Late Great Beethoven

BEETHOVEN'S Missa Solemnis has a formidable reputation. It poses extraordinary difficulties for performers, and manifold complexities for listeners. More talked-about than played, the Missa is still forbidden territory to many music lovers, even though Beethoven himself once dubbed it his "most successful" work. But a performance like the one conducted by F. John Adams last Friday night can prove that this mass is a moving and uplifting expression of man's relationship to God, and to His universe.

Adams amassed a huge choir for this concert, including the Collegium Musicum, The Harvard Glee Club, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus. The soloists, all from the Boston area, were Mary Strebing, soprano, Jan Curtis, alto, Robert Gartside, tenor, and Francis Hester, bass. The very fine orchestra included both Harvard students and Boston professionals contracted by concertmaster Robert Brink. Adams led all these forces in an intense and exciting performance.

Composed when Beethoven, never a particularly graceful vocal composer, had long been deaf, the Missa Solemnis reflects its composer's implacable unwillingness to make allowances for performers' limitations. The soprano part, abounds with sustained Forte. As and B flats. Often called upon to sing Fortissimo for long passages, Adams's choir coped with their hard-to-negotiate vocal lines courageously, and by and large, successfully. The balance was usually fairly good, with the men tending to outweigh the women at times. A large measure of the success of this performance was due to the sensitivity with which the choir responded to Adams's direction.

The soloists, unfortunately, were considerably less impressive than the choir. Both women soloists sang with wobbly gusto, though none too steady in pitch. Tenor Gartside sounded forced and dry while bass Hester, the best of the four, masterfully sang his solo at the beginning of the Agnus Dei.

The outer movements were better done than the Credo or the Sanctus, the former being sloppy, and perhaps too demanding for the Choir, and the latter featuring the quartet of soloists and a long violin solo which was drabbly executed by Mr. Brink.

The opening movements, the Kyrie and the Gloria, were spectacular. Adams chose perfect tempi--a wonderfully slow Adagio to begin the work, a free-flowing Andante for the Christe, and a very lively Allegro vivace in the opening of the Gloria. He took the huge fugue, "in Gloria Dei Patris, Amen," at a breakneck speed which left the audience--and the singers--breathless at the intermission. The last movement, Agnus Dei, was extremely dramatic as the singers' supplications for "inward and outward peace" were interrupted by the trumpet calls of war. The several tempo transitions in this movement were managed smoothly and effectively.

Altogether this was a fine performance, successful because of the sincerity of the conductor and the choir, and sincerity is the essence of this great religious work.