Mendelssohn Club: "Battle Hymns'

The Mendelssohn Club opened its 136th season with its big chorus happily belting out Charles Ives's 1917 exhortation to support the troops going off to fight the "sneaking gougers" who started World War I. Conductor Alan Harler followed that, somewhat ironically, with a reprise of David Lang's Battle Hymns— the lengthy, far more complex vision of war he premiered during the Hidden Cities Festival, in a performance at the First City Troop Armory on 23rd Street.

That Armory performance included dancing and choreographed choral movements and made heavy use of the Armory's military setting. It was so effective that I approached the repeat assuming the pure choral version would seem watered down.

Fortunately, I was wrong. The choral performance was, in fact, a rare opportunity to hear a second performance of a new work just a few weeks after its premiere.

The human heart at war

As I said in my review of the Armory version, Battle Hymns deals with all the turbulent, conflicting emotions that war arouses. Lang creates his musical effects by combining simple elements into a complex structure that reflects the complexity of his vision. The heart of the piece— his teeming setting of phrases from an "If I die" letter by a Civil War soldier— is a powerful musical version of William Faulkner's dictum that art should portray "the human heart at war with itself."

The fourth section of Battle Hymns, on the other hand, reminds us that some of our wars have also been struggles over real issues. I was particularly impressed, this time around, by Lang's choice of a single, short sentence by Lincoln— "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." As the repetitions of the sentence intensify and snare drums join the climax, the quote becomes one of the purest statements of American political idealism ever produced.

Our national legends frequently glorify heroes who defend American freedom. Lincoln fused domination with submission and rejected both.

Stale Frost

Harler followed the Lang with a setting of seven Robert Frost poems by Randall Thompson. He finished with two more short pieces by Charles Ives and a preview of the Sanctu from a Missa Latina by Roberto Sierra, which the Mendelssohn Club will premiere later in the season. Thompson's Frostiana was a popular choral piece in the '50s, but it seemed staid beside the intensity of Battle Hymns and the unrestrained voices of Ives and Sierra.

The Mendelssohn's opening number was an American piece from Woodrow Wilson's day. The night before, I heard Piffaro open its 24th season with bagpipes and Renaissance percussion bouncing through a dance that sounded much like a Spanish version of an Irish jig. Two nights before that, Mimi Stillman's Dolce Suono series inaugurated its 2009-10 edition with something that was less imposing but just as engaging: a single musician, Charles Abramovic, playing Handel's harpsichord suite in D minor.

How to label serious music?

At the beginning of the week, the opener at the Philadelphia Orchestra's chamber music series was a 1927 Fantasy for Viola and Harp by the British composer Arnold Bax, played by Ann Marie Petersen and Elizabeth Hainen. Earlier this month, the designated opener at the first 1807 and Friends chamber concert was an early Beethoven quartet played with an appropriate light touch.

These five programs covered every musical period from the Renaissance to the 21st Century and presented a good sample of the scope and range of the Philadelphia music season. The term "classical music" makes many of us wince because it doesn't convey the variety and liveliness of a musical spectrum that includes early music and spanking, hot-off-the-computer new music, as well as the 19th-Century repertoire normally associated with the term. I don't know what we should call the category, but there is no reason why any of its devotees should complain about a lack of variety.