Concert Review: ‘O How Good’ – Bloch’s ‘Sacred Service’ at Central Synagogue, Presented by MasterVoices

The 1965 hit album “You Don’t Have To Be Jewish” is largely about the universality of humor but the title could just as easily apply to the sacred music by Kurt Weill and Ernst Bloch by MasterVoices, formerly the Collegiate Chorale, in a one-night only performance at the Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue.

The most well-known sacred music in the Christian Church comes from composers including Bach, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, but the earliest Christian sacred music came directly from Jewish worship music.

While the well-known Viennese cantor Salomon Sulzer was a composer of liturgical music in his own right, he also asked Franz Schubert to make a choral setting of Psalm 92 in Hebrew, and multiple other non-Jewish composers prepared works for German congregations.

This notwithstanding, one has to search back to the late Italian Renaissance period for works such as Salamone Rossi’s unprecedented “The Songs of Solomon,” (not based on the similarly named “The Song of Songs,” also known as “The Song of Solomon”) as well as Rossi’s other works to find something that matches the awe-inspiring tones of later Christian composers.  Rossi’s work, along with Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” Steve Reich’s “Tehillim,” and the Bloch piece as performed Thursday evening by MasterVoices, led by Ted Sperling, “Avodath Hokodesh,” (Sacred Service in English), neatly fit the bill.

The the Casavant Frères organ at the Central Synagogue

The program opened with Kurt Weill’s 1946 “Kiddush,” performed by the Central Synagogue’s cantor, tenor Daniel Mutlu, who also gave a brief and rather illuminating pre-concert talk about the program.  The Weill piece, which had been commissioned by the long-time cantor of the Park Avenue Synagogue, David Putterman, was followed by the world premiere of Daniel Rein’s moving “And the Sun Goes Up.”

The program’s finale, the sui genesis “Sacred Service,” is a virtual oratorio of the Sabbath liturgy based on the aesthetic of Reform worship once prevalent in the United States.

Bloch intended “Sacred Service” on the one hand to highlight the awe-inspiring spiritual experience of Jewish prayer and, on the other, to offer general audiences of any faith (or none) a Jewish equivalent to Verdi’s or Mozart’s Requiems in the same way that the power of a Roman Catholic mass is not based on the faith of its audience.

“Sacred Service” was originally written for baritone, orchestra, and chorus but Bloch later arranged a version that replaced the orchestra with an organ.  The lush tones of David Strickland’s powerful organ accompaniment on the Casavant Frères organ which features 4 manuals, 71 registers, 46 stops, 63 ranks, and 3,642 pipes, allowed Bloch’s music to be heard as it must have been intended.  The piece uses melodies that hint at the original Hebrew chant but were in fact compositions of Bloch.  Justin Austin, a renowned baritone who has performed with such companies as the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Lincoln Center Theater, brought an ethereal warmth to the cantorial role.

To paraphrase Kissinger, I would have died unfulfilled had I not heard the awe-inspiring “Sacred Service” for a second time and I was fortunate that it was the MasterVoices rendition of it that will stay with me.  To borrow from Bloch’s own words, the music MasterVoices presented was that of vitality and significance and the magnificent setting of the Central Synagogue further heightened the experience.

THE DETAILS

Oh So Good
Limited engagement – March 23, 2023 only
MasterVoices
Central Synagogue
651 Lexington Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10022
www.mastervoices.org

(Photos: Accura Media Group)