Senior Executive Jerry and I stay in touch- he is still in the government, I am not, and it is fun catching up on the old colleagues who still labor in the madness. He is an avid reader and we compare book lists and new favorites when we get together at Willow.

He also shares his passion, which is his membership in the Washington Choral Arts Society. Passion and madness share a certain amount of common ground, and the chorus is a very active organization, particularly around the holidays.

They also are invited to a variety of overseas venues in the summer due to their reputation for excellence, but this is not a professional organization that pays a living wage. These are all volunteers, all of them with day jobs like Jerry, running Washington, working on the Hill and in the Agencies, and often racking up 60+ hour work-weeks to which they add rehearsals and performances when the rest of us are relaxing on holidays.

I always look for my pal on the televised version of A Capital Fourth- he is working while we drink and grill. This is about passion.

(The Atrium at the Kennedy Center).

Artistic Director Scott Tucker took over in 2012 from the venerable Norman Scribner, who founded the organization that is now in its 48th season. The Society has a budget over a million dollars a year and has sung with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, while maintaining a special relationship with the National Symphony Orchestra. They have recorded seventeen CDs from material in its annual subscription series in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Special programs like their Annual Choral Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., have cemented a unique relationship between the society and their city.

I am not much for formal evening activities any more- I get up too early and my energy is not precisely the same as it was when I stormed the liberty ports of Asia years ago. That is why I look for the afternoon concerts to share a little of their culture, and this concert at four pm on a chilly, windy wildly bright November day was just the ticket.

And, the performance was going to be what arguably is the masterwork of the master composer and musician of his age, Johan Sebastian Bach. His Mass in B-Minor is a setting of the complete Latin Mass in an intricate 27 movements with solo and choral voices, lush strings, horns, tympani and organ.

(J.S. Bach)

It was the culmination of the Master’s life work, and one of his last compositions when he was already blind. It was completed the year before his death in 1750. The Playbill informs us “the Mass gave new form to vocal music that Bach had composed throughout his career, dating back (in the case of the “Crucifxis” movement) to 1714, but extensively revised.”

Bach was a Lutheran, like the Pennsylvania Socotras, and it was unusual for composers working in that religious context to compose a complete mass- a missa tota. It is an oddity- in fact the whole thing was only performed in pieces never performed all at once until nearly a century after Bach was in his grave.

The judgment of history has been positive: the Mass has been described as one of the greatest compositions in musical history, which is going a ways. I am no connoisseur, though over the last decade or so I have found solace in listening to classical music on the local NPR outlet, and find that it soothes my soul after the abrasive discourse of the Imperial City.

Professor Markus Rathey at Yale sums up Bach’s motivation in creating a work he never saw performed in its entirety this way:

“The symmetry on earth mirrors the symmetric perfection of heaven. The purpose of art at this time—in architecture, the visual arts, and music—was not to create something entirely new, but to reflect this divine perfection, and in this way to praise God. We find such a symmetric outline in many pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach… but only in a few cases is this outline as consequent as in the B Minor Mass.”

And the Kennedy Center sells wine in the lobby before the performance. A glass before the performance began, nice seat in a parterre box at the back of the Orchestra Hall, and Jerry and his fellow volunteers gave us a chance to see what the sound of the soaring human spirit sounds like.

From the moment Scott Tucker raised his baton, the audience was captivated, enmeshed, enthralled. The voices soared in prayer, softened in reverence, roared in affirmation and rolled over us all in a wave in two hour-long parts, with a twenty-minute intermission.

My God, I thought. There is so much in this world that has twisted the passion of the human spirit into something awful.

Bach- through his instrument of the Choral Arts- reached out from beyond life to affirm the sanctity of ours, and the power of the spirit against time and place.

The voices were mesmerizing, the Choral Arts magic palpable. By the time we reached the dramatic soaring conclusion, I realized that the Mass in B-Minor is not the consecration of a master composures life work- it is the synthesis of every stylistic and technical contribution of his age.

I am not a particularly religious fellow- I distrust true believers of all stripes by hard experience- but I was reminded of the lines in Marc Cohn’s song “Walking in Memphis.

“Now Muriel plays piano
Every Friday at the Hollywood
And they brought me down to see her
And they asked me if I would
Do a little number
And I sang with all my might
And she said
“Tell me are you a Christian child?”
And I said “Ma’am I am tonight”

I defy you to listen to the Mass in B-Minor and say anything else yourself.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303