Master Chorale Excels on Palm Sunday

On Palm Sunday afternoon, when the capital area teemed with choral music, the Master Chorale of Washington made its own distinguished contribution by presenting Antonin Dvorak's "Te Deum" and Johannes Brahms's "German Requiem" at the Kennedy Center.

Over the course of more than a quarter-century of reviewing concerts, I had somehow missed the "Te Deum." My loss -- it's a wonderful piece, filled with a primal and ecstatic energy, from the opening timpani rolls through the jubilant finale. At times, it seems a prefiguration of the pulsing, muscular, fiercely direct music of Carl Orff. At other moments, I was reminded of the magnificently wild-eyed "Beatus Vir" of Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki, written almost a century later. Donald McCullough led an exciting performance; the chorus sounded fit, focused, proud and blended, and the Master Chorale Orchestra played with remarkable unity, especially considering it only meets for a few concerts every year.

The "German Requiem" followed intermission and this work, too, represented the chorus at its best. Some of McCullough's tempos were brave ones -- a very slow "Denn alles Fleisch," which almost, but never quite, fell apart, and an unusually quick and clipped "Denn wir haben hie," which added a certain bristle to what is mostly a heavy and contemplative work.

Indeed, this is music that people take to strongly or not at all. (George Bernard Shaw once said that it could only have been composed by a "first-class undertaker.") The "German Requiem" is manna for pessimists -- no terrifying evocations of hellfire (as in the Verdi Requiem), little in the way of paradisiacal evocation (as in the Requiems of Gabriel Faure and Maurice Durufle), nor even the metaphysical weirdness of Berlioz's contribution to the literature.

Instead, Brahms offers sturdy, somber human recognition of our loss and sadness. This is, as McCullough noted in his opening remarks, a work for those of us left behind, rather than for the dead themselves, and I love it for its luminous, wind-swept gloom.

Lester Lynch gave a splendid account of the baritone solos, both authoritative and urgently personal. Angela Powell was a distinct disappointment, however. Despite a reasonably pretty voice, she seemed to have the barest conception of what she was singing, and her rendition of the soprano aria was so uninflected as to seem nerveless.