Bach’s Captains And Foot Soldiers Of Musical Industry

BETHLEHEM, Pa., May 5 — Few would have guessed, say 25 years ago, that among the central pillars of this citys storied tradition the Bethlehem Bach Festival would prove sturdier than Bethlehem Steel. But the steel mill, shut down in 1998, now stands as perhaps the most spectacular ruin of the American rust belt. And the annual Bach festival is alive, well and celebrating its 100th outing here, 85 miles west of New York City.

Now that civic tradition, scrupulously built over decades and centuries on the Moravian cultural and religious ethic and the American work ethic, faces another jolt as the Sands Corporation develops plans to turn the steel plant into a casino. That particular service industry seems an odd fit for this city of 73,000 with two notable institutions, Moravian College and Lehigh University; a bad fit, many say.

But the festival seems unperturbed by the prospