It is important to realize that this work was never performed, in its entirety, during Bach’s lifetime-neither as a concert, nor in a service. In some respects, we are a thoroughly modern choir: we are 60 singers, rather than the 8-24 some scholars think Bach had in mind we perform in a building which, though superficially resembling a “period” building, actually has modern, diffuse acoustics, and requires non-period forces to be adequately filled with sound and we are presenting a “mass” as a concert, rather than in a liturgical context, with appropriate, necessary breaks during which the rest of the liturgy would occur.

And we work hard to sing with the kind of non-legato articulation we will hear from our instrumentalists, the kind of articulation that “reads” well when presenting music as complex and polyphonic as this, in a resonant space. Our sopranos and altos are women, rather than the boys and counter tenors Bach would have employed, but they sing with a narrower, straighter sound than modern singers would usually employ. Voices, and instruments, are tuned to a=415, approximately one half step lower than modern pitch and our orchestra will play on copies of period instruments-gut strings, wooden flutes, natural horns and trumpets, etc- which have a very different characteristic sound than modern instruments: they are far softer in volume and quality, they play with less vibrato, and they rely more on articulation than on unbroken legato sound. Our preparation is greatly influenced by the historically informed performance practice (HIPP) movement of the second half of the twentieth century. We can already hear what the finished product will sound like-which is a far different experience than that enjoyed by a choir reading this mind-boggling difficult score for the first time. The majority of Chorale’s singers have sung the Mass at least once, and are familiar both with the notes and with the overwhelming majesty of the work and they carry the neophytes with them.

Understandably, ambitious choirs tend to prefer the Mass… and this preference finds expression in the good natured euphoria greeting our opening rehearsals. The Passion, which is a continuous narrative dialogue, gives far more weight to the soloists, leaving the choir to sing significantly less than it does in the Mass. The Mass edges out the Passion only because the Mass is truly a choral work, the choral movements greatly outnumbering, even overshadowing, the solo movements each stands alone as a supreme example of the choral art, and the whole is an overwhelming tour de force for the choir. This is Chorale’s third preparation of this work, usually considered the greatest composition for chorus and orchestra in the Western canon it is rivaled only by Bach’s other greatest choral/orchestral work, the Matthew Passion, which Chorale presented two years ago. Chorale is four weeks into rehearsal for our March 26 performance of J.S.

Bach compositions for choirs