Symphonic Choir ends current season with a glowing, intense Mozart Requiem

 

Mozart death mask, 1791

A nobleman's vanity generated the mystery surrounding Mozart's Requiem from its origins in the final, frantic phase of Wolfgang Mozart's career. The Austrian master scrambled to complete promised works and was bedeviled by health problms that were to kill him on December 5, 1791. The scholarly consensus is that an attack of acute rheumatic fever caused his premature death. 

The commission to set the Latin Mass for the Dead was attended with secrecy because of an aristocrat's habit of presenting new music in his court as if he had written it. The "ghostwriting" assignment came to be associated with Mozart's declining health and the composer's unfounded suspicion that he was being poisoned. 

Such a mixture of fact and fancy shadowed his final weeks and eventually led posthumously to a hit play and movie called "Amadeus," linking  Antonio Salieri to his artistic superior's demise in his mid-30s out of the court composer's envy.

Happily, knowing the back stories is not necessary to appreciate Mozart's Requiem more than two-and-a-quarter centuries since its premiere. But the work had to be completed, originally to fulfill a contract the dying composer was unable to. The completion that Indianapolis Symphonic Choir and the ISC Festival Orchestra used in concert Sunday at Second Presbyterian Church has in many modern performances replaced the standard, occasionally unidiomatic version prepared by Franz Sussmayr, a slightly talented Mozart pupil engaged by the composer's widow to finish the work. 

The modern completion chosen by ISC artistic director Eric Stark was written and published in the late 20th century by Mozart guru Robert D. Levin, who as a pianist revived the long-discarded practice of improvising cadenzas for the Mozart piano concertos. 

Levin's version of the Requiem thins out some of Sussmayr's orchestration to keep voices to the fore. His boldest change was to apply some fugal material Mozart wrote to cap the sublime "Lacrimosa" chorus, replacing Sussmayr's two-chord, anticlimactic "Amen." It was a particular joy to hear this fugue so robustly performed Sunday afternoon, after the heartwrenching, chromatic tread of "Lacrimosa." 

The choir at its largest was well-used in these lofty environs. "Rex tremendae majestatis," one of the work's most impressive choruses, struck the collective audience ears with aptly stunning majesty. And for contrast, the choir's well-trained lightness of tone and agility was evident, especially in the "Kyrie eleison," where the humble pleading of the text is soon put in context by the scary "Dies irae" and later, that "Rex tremendae." 

In between comes the "Tuba mirum,' addressing the mystery of "the last trumpet," keyed to a trombone solo linked at first to a bass solo, impressively sung by Ron Dukes, followed by the rest of the vocal quartet. Individually and then blended, they acquitted themselves well: tenor Thomas Cooley, mezzo-soprano Mitzi Westra, and soprano Gabriela Martinez. The soubrette quality of Martinez's voice, which struck me at first as perfect for Despina (the maid in "Cosi fan tutte") took on more heft and oratorio substance with further exposure. 

The dynamic variety and control exhibited by the choir gave an extra lift to the "Agnus Dei" and the "Lux aeterna," concluding with a fugal climax worthy of this work. And it is thankfully a conclusion the dying composer endorsed in manuscript, leaving to a variety of experts their notions of filling in the gaps in the decades since. 

Jeffrey Van wrote "A Procession Winding Around Me"

The concert opened with "A Procession Winding Around Me," a piece for solo guitar and chorus by Jeffrey Van, a guitarist-composer from Minnesota.  The work divides in four sections poetry by Walt Whitman from the Civil War. The solo guitarist here was Daniel Duarte, who is lecturer in guitar at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music.

 The extracts are well-chosen and moving in both the intimacy and the cosmic outreach characteristic of Whitman. Van paints on a broad canvas as well, enhancing the chorus (articulating clearly in Sunday's performance). The guitar occasionally imitates the roar of cannons as well as military drum taps, the snare and parade drum alike.  

In the chorus, there are ghostly touches lent by whistling and humming, used sparingly enough that they never seem like gimmicks. Sung words remain uppermost. At the end, the repeated phrase "this soil'd world" emphasizes that war is simply an extreme element of the harm humankind does to itself and the natural world at large. The piece speaks demonstrably to today in addition to representing the best American poet's response to the anguish of his time.