Boston Secession calls a time out

Jane Ring Frank in action: we won't be seeing this next season.

The grim news keeps rolling in. Last night I learned that Boston Secession, our most adventurous (and perhaps my favorite) local chorus, is taking a hiatus due to funding issues. Only a year ago, they seemed to be riding high: a new CD got raves, their audience was building, and they had plans to premiere an ambitious oratorio about the Holocaust, Testimony of Witnesses. But ah, what a difference a housing bubble makes! So we won't be seeing the smart, talented, funny Jane Ring Frank (above) directing her wonderful singers next fall; truly our loss, my friends. But something about this lady strikes me as indomitable, and so I have hope that a mere recession won't keep the Secession down for long.

Sacred music gets its groove on

Jane Ring Frank in action.

You go to a Boston Secession concert expecting two things: 1) the cleanest choral sound in town, and 2) the smartest, most adventurous programming anywhere, courtesy of Jane Ring Frank (above), the chorale's charismatic leader (think Cambridge's answer to Sarah Palin, only with brains and talent). At last Saturday's concert, "The Sacred Imagination," however, we didn't always get enough of #1, at least not at first, due to a miscalculation on Frank's part in the arrangement of her singers. She made up for this misstep in the second half of her program, however, which was given over to Alfred Schnittke's brilliant Requiem, a lengthy, rarely-heard funeral Mass that it seems Boston Secession was born to sing, in that it's both deeply serious and yet deeply - well - funky; in a word, funeral music with a groove.

But first, the bad news. The concert's opening number, Bach's Lobet den Herrn alle Heiden, lacked the clarity Boston Secession is known for, largely because Frank had arranged her singers into quartets rather than blocks (all the sopranos together, all the tenors together, etc.), and the great joy of Bach is his brilliant counterpoint. That rolling sense of intersecting contrapuntal lines, however, tends to dissolve in resonant vaults like those of First Congregational Church (this was a problem last month for the superb Collegium Vocale Gent, too, which also sang in quartets), and with each fugual "voice" essentially scattered, Boston Secession simply couldn't overcome the laws of acoustics (and oddly, their organ and cello accompaniment sometimes sent an unexpected overtone through the mix).

If, of course, Frank and Boston Secession were aiming for a "blended" sound rather than a contrapuntal one - well, we've tried that now, so we don't have to do it again! Certainly there was nothing wrong with Frank's direction of the chorus per se - she gave the piece a joyful lilt, and adjusted the mood appropriately to her next piece, Brahms's more sober (and Bach-derived, though perhaps more canonical than contrapuntal) "O Heiland reiß die Himmel auf."

The singing got better still in the second half, although perhaps here the "adventurous programming" side of the Boston Secession equation took center stage. Although Frank tried to tie Alfred Schnittke to the German tradition of Bach and Brahms in her pre-concert "lecture" (another staple of Secession concerts), this seemed to me something of a red herring (although it's true enough that Schnittke was of German descent, and his work sounds vaguely like German Shostakovich). To be blunt, there's simply a strange, uncrossable chasm between the German choral tradition and Schnittke's eccentric "polystylism," which tries to meld ancient modes, modern harmonics, and pop percussion - and, believe it or not, largely succeeds. And unlike the Bach or Brahms, Schnittke's Requiem faced death squarely, with a mix of poignant mourning and something close to horror - in fact, we half-expected to hear the squeal of an opening tomb during the "Dies Irae" or the "Tuba mirum." The chorus (re-arranged, thank God, into blocks) was riveting throughout, as were soloists Jason McStoots, Jennifer Ashe, Mary Gerbi, Adriana Repetto, and counter-tenor Martin Near (who doubled on bass!). There were a few balance problems with the amplified instruments, but the larger revelation was how startlingly well the electric bass and guitar blended into Schnittke's doomy, fraught soundscape. And what can you say about a "Credo" that has a backbeat except, "Well, why shouldn't the Credo have a backbeat?" It would take more than one hearing to fully assess or analyze this strangely compelling piece of music, but my hat is off to Boston Secession for bringing it before the public. Here's hoping we hear it again, and often.

Human Choral Response

Music and sex: their parallels are practically a cliché - except in the hands of Jane Ring Frank, whose recent program, "The Big Oh!," for the Boston Secession (at left, Frank at center), once gain displayed her genius for inspired pastiche. Frank's not all that interested in straightforward performances of single works (how dull!); instead, she's a kind of musical magpie, piecing together conceptual montages from sources both familiar and foreign. And with all the splendid pipes in her chorale, she had no trouble making her deeper point: like sex (or so I've heard), music is best when it's a group thang.

