Here is my Tuesday December 7 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review, with small cuts restored, of the Sunday December 5, 2010 Music of the Baroque Chorus and Orchestra performance in Evanston.
Jane Glover
MOB does Bach oratorio justice
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
Repeats 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park
Broadcast live Tuesday at 98.7WFMT and wfmt.com at 7:30 p.m. CST
While many ensembles and presenters are feeling the economic pinch, Chicago’s Music of the Baroque has such dependable ticket buyers and supporters that it is marking its 40th concert season by seeming to do it all. It’s offering a Messiah -- in the spring, when Handel himself presented it -- and a Christmas Oratorio -- although a few weeks before Christmas. And even though offering this full Bach work is a rare undertaking, MOB is also going ahead with not one, not two, not three, but five of its popular Holiday Brass and Choral Concerts this month at architecturally distinctive churches in River Forest, Old Town, and Northbrook/Techny.
All of this has involved not only raising money, but squeezing out time. “It’s our 40th,” the group’s “nothing’s impossible” executive director Karen Fishman said at intermission for the Bach work Sunday at First United Methodist Church in Evanston (the program repeats tonight at the Harris Theater). “We all agreed that we needed to do all of these things -- and our Purcell, Haydn, Mozart, and Brandenburg programs, too.”
Some tradeoffs were made to put the rehearsal calendar puzzle pieces together: MOB players and singers who are also members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus had to pass because of the CSO’s presentation of Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, although superb MOB principal bassoon William Buchman sacrificed that opportunity. But fine subs were found, name vocal soloists were in place, and a packed sanctuary at First Methodist was there for six cantatas that Bach had presented at six separate services in Leipzig from Christmas to Epiphany in 1734-35.
It’s not a shock that Handel’s Easter-intended Messiah won the Christmastime popularity contest long ago. Bach’s entry wasn’t given a second performance for 120 years; Handel, meanwhile, both wrote his work in English and loaded it with theatricality. Bach was, among other things, the church music man par excellence; each of the six 20-25 minute parts is keyed to a church service, its readings in German, and a Protestant meditation on the meaning of the Christmas story.
But this is Bach, and so musical glories are plenty, too, of course. Under music director Jane Glover, the trumpet- and timpani-laden openings and closings of several of the sections exploded as if they’d come from the wild 17th-century Venetian Monteverdi. The instrumental Sinfonia that opens the second part, the "Annunciation to the Shepherds" and the various types of oboes that carry its themes through the section were wonderfully pastoral. And in the final Epiphany cantata, Glover found a dancelike feel in much of the scoring.
Scottish tenor Paul Agnew took up both the Evangelist’s narratives and the tenor arias with great tenderness. Veteran baritone Sanford Sylvan brought authority to the bass parts. Mezzo Jennifer Rivera made a notable MOB debut, while soprano Lisa Saffer, , another experienced singer new to MOB, sounded a bit constricted. William Jon Gray had prepared his 27-member chorus with care as to both music and text.
With a necessary intermission, the program runs nearly three hours. But it’s started the winter music season with substance, style and spirit.
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