Leonard Bernstein's Mass

I didn't even notice until last night while reading the paper that a local symphony orchestra was performing Leonard Bernstein's Mass. The work is rarely performed, on account of needing 200 performers including a full symphony, a marching band, a full chorus, a boys chorus, dancers, fifteen soloists, and a stage twice the size of a usual stage.

I'm one of the few people who has actually seen a full production of the piece. When I was in high school, my h.s. choir went on a three-week trip to Europe to take part in a music festival. On an off night we had tickets to a production of the Bernstein work, which happened to be staged that particular week in Vienna by an American company from, I seem to remember, Yale. Not that we knew exactly what we were seeing, or were mature enough to follow it, but it was very impressive. What's more, that particular performance was videotaped, and if you've ever seen Mass on a PBS station, that's the performance I was at. For Xmas that year I asked for the recording, and got it -- a three-album boxed set, probably the most expensive and arcane present my parents ever got for me. So then I had the opportunity to listen to the two-hour work over and over. This, probably more than anything else, probably made me queer, because you cannot be a seventeen-year-old Bernstein geek without also becoming a cocksucker.

So I devoted this gorgeous Sunday afternoon to the performance, by the Oakland-East Bay Symphony. It was a semi-staged version, but they certainly had all the singers, players and dancers.

I have to say it was distinctly second-rate. The soloists were miked, and it was a good thing, since the conductor really liked the orchestra playing at full volume during the real loud parts. But the sound board man didn't really control the volume of the miked singers that well. So all in all, the sound balance was pretty goofed up.

There was also miscasting. The guy who had the lead role -- he plays the Celebrant, the priest leading the "mass" -- was a middle-aged man who looked like a an escapee from a performance of Man of La Mancha, and the woman who sang the beautiful "Then I Sang Gloria" number was not an ethereal contralto, as she should be.

Nevertheless, I was glad I went. Though I listened to the recording maybe 20 times, that was over 30 years ago; I hadn't heard it since. What struck me was the familiarity not so much of individual pieces, but of little snatches of things I'd completely forgotten. Rhythmic fragments, intervals, chords -- I never realized just how this work was sunk into my subconscious.

Maybe I'll get another recording. Though I don't know when I'd ever have time to listen to it.