Disappointed that the Naxos recording of Bernstein’s Mass with Jubilant Sykes as the celebrant and Marin Alsop conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra didn’t win a Grammy last Sunday. I heard the performance at Carnegie Hall in October 2008 and loved it. But it was a weird weekend in Manhattan, with the joy of Mass one night followed by the deadly experience of Adam’s Doctor Atomic the next (full review).
Mass speaks to me on so many levels. I was raised very Catholic — star altar boy, 16 years of Catholic education, and plenty of years in church music or “pastoral music” as we came to call it. I first encountered Mass at the 1981 Kennedy Center revival, during my first weeks as a music student at Catholic University of America, attending two performances including the opening night when Bernstein pinched my cheek. (I wrote about the whole experience some years back for New Music Box.) But above all, I also just can’t get enough of the music.
Strange but not too surprising that it took more than 30 years after the debut of Mass for a new recording to be made. It was a relief when Kent Nagano’s 2004 effort came out on Harmonia Mundi. But that performance was just too polite and lacked the kind of Broadway punch that’s needed to convey the angry, confrontational tropes of the street singers. As the celebrant, Jerry Hadley treated everything as poetry or art song, rather than preaching and jiving. And the street chorus was similarly weak, under prepared and, well, just too European. Maybe it’s too easy to blame the failures of that recording on the fact that it was made in Germany but Mass is a decidedly American work and still very contemporary in its origins and message. An even worse effort from Nagano was the 2000 recording on DG of “A White House Cantata.” I was thrilled to learn of the reworking of Bernstein’s big Broadway flop “1600 Pennyslvania Avenue” and to get the chance to hear that otherwise lost music. But the performance is also mealy mouthed and given too much of a classical touch. When in the second cut Thomas Hampson sang of the “Potomic Rivahh,” I lost all hope. No rolled Rs in Broadway songs, please!
So, back to the new recording of Mass. Beyond the lively and heartfelt performance — especially enjoy the punch BSO brass in “I Believe in God” — also admirable is the audio mix by producer Steven Epstein and engineer Richard King. There’s a lot going on in Mass — chorus, children’s choir, umpteen soloists, orchestra, electric guitars, kazoos, etc. — and it all comes through with clarity and verve.
I also was pleased to see notes by Robert Hilferty, the late music writer and acquaintance. He died at age 49 last August, the same month this disc was released. Perhaps the essay was his last published piece. Hilferty concludes by discussing the crux of Lenny’s own faith, which was music itself. And he points to how it’s spelled out in the libretto “I believe in F sharp / I believe in G” (from the Credo) and “Mi alone is only me. But mi with sol, Me with soul, Mi sol means a song is beginning…” (from the Sanctus).
Finally, tuning in my gay ears to Mass, I’m especially drawn to what Catholics call the Liturgy of the Word, which is darned fun and nicely irreverent when it gets to the “God Said” number (“God said it’s good to be meak/ And so we are once a week…”). But the immediately prior track, “Epistle: The Word of the Lord,” has passages, both spoken and sung, that make me think of the gifts and the plight of gay men and the on-going struggle of all who seek equality and respect in an unjust world:
Dearly Beloved,
Do not be surprised if the world hates you. We who love our brothers have crossed over to life, but they who do not love, abide in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer.Dear Mom and Dad,
Do not feel badly or worry about me. Nothing will make me change. Try to understand: I am now a man.You can lock up your bold men,
Go and lock up your bold men and hold men in tow,
You can stifle all adventure
For a century or so
Smother hope before it’s risen,
Watch it wizen like a gourd,
But you cannot imprison
The Word of the LordFor the Word was at the birth of the beginning.
It made the heavens and the earth and set them spinning,
And for several million years
It’s endured all our forums and fine ideas.
It’s been rough but it appears to be winning!
There are people who doubt it and shout it out loud,
Oh they bellow and they bluster ‘til they muster up a crowd.
They can fashion a rebuttal that’s as subtle as a sword.
But they’re never gonna scuttle the Word of the Lord.Dear Brothers,
I think that God has made us apostles the most abject of mankind. We hunger and third, we are naked, we are roughly handled and we have no fixed abode. They curse us and we bless. They persecute us and we suffer it… They treat us as the scum of the earth, the dregs of humanity, to this very day.
I love the irony that when gay people are attacked on so-called religious grounds, it’s by pointing to scripture. But this was Bernstein’s scripture.
