Bach Society Wraps Season With Rarity

By Lawrence A. Johnson, The Miami Herald

Apr. 24–The Baroque revival of the last 40 years has restored a great deal of neglected music to the regular repertory, not least the operas of Handel and Monteverdi.

Still, some conspicuously neglected composers remain, among them the prolific Heinrich Schutz. Give credit to the Miami Bach Society and conductor Donald Oglesby for an offbeat musical excavation of Schutz’s German Requiem to close the society’s season.

Schutz is regarded as the greatest German composer pre-Bach, and his music evolved from a complex Venetian style to a leaner, stripped-down simplicity — partly due to the dictates of the Protestant Reformation and partly to the tragic toll of the Thirty Years’ War and epidemics of plague and dysentery. Schutz suffered greatly during this period, losing his wife, parents, both daughters and several friends to disease.

Though Schutz’ Musikalische Exequien — more colloquially, German Requiem — was written for the interment of a royal prince in 1636, the scale and degree of response in this solemn music indicates that something of the composer’s personal tragedies motivated his inspiration.

The Requiem is set in three parts, the most striking of which is the first section, Concerto in the form of a German Funeral Mass. This sprawling, 27-section movement is stylistically austere by Bach or Palestrina standards, relying on the even then old-fashioned ripieno style, which alternates soloists with full chorus. Still, Schutz utilizes a variety of solo, duo and trio voice combinations set against the chorus, closely reflecting the texts, which tell of the rewards and glory of the afterlife.

Oglesby led an attentive, well-paced performance with the University of Miami Frost Collegium Musicum and soloists Monday night at St. Philip’s Episopal Church in Coral Gables. The quality of the solo singing in the long first section varied drastically, but the largely student ensemble produced a solid, euphonious corporate sound, particularly in the four-part choruses of the central Motet and the concluding Canticum Simeonis. Cellist Ross Harbaugh and harpsichordist Robert Heath provided sturdy continuo support.

The first half set the scene nicely for Schutz’s opus, with a choice mix of contemporaneous sacred works. Organist Heath showed a nimble touch in Sweelinck’s Four Variations on Vater unser in Himmelreich, and the Collegium’s assistant director Korre D. Foster led a lovely, nicely detailed rendering of Purcell’s Hear My Prayer, O Lord.

Harbaugh and Heath were also simpatico partners in Henry Eccles’ Bachian Cello Sonata in G minor. Harbaugh’s stately, sensitive playing of the Praeludium and Sarabande was as finely wrought as his buoyant spring in the dance rhythms of the Courante and Gigue.

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