Rochester Oratorio Society – Amy Beach’s Grand Mass in E flat, Opus 5

I’ll admit, I was puzzled when my brother from Baltimore asked if he could fly up for the night, just to attend the Rochester Oratorio Society (ROS) performance of Amy Beach’s Grand Mass. I had posted the concert on Facebook, because Concentus Women’s Chorus was performing a few pieces on the first half of the program, and my purpose had been to get fellow Rochesterians to attend, not anyone from out of town! Even Concentus’ conductor was curious.

Now, my brother is a bit of a classical music nerd, so my guess was that he likes to collect performances, the way a philatelist collects stamps. And the mass was a piece he hadn’t heard performed, nor was he likely to in another setting. While that was a piece of it, he explained that it was primarily because Amy Beach, born in 1867, is an important American composer, like George W. Chadwick and John Knowles Paine. Um, who? I’ll admit, I had never heard of any of these people! So if they are so relatively unknown, why are they important? And how can you be unknown and important? Well, apparently, she was among the first American composers to achieve prominence in the Western musical tradition. Oh, and she was a woman.

The work is not particularly sophisticated, and her inexperience is evident in the sometimes odd settings of the Latin text (a quick look on Wikipedia confirmed that she wasn’t really familiar with Latin, but I think we can give her a pass, since she was only 20 when she composed the piece). But the entry also asserted that this was the first mass written by a woman. Let that sink in. In the pre-concert interview, WXXI’s Brenda Tremblay asked soprano soloist Elena O’Connor about her experience learning and performing the piece, and Ms. O’Connor remarked that Beach was “meticulous in her notations – she was a woman who knew what she wanted.”

The soloists were very good, although I particularly enjoyed the baritone, Keith Brown, and Ms. O’Connor. I’ll admit, though, that when the four of them sang as a quartet I sometimes had difficulty discerning the notes through all that vibrato. My brother and I both noticed that the keyboard player hopped back and forth between the organ and the piano. He wondered if perhaps some wind instruments had been substituted with a piano reduction. Since it was my initial impression that there wouldn’t be a piano (hence the need for Concentus to sing only a cappella songs), I suspect musician costs became a factor. Even though ROS is a 130+ member volunteer chorus, I’m sure the instrumentalists, in addition to the soloists, were all paid. Thank goodness for the Decentralization Grant that supported this performance!

Kudos to ROS Artistic Director Eric Townell for putting together this collaborative performance to celebrate the centennial of Women’s Suffrage and the 150^th anniversary of Beach’s birth. I applaud his risk-taking inclusion of the Young Women’s College Prep Charter School Choir. Concentus was truly honored to have been invited to participate in the event.

For information on the rest of ROS’ season, visit https://rossings.org