Marin Alsop
Conductor
Marin Alsop is an inspiring and powerful voice in the international music scene, a Music Director of vision and distinction. She is recognised across the world for her innovative approach to programming and for her deep commitment to education and to the development of audiences of all ages. As she has said, she believes passionately that “music has the power to change lives”.
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Marin Alsop (credit: Grant Leighton) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Grant Leighton) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Grant Leighton) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Grant Leighton) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Grant Leighton) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Grant Leighton) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Grant Leighton) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Grant Leighton) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Grant Leighton) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Kym Thomson) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Kym Thomson) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Kym Thomson) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Kym Thomson) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Kym Thomson) |
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Marin Alsop (credit: Kym Thomson) |
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Marin Alsop records Bernstein's Mass with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on Naxos
Released in August 2009
NAXOS
8.559622-23
"Alsop’s tight-knit, symphonic pacing delineates the structure of the work without diluting its exuberant eclecticism or softening its hard road towards spiritual reawakening."
Marin Alsop's new recording of Bernstein's Mass - part of her continuing relationship with Naxos - arrives ahead of the 2009/10, during which Alsop is Artistic Director of ‘The Bernstein Project’ at London’s Southbank Centre. The series runs from September 2009 to July 2010 and will range from Mozart with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to a performance of the Mass itself, featuring musicians from the National Youth Orchestra and a huge cast of performers drawn from the local community.
Gramophone - Disc of the Month
To all the naysayers, bug-eyed sceptics and disapproving doubting Thomases, listen up: a third apostle has spoken.
If Leonard Bernstein’s own 1971 recording of his Mass (yes, italics – it’s a “Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers”, not a setting of the liturgy) is Gospel, Marin Alsop is the latest disciple to evangelise Bernstein’s most ecstatic, charismatic and sanctified music.
Compared to the intellectual fence-sitting and crackerbarrel mysticism that – since Holy and Minimalism became the latest must-have lifestyle soundtrack – is every place, Bernstein’s relationship with God is dangerous, probing, transformational. There are those, of course, who proffer that Bernstein thought he was God, that’s why he could stand in defiance against Him. But, no – Mass reveals a man thirsting for faith but petrified of blind acceptance.
Bernstein’s religion was muscular and intellectualised, and the experience of Mass expands, rather than contracts, the further you travel towards the essence of its cosmology.
When Kent Nagano brought down the tablets of stone in 2003, frankly, he dropped some. Jerry Hadley sang the anchoring role of the Celebrant with obedient accuracy but lacked the lusty, unselfconscious mania with which Alan Titus sexed up Bernstein’s account. Released earlier this year, Randall Scarlata in Kristjan Jarvi’s performance preached with soul and fervour: but Alsop’s Jubilant Sykes is the best of all possible Celebrants.
There can be few roles in contemporary music theatre that demand so many sides of a performer. The Celebrant is a near-constant presence on stage throughout the just-short-of-two-hour duration. He must disentangle music of gnarly complexity (“The Word of the Lord”), and bringing appropriate sincerity to writing that could slide towards doe-eyed naivety (“Simple Song”). “The Lord’s Prayer”, segueing into “I Go On”, needs an operatic sensibility, while the Celebrant must also swing like a hipster jazzer and declaim with authentic rockist swank.
And those are just the technical riders. Mass follows the Celebrant to the darkest place a proselytiser for faith can travel – from sneaking doubt towards a full-scale breakdown as, in Bernstein’s climactic scene, he trashes the altar and sends the sacraments scattering. Sykes brings an intensity that chills. In his joy is pain; in the agony of his crack-up is hope that does, indeed, ultimately blossom. His voice shakes with James Brown’s ecstasy, snarls with Janis Joplin-like indigence and projects through the labyrinth of Bernstein’s tricky melodic contours like any trained voice would. Sykes was born to play this part.
The stage action was Bernstein’s parable for 1970s America; an America fighting a controversial war, ravaged by political and racial conflict, and the assassination of anybody who was a force for good. To portray a society in freefall, Bernstein illuminates all its music. At the beginning vocal and percussive fragments leer at the audience from out of quadraphonic speakers like latter-day Ives, and musical modernity breaks out everywhere. An atonal oboe solo sounds like calculated blasphemy, stretching chromatic choral fragments leave singers grasping free-for-all notes in aleatoric freak-outs; tonality gets refracted through tone-rows and clusters. Over this shifting abstraction, Bernstein layers church music, blues, jazz, even a brief quote from Beethoven. This is our world now, Bernstein proclaims: no place for art that thinks it knows itself.
Just as the Celebrant flips comes the most remarkable passage of all – a funky 10-bar refrain of “Dona nobis pacem” which is reiterated deliriously as blues singers improvise added lines and, eventually, the orchestra is invited to holler above “anything from the entire musical literature”. Although she doesn’t drive things quite as far as Bernstein, Alsop ensures this passage pushes the Celebrant over the top and Sykes’s portrayal of the breakdown is moving and sensitive; the orchestral playing too, her and throughout, is lusty and unafraid to let go. Jarvi’s handling of that same moment is more contained, and his tendency is to stress points of demarcation within Bernstein’s stylistic smorgasbord. Alsop is pacier, creating a dramatic slipstream that is powered relentlessly onwards by the awkward discontinuities and jagged narrative.
Even if this atheist cannot quite love the God-fearing D major affirmation of the final scene, as the Celebrant reconnects with his faith, it doesn’t matter. The journey – the process of discovery – counts for more. The haughty certainty of bad religious music is bad religion, worse music. Beethoven’s Credo from his Missa solemnis, Tippet’s A Child of Our Time and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem for a Young Poet probe the terror of God. Bernstein’s Mass sits in that tradition: make our garden grow – go tell it on the mountain.
September 2009
BBC Music Magazine - 5 stars
Unlike the disappointing recording of Mass released earlier this year by Chandos, this Naxos issue is a virtual triumph from beginning to end, and the only recording for me worthy of sitting next to the composer’s own.
In terms of overall technical achievement, it trumps all: the Morgan State University Choir and the Peabody Children’s Chorus negotiate Bernstein’s tri-lingual tongue twisters with absolute mastery of pitch, diction, and style, while the Baltimore Symphony plays most eloquently, particularly in the many lyrical woodwind passages. Engineering is superb, as is Robert Hilferty’s booklet essay (however, the soloists of the Street Chorus deserve to have their assignments listed).
Jubilant Sykes’s Celebrant offers a valid alternative to Alan Titus’s audacious conception, still in a class of its own. While Titus simmers towards spiritual meltdown almost from the beginning, Sykes’s wide eyed innocent maintains his belief in the validity of the ritual until the final destruction of the sacraments; in the mad scene that follows, he seems more upset with his own spiritual failings than those of the congregation.
Perhaps Bernstein’s fractionally slower tempi in big ensembles such as “God Said” and the Agnus Dei allow his singers more time to relish the words’ cynicism and venom, but Alsop’s tight-knit, symphonic pacing delineates the structure of the work without diluting its exuberant eclecticism or softening its hard road towards spiritual reawakening: the final Communion is among the most moving passages ever recorded. And she is no slouch when it comes to that elusive Bernstein groove; if you aren’t frugging around the room during the Gloria in Excelsis, you haven’t got a soul to save, my friend!
September 2009
LINKS
» Marin Alsop's website
» Naxos
» Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
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