Mendelssohn Club continues to play it smart

Monday, October 25, 1999

By Peter Dobrin

Philadelphia Inquirer Music Critic

One of the nobler tasks the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia has consistently taken on is that of expanding the repertoire. Not content to wallow in the relative crowd-pleasing safety of the 19th century, the choral group has set an admirable course of commissioning and premiering.

Saturday night, at the first concert of its 126th season, the clubbers ended their concert at the Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion with a rather smart move. After performing Beethoven's Mass in C, the group launched into the premiere of Donald St. Pierre's Ite missa est. The new work sets the concluding part of the Mass - a portion that Beethoven, following tradition, had eschewed - so in effect, the new work completed an emotional arch.

St. Pierre, also the group's rehearsal pianist, did not mimic Beethoven in any stylistic way. His likable piece was more akin to Orff and Stravinsky in its slightly primitive sound. Hand bells, castanets, ratchets and other percussion instruments bolstered the short burst of a work, which conductor Alan Harler moved along energetically. The words of the title, translated as "Go, you are dismissed," did the trick.

The Mendelssohn Club also performed the local premiere of Marjorie Merryman's 1995 telling of Jonah and the whale, scored for chorus, orchestra and tenor and baritone soloists. Merryman, chairwoman of the department of theory and composition at Boston University School for the Arts, inhabits that rich realm of potentialities in which neither dissonance nor consonance is something to be avoided. In Jonah she deploys both as tools for dramatic storytelling, and the strategy pays off powerfully. The Concerto Soloists, orchestra for the evening, weighed in with some thin violin playing, and the two soloists, tenor Randall Black and baritone Valeriano Lanchas, were vivid storytellers, once Black got over some initial moments of being overwhelmed by the orchestra.

Black and Lanchas were back in Beethoven's Mass in C, joined by soprano Debra Field and mezzo-soprano Suzanne DuPlantis. Here the chorus shined. Near the end of the "Credo," the fugal section emerged with great clarity and that perfect gust of unity that only the best vocal ensembles can muster.