But back to the orgasm - at least the musical one; right off the top, Frank got rid of the most overheated candidates for her concert with a hilarious medley that mashed up Carmen, the Grieg Piano Concerto, "Sweet Mystery of Life," and a whole lot more. No, Frank was saying, this isn't a concert of music about orgasms - instead, it's about musical orgasm, that delicious aural climax, which, in the footsteps of Masters & Johnson, she divided into two classes - "masculine," or singular (chart at right), and "feminine," or multiple (sorry, the chart's just too long to post).

With this structural idea as springboard, Frank began bouncing through the Western canon, beginning with a plaintive madrigal from Monteverdi, then jumping to an almost overwhelming choral arrangement of a Verdi aria from Macbeth (with Adriana Repetto reaching piercing top notes), before taking a brief time-out with a piano rendition (by the capable Scott Nicholas) of Wagner's famous ascent up the sexual/harmonic plateau, the "Liebestod" from Tristan and Isolde. All these represented "masculine," or singular, orgasms, btw - even the splintered hysteria, apparently, of "Litanei," from a Schoenberg string quartet (which here received a committed performance from Mary Sullivan, who's usually cast in sunnier roles).

The second, or "feminine" half of the evening, then presented a series of cyclical structures, from the medieval polyphony of Pérotin (sung exquisitely by the charming Justina Golden and Martin Near), to the interwoven, so-gorgeous-they-nearly-droop vocal lines of the famous duet from Lakmé (here warbled by Kristi Vrooman and Thea Lobo, who do it so well they could make a small career of it). To my mind, however, the most fascinating performance of the evening was a novelty called Bach Again, "decomposed" by Edwin London from one of the German master's choral phrases. Here the Secession singers spread out across the hall (the First Congregational Church in Cambridge), and began vocalizing their parts in long, slow, individualized beats. The phrase soon broke apart - but as the pitches echoed through the vaults above, their overtones began to coalesce into new tones in unearthly timbres; the overwhelming impression was of being inside the phrase - a moment of intense, almost mystical musical depth, and yes, I have to confess, as close to a multiple orgasm as this benighted male may ever get.

The program wrapped with a spirited excerpt from Carmina Burana, and that font of easy tragedy, Agnus Dei, Barber's choral adaptation of Adagio for Strings. I know - obvious (if always welcome) warhorses, both; but no one could carp at the sublime performances of them rendered here. And what's a pastiche without a few familiar touchstones? After the final bow, I realized the concert hadn't had a single dead minute; every selection had been interesting in its own way, and every performance had been memorable - yet another feather in the cap of a chorus that may be Boston's finest, and certainly its most adventurous.

Mother love

Jane Ring Frank and Boston Secession - Photo by Susan Wilson

It isn't often that a local musical group premieres a piece that one senses immediately will become part of the permanent repertory, but that's exactly what happened last Friday night at the final Boston Secession concert of the season. The concert itself, "Mother Tongue," was designed as a kind of guided tour through the pleasures and pitfalls of setting the English language to music, and the evening featured the group's familiar strengths - a commitment to serious musicianship leavened with a friendly sense of joie de vivre.

This time out, however, the balance was a little less harmonious than usual; artistic director Jane Ring Frank's comments were gathered into what almost amounted to a lecture, complete with detailed analyses of metrical feet (dactyls, trochees, etc.). Frank's general point was that after the untimely death of Purcell (and the later popularity of Handel), the English adopted French and Italian vocal forms which were ill-suited to the accented rhythms of their "mother tongue" (as in, a tongue that's a real mother!) - and Frank had some hilarious examples of nineteenth century pseudo-Franco-Italian writing (by the likes of Michael W. Balfe) to back up her thesis. It wasn't until Gilbert and Sullivan, she pointed out, that musical strategies began to catch up with the metrical problems of English - eventually leading to the musical flowering of the language in the twentieth century, under Britten and other composers.

This is certainly fine as far as it goes, and Frank's technical analysis was definitely sure-footed (in both senses of the term). But it seemed to this listener that she ignored a deeper cultural shift that brought English to the vocal fore in the twentieth century: the musical world as a whole was groping for an ironic, intellectualized style to grapple with the aesthetic problems of the modern era - and English is nothing if not appropriate to ironic modes. (It didn't hurt, either, that there was so much sympathy between the musical and literary styles of Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden, one of the century's greatest composers and one of its greatest poets.)

