Baroque Passion

Music lovers I know draw their line at Baroque.  The music lacks emotion, they say.

Even Leonard Bernstein agreed. The great conductor / composer, in his teens failed to find in Baroque music any of the drama and passion that he sought in the swelling Romantics or the dissonant Modernists. He tried to spice it up adding his own dynamics and variations in tempo when he played Bach and his ilk.  Only later did he come to understand that Baroque composers expressed one emotion per movement.  (see Bernstein's book, The Joy of Music.)

I, too, have found Baroque music to be charming and brilliant as an eighteenth-century timepiece and no more emotionally involving.  I've enjoyed the Baroque for background music, tuning in to the radio program Sunday Baroque while I make breakfast or read, knowing that the composer will run a limited amount of material through a series of more-or-less predictable procedures to fill the air with music sometimes ebullient, grand, or contemplative, and always steady.

But this past year, Bach and Handel took me by surprise during live performances, and I felt them reach through the centuries to grab me in a way that struck me as modern.

First, the Cathedral Choir and Schola of St. Philips Cathedral, Atlanta, Dale Adelmann, conductor, teamed with The Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, Julie Andrijeski, director, to perform Bach's St. John Passion at Roswell Presbyterian Church north of Atlanta, February 24.   A soprano singing solemnly of Christ's suffering momentarily lapses into a dancing, bubbly celebration of what this means for us and for mankind, a victory over death!  Then, just as suddenly, she seems stricken anew by the immense cost borne by our savior.

Then, at Easter, our little choir at the Episcopal Church of St. James, Marietta, GA, performed Handel's Hallelujah chorus from The Messiah.  With organ, strings, and brass, we sounded bigger than we are.  Now, this is a piece I've known since I listened to Dad's LP before kindergarten, sometime around 1963, and I knew what to expect.

Handel does his Baroque thing: after we hear the phrase, "Hallelujah" a few times, at different pitches, and each voice has taken turns with it,  he throws a new phrase into the mix, and there's mixing and matching, along the same lines as before:   King of Kings and Lord of Lords!  And he shall reign forever and ever.

In the middle of it all, every time I sing this, I have to smile.  We basses sing snippets as punctuation when other parts take a breath:  "forever"  (long pause) "and ever" (longer pause) "forever and ever."  We concentrate on the counts or we'll gum up the works of this charming clockwork.

At Easter, just when I was thinking that, really, it's just too much, the trumpet came in with a descending run of sixteenth notes, coming down into "King of Kings!" at a higher pitch of the scale.  I burst into tears and couldn't sing for a couple pages.  It's energy, it's care and craftsmanship, it's full-hearted, full-throttle statement of belief and joy, and it's hugely communal, every part different, every participant concentrating, every note fitting just so into place, and all of it holding hundreds of listeners transfixed while we sweated every beat.

I love my modern composers.  I loved hearing Bernstein's Symposium at the Atlanta Symphony around Easter, with its openly emotional melodies, tugging undercurrents, and startling dramatic eruptions.

But I give the Baroque its due, too.