Elijah, Robert Bass & the Collegiate Chorale, Carnegie Hall, 11/19/07

Reviews

OPERA NEWS - February 2008

Elijah, blockbuster hit of the 1846 Birmingham Music Festival and a favorite of the Victorian Era, makes only rare appearances nowadays. When Robert Bass and his Collegiate Chorale brought Mendelssohn's giant oratorio to Carnegie Hall on November 19, with Bryn Terfel in the title role and two hundred-odd choristers massed across the stage, the event was up to scale in every way. The chorus's opening cry of "Help, Lord!" shook the floor as well as the rafters, and everyone got set for a bracing evening.

Terfel, clad in simple clerical-looking garb, showed his resourcefulness as an artist by conceiving Elijah as an operatic character while singing his music more in a recital style - personal, detailed, free of grandstand rhetoric, with an informal dignity that ranged from intimate to awesome. Elijah as depicted in this text (William Bartholomew's English version of Carl Klingemann's Biblical adaptation) is meaty enough for a Masterpiece Theatre special - fanatical and bossy, even to the point of shouting stage directions to the Almighty, yet also humble, even self-effacing. Terfel made the most of it all, using skills of both opera and song, easing seamlessly from one to the other.

There was intensity and tenderness in his simple, expressive prayer to restore the Widow's son to life. In the scene where Baal's power is tested against Jehovah's, the Welsh baritone's dynamic range, word clarity and natural elocution projected the text evocatively, while his solo with chorus, "Look down on us from heaven, o Lord," offered a textbook case of bel canto smoothness and shapely movement. No less masterly was his transition from Part I to Part II, where Elijah starts to age and tire under the demands of his mission. With no help from scenery or stage event, one felt the prophet's humanity as well as the length, breadth and burden of his saga.

All told there were ten soloists, some in bit parts. As Obadiah, Elijah's sidekick, Iowa-born tenor Eric Cutler showed nicely focused tone, never any weightier than necessary, so well-aimed that it carried at every volume level. With Mendelssohn in songwriting vein ("If with all your hearts"), Cutler readily switched from clean-lined recitative to warm lyrical effusion. The soprano soloist, Hei-Kyung Hong, seemed a bit light for her assignments but sounded at her best at the start of Part II with "Hear ye, Israel" - sorrowful, urgent and lyrical all at once. The mezzo soloist, Nancy Maultsby, played both King Ahab's wife, Jezebel, with nasty dramatic zest, and an Angel, offering a mellifluous, reassuring, smoothly linear alto solo, "O rest in the Lord."

Though Part II runs downhill dramatically, it compensates with luscious ensembles, notably a female trio of Angels ("Lift thine eyes"), a female quartet of Seraphim with chorus ("Holy is God the Lord") and a mixed quartet ("O come, ev'ryone that thirsteth") just before the bang-up final chorus. In these scenes and elsewhere, the Chorale fielded a team of well-qualified soloists, completed by Elizabeth Hillebrand, Sarah Bleasdale, John Bernard, Lester Lynch and Lawrence Long, with boy soprano Daniel Castellanos singing a Youth's brief lines with bright, clear tone. The Chorale sang lustily or gently, as the occasion demanded, and with enthusiastic unanimity. The Orchestra of St. Luke's played its part with professional dispatch.

Presiding over this array of forces, Robert Bass, the Chorale's music director since 1980, paced the music smartly and shaped it with cohesion. Though he gave the soloists some leeway, there was an overall sense of tautness, bordering on rigidity - motivated, perhaps, by a desire to maintain discipline and prevent the work from loosening up or bogging down. Elijah is one of those "grand machines" connecting the Handelian oratorio tradition to such modern extravaganzas as Schoenberg's Gurrelieder and Walton's Belshazzar's Feast. Its return to Carnegie Hall, and Bryn Terfel as its protagonist, earned prolonged cheers.

JOHN W. FREEMAN