There is nothing quite like the sight of a full orchestra and chorus on a concert-hall stage to instill a religious sense of wonder and awe, especially when the music is set to liturgical texts. Such was the case last Monday night in Avery Fisher Hall when the Cleveland Orchestra, led by their Music Director Franz Welser-Möst, returned to Lincoln Center for the first time since 2011's Bruckner/Adams marathon to perform sacred works by Messiaen and Beethoven, part of the ongoing White Light Festival.
The program opened with Messiaen's Three Small Liturgies of the Divine Presence: a three-movement work written in 1943 for women's chorus and orchestra. A devout Catholic, Messiaen aimed to illustrate the three traditional concepts of divine presence that are shared among most monotheistic traditions:
- God's presence in nature
- God's presence among all human beings
- God's presence within each human being
But unlike most sacred works which lean towards the grand and majestic, Messiaen's vision of the divine is wild and unhinged, employing strange texts that speak of blue trumpets and "the rainbow-ladder of truth." His music is even stranger, filled with birdsong (played by Cleveland Orchestra pianist Joela Jones) and the cartoon-like sounds of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic keyboard played here by British virtuoso Cynthia Miller. For all its oddness, I was completely mesmerized by the hallucinatory blend of text and sound, unwittingly pulled into a state of whirling ecstasy. Even the most staunch skeptic would be hard pressed to resist Messiaen's fervent belief, as expressed in music.
After the Messiaen, almost anything would have been a letdown, but the Clevelanders showed off their formidable chops in Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, arranged for string orchestra. They played with crisp intensity, their dark burnished sound complementing Beethoven's mysterious, visionary music.
Beethoven's Mass in C, which ended the program, was not well received in his lifetime, and indeed falls far short of the later Missa Solemnis: one of the great miracles of music, liturgical or otherwise, that was heard on the 2011 edition of the White Light Festival. But taken on its own, the Mass in C still ranks among the dozen or so masterworks of the genre, and Welser-Möst gave it a richly detailed reading that brought out its best qualities. Among the soloists were the formidable soprano Luba Orgonášová, fast-rising mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor, who was last seen here in John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Tenor Hubert Lippert, who performed with the Vienna Phil last March, and bass Ruben Drole rounded out the cast.
From here, Cleveland left the next day for their latest European tour, taking them to Hamburg, Frankfurt, Paris, Luxembourg, Cologne, Linz, and Vienna, where they have an ongoing residency at the Musikverein. Not too shabby for an orchestra from a city known as the "mistake on the lake."