last Words by France’s Theodore Dubois varied the mood.

Words worth killing for?

The last piece raised troublesome questions in this listener’s mind. It is Finished is a song by a composer of “Contemporary Christian” music and popular “Christian” songs named William Gaither. The word Christian, used in this way, has become associated with a specific branch of modern Protestantism— the branch many of us refer to (not completely accurately) as Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. The song itself clearly refers to a worldwide struggle that will end with the Second Coming and a world in which “Jesus is Lord.” If you have any familiarity with the worldview it represents, you can’t hear it without thinking of contemporary sectarian divisions.

All religious music has political and social associations. People killed each over the words in the Latin mass. But time encourages detachment. When we listen to older music, we can concentrate on its musical qualities and the universal needs and longings addressed by all religions. I didn’t think about the horrors of the Thirty Years War when I heard the Philadelphia Orchestra ring out the finale of Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony a few weeks ago. I responded to the grand drama of people reaching toward a new vision of life.

The version of It is Finished played at the AVA concert was arranged by the conductor, David Anthony Lofton. It’s a stirring song and I can respect the vision it communicates, even though I oppose many of the political stances its adherents support. But I would have been just as stirred if Lofton had arranged something older, such as one of the great hymns that capture the sturdy piety of the 19th Century. Amazing Grace can’t be the only hymn, for example, that communicates the religious fervor behind certain sectors of the Abolitionist movement. I suspect I could even generate some enthusiasm for one of the marching songs of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, without being in any way troubled by the knowledge that another part of my mind was contemplating the Merlot scheduled for Sunday dinner.



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