CHICAGO STRING ENSEMBLE
at Orchestra Hall
Late in his life, about the time he was compiling anthologies such as the Musical Offering and the Art of the Fugue, Bach finished the mass by adding the other three movements of the Roman ordinary. The overall scope and scale was so grand and the textual liberties and titling so unusual that any practical or liturgical use would have been virtually inconceivable–there was no such thing as a “concert” mass in the 18th century. Many musicologists and performers argue that Bach did not conceive the work as a whole–and it is undeniable that the pieces were written at separate times and that Bach borrowed heavily from earlier pieces, a frequent practice of his. Yet all the parts were gathered together and numbered liturgically, not chronologically, under one hard cover. (The Romantic notion that Bach was thinking only of posterity must also be categorically rejected, for such a notion would have been totally foreign to him.)
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In fairness to Rifkin’s views, they would be grossly misrepresented if judged only by the recent Chicago String Ensemble performance. For one thing, conductor Alan Heatherington incorporated an orchestral ensemble nearly three times the size of the vocal ensemble–actually nearly six times, if you consider that most of the choral sections used only four singers. Those proportions are not only contrary to everything we know about Bach’s sense of symmetry, but are even more lopsided than Sir Georg Solti’s use of more than 80 voices with an orchestra of less than half that number. (Even Rifkin preserved some sense of Bach’s original balance by claiming that Bach was also limited to one player per part on strings and winds, with no double bass.) Heatherington used three first and three second violins, included bass, and doubled the winds. Obviously the tiny “chorus” had quite a struggle matching the power of that ensemble, which was, of course, made up of modern instruments that create far more sound than their counterparts from Bach’s time. Rifkin used early instruments, which would seem a minimum in making his scaled-down version credible. Bach’s specifications for the minimum size of an orchestra, found in the memo mentioned above, indicated one player per part on winds, two to three players each for first and second violins, two violas, two cellos, and one double bass–which would perfectly balance a choir consisting of three to four singers per part.
There are certain features one would expect from a Solti-CSO Mass in B Minor, among them the flawless diction and magnificent sound of Margaret Hillis’s Chicago Symphony Chorus. It’s a tribute to this glorious ensemble that not only could every line and every word be clearly heard and understood, but that Hillis brought out a clarity rare in ensembles one-tenth its size. One would also expect first-rate though very heavy-handed instrumental playing from the CSO, which was also the case, with the notable exceptions of oboist Ray Still and horn player Dale Clevenger, who were having evenings so bad that, given their track records, one could only feel sorry for them. Organist Richard Webster had his share of trouble trying to blend in and keep up with the ensemble.