But whatever the reason for the slow bloom of the English musical tradition, we were more than ready for it to flower after a little too much Victorian parody (and one amusingly prickly poem from Marianne Moore, set by Virgil Thomson). Luckily, Frank and the Boston Secession delivered: the concert reached a stunning high point with the Britten/Auden Hymn to St. Cecilia (the patron saint of music). Here, Britten was blessed with an Auden text that's almost the equal of such classics as "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," and his setting is justifiably famous for its lovely extension of traditional modes to a new, mournful self-awareness. Appropriately, the chorale's singing was at its most crystalline, and Frank's direction seemed to capture every facet of Auden's multivalent mood; at its conclusion, the crowd understandably went wild.

Daringly, however, Frank had then programmed three new commissions in a row, "Ashes of Soldiers," by Byron Adams to a text by Walt Whitman; "After the Storm," by the Secession's resident composer, Ruth Lomon, to a text by Joyce Carol Oates; and "Prospects," by Emerson's Scott Wheeler, to a text by Anthony Hecht. All of these proved worthy; Wheeler's, a wry take on the naivete of idealism, had a haunting sense of abstract space in its shifting vocal planes, while Lomon's, a quietly alienated evocation of a disastrous flood (cross-cut with banal line readings from local weathermen) intrigued but didn't quite seem to take its ideas the full musical distance.

"Ashes of Soldiers," however, like many a small masterpiece, seemed to cohere from its opening moments, and by its conclusion it was hard to fight the feeling that one had just heard an instant classic. Adams (like Britten) was blessed with a stunning text - Whitman at his most mournfully piercing - and while his musical voice may not be deeply original, here he's clearly operating at something like a personal best technically, and with impressive emotional sensitivity. Whitman's ode is a "chant in the name of all dead soldiers," for whom "all is over and long gone," but for whom Whitman's love, however, "is not over," and will never be over. The piece perfectly balances the deepest love of the soldier with the deepest disillusion with war - and so, perhaps, will serve as an appropriate threnody to our lost boys and girls in Iraq, and indeed on battlefields everywhere.

Love's sweet-and-sour song

The crowd at Boston Secession's "(Un)Lucky in Love" concert last Friday was a testament to this sparkling ensemble's growing cult - a cult you should join, too, if you hanker for lushly transparent singing conducted with intelligence and wit (by the accomplished Jane Ring Frank, at left). The shaggy setting of "(Un)Lucky in Love," however - a church hall in Cambridge - had the kind of acoustics that undermine vocal precision, and for once Frank's idiosyncratic programming was occasionally beyond the Secession's grasp.

Frank is truly an expert at at both high and low pastiche, and she knows just how to leaven solemnity with whimsy (useful skills when simultaneously celebrating and skewering St. Valentine's Day). But this time her musical eye roved particularly wide; at one point, the concert careened from Britten's Phaedra to "Baby Bear's Lament" (surely a segue for the history books). Actually, the "Lament" was quite winsome, but Phaedra, alas, proved beyond the persona (if not the pipes) of its soloist, Thea Lobo; Ms. Lobo got her chance to shine in a charming version of "A Case of You" (it's nice to see Joni Mitchell treated as art song), and particularly in an exquisite rendering of the Flower Duet from Lakmé, where her limpid soprano was paired with the achingly pure tones of Kristi Vrooman. In general the Secession did best by its chestnuts: "Soave sia il vento" from Cosi had a yearning glow, and the famous sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor sounded as if it would have sounded fabulous in a better hall. Elsewhere, Adriana Repetto brought a melting kind of bloom to "Elegia Eterna", while Marc J. DeMille and Bradford Gleim duked it out for top honors in two Schumann lieder.

Alas, the opening contemporary songs, from the likes of Elliott Carter and Paul Bowles, didn't make much of an impression, but guest artist Brittany Bara did nail her version of Carol Burnett's big number from Once Upon a Mattress (remember what I told you about that widely roving eye?), and Mary Sullivan had a triumph with "Pro Musica Antiqua," a hiliarious warning from a shy young thing about the machinations of "the musical male." Something in its witty sweetness seemed to encapsulate what's best about Boston Secession - a sense that true musical seriousness is never less than fun.