by Fred Moleck
Messiah in Space in Pittsburgh
This year’s Christmas mania in the malls and schools and media was starting to sour my usual good-natured tolerance of peripheral religion. For example—
the presence of the crèche sans Jesu in the cathedral sanctuary for a week now;
the presence of the crèche avec Jesu in outdoor nativity scenes at three Catholic churches in Pittsburgh;
and the proliferation of performances of Handel’s Messiah
stimulated my Bolshevik soul, and I was plotting a revolution against malls, schools, media and “just-can’t-wait” churches.
A divine intervention occurred last week—just in time. I attended a performance of Messiah by the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh. It was life changing—well, if not life changing, it certainly soothed my savage breast.
The performance took place in Hunt Armory under the directorship of Thomas Wesley Douglas, the choir’s enormously creative maestro and artistic.
If you don’t know, an armory is a storage place for tanks, jeeps, equipment, military cargo trucks, and other military paraphernalia. Hunt Armory is cavernous, maybe the size of a football field.
The instrumental ensemble and director were situated in the center of the building with the choir in two SATB divisions flanking them, but about thirty feet away from the ensemble.
In spite of the distances, the whole thing hung together beautifully—no small feat for any director. Maestro Douglas commandeered them well.
The highlights for me were the soloists who sang and acted like opera singers—in the sense they reflected the emotional content of their recitatives and arias.
Each one made his or her entrance, and as they moved through the aisles, their faces and bodies reflected the essence of the texts.
For example, when the soprano sang, “Rejoice, greatly, O daughter of Zion,” she smiled exuberantly and discretely related to the audience members who were close to her.
She would make a perfect Susannah.
The bass sounded and looked like a prophet when he sang his “Thus Saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts.” Most of the audience felt the energy, and some of us felt visibly shaken when he proclaimed, “And I will shake.”
As I was leaving the building I overheard one of the audience members tell his friend that is seemed like an opera and the choir and soloists sang like opera singers.
And why shouldn’t they? Handel wrote operas, and operas are theater, and theater deals with baring human emotions.
The sense of drama, exultation, and pathos inherent in the Scripture transcended the chilly building and metal chairs.
It appeared that most everyone in attendance knew Messiah upside down and probably sang parts of it some in type of chorus or choir.
What convinced me was hearing the people around me sing part of the choruses with the choir from the excerpts that were printed in the program.
Imagine, the “Hallelujah” chorus being sung in an armory.
It blew me away.
There were a thousand delights like the tenor singing “ Comfort Ye” sitting on the roof of one of the large trucks. He did, however, gracefully come down to sing “Every Valley Shall Be Exulted.”
I grinned another time when I spied the trumpet player climbing to the top of another truck for “The Trumpet Shall Sound.”
When the headlights of the trucks were miraculously turned on and provided the light for “the people who walked in darkness” so they could see “a great light” I had to stifle a snicker.
To pull off these “delights” as well as the high drama, the direction and artistry has to be consummate. Otherwise, the whole experience would have been an embarrassment and incredibly hokey.
That never happened. With good musicians and a director with a deep sense of theater and drama, the event moved Handel’s Messiah from another Advent-Christmas warhorse in choral literature to a highpoint in my Advent.
I wonder if the armory space had something to do with its success—and I don’t mean the highly reverberant acoustics.
Here is a space used to store war-making equipment. In this same space ancient words from religious traditions are heard that sing of peace, comfort, and exultation.
Another text came to mind as I wandered home in a mild trance. It is not in Messiah.
We heard this text on the First Sunday of Advent three weeks ago.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks;
One nation shall not raise the sword against another,
Nor shall they make war again.—Isaiah 2:4
You can reach Fred Moleck via email at fmoleck@comcast.net