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  • Beethoven didn't make it easy for singers

    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.
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