The Register-Guard, Oregon
May 1 2005

Beethoven didn’t make it easy for singers

By Paul Denison
The Register-Guard

Last month, Diane Retallack’s Eugene Vocal Arts Ensemble sang Sergei
Rachmaninoff’s Vespers in Russian with a Ukrainian choir. On
Saturday, the ensemble and her larger Eugene Concert Choir will sing
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in Latin, with Austro-German
pronunciation.
“It’s extremely challenging, the hardest thing we’ve ever done,”
Retallack says. And she’s not talking about Latin with a German
accent. She’s talking about the music.

“Beethoven’s personality was very erratic,” she says. “And this is
reflected in his music, with extremes of dynamic expression and range
changes. The changes happen very quickly, and Beethoven often
obscures the meter with difficult rhythmic changes.”

The Eugene Concert Choir and the Oregon Mozart Players will perform
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis next weekend at the Hult Center.

Lisa Gislason, a singer who also serves as the choir’s general
manager, agrees.

>From a soprano’s viewpoint, she says, “Beethoven is brutal. He
expects you to float through your passagio on a pianissimo, wail on a
high B-flat, drop down more than an octave, and still look like a
lady.”

“Beethoven was totally deaf by the time he wrote this,” Retallack
adds, “and some have said that if he could have heard it, he
wouldn’t have done it this way. But I think not. He was hearing it in
his head.”

Beethoven went deaf gradually, she says, and “he continued to hear
music long after he could no longer hear speech.”

The music he heard as he composed the Missa Solemnis is not only
difficult but also stirring and beautiful, Retallack says.

“He’s definitely into Romanticism with this piece,” she says. “Some
of the lyrical passages are so glorious that you want to weep, and
there’s an exquisitely beautiful violin solo in the Benedictus.”

In her written program notes, Retallack describes this violin part,
to be played Saturday by Alice Blankenship, as “so significant as to
practically be a violin concerto accompanied by solo voices.”

Joining the choir as soloists will be soprano Kelly Nassief,
mezzo-soprano Victoria Avetisyan, tenor Yeghishe Manucharyan and
bass-baritone Clayton Brainerd. All four have sung with the choir
before, Nassief and Manucharyan in the Verdi Requiem, Avetisyan and
Brainerd in G.F. Handel’s “Messiah.”

Manucharyan and Avetisyan, both Armenians, are also husband and wife.

Beethoven started writing his Missa Solemnis – it’s a grand mass, not
a requiem, Retallack points out – on learning that his friend and
patron, the Archduke Rudolph, was going to become an archbishop.

But the composer was still working on the mass, and on his Ninth
Symphony, when Rudolph was elevated to archbishop in 1820.

The Missa Solemnis was performed for the first time in St. Petersburg
in April 1824. The Ninth Symphony had its premiere in Vienna on May
7, 1824. That program also included three sections of the Missa
Solemnis.

“Known for his decisively grand and final endings,” Retallack
writes in her program notes, “Beethoven leaves the Missa Solemnis
instead with a question.”

Trumpets and drums, “the sounds of war,” punctuate the singers’
repeated pleas for peace. “The answer is not forthcoming,” Retallack
writes.

Beethoven lived in Vienna when it was occupied by the forces of
Napoleon, whom he initially admired but eventually became
disenchanted with.

Retallack herself has sung the Missa Solemnis twice, both times under
conductor Robert Shaw.

The first time was in the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at
the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

Retallack says the audience was “absolutely transported.” So was she.
“It was then and is now the peak musical experience of my life,” she
says.

In addition to Saturday night’s concert, some 250 elementary and
middle school students from Eugene and Springfield will get the
thrill of singing a single movement (Benedictus) of the Missa
Solemnis in the Hult Center’s Silva Concert Hall with the choir,
orchestra and soloists.

This lecture, demonstration and performance is part of the choir’s
Singing a Masterwork educational outreach program. It’s scheduled for
7 p.m. Thursday and is open to the public without charge.

CONCERT PREVIEW

Eugene Concert Choir and Oregon Mozart Players

What: Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Hult Center, Seventh Avenue and Willamette Street

Tickets: $14-$26 ($9-$22 for students and senior citizens), through
the Hult Center box office, 682-5000

Also: 250 elementary and middle school students will sing the
Benedictus with the orchestra, chorus and soloists at 7 p.m. Thursday
in the Hult Center. It is part of the choir’s educational outreach
project. The performance is free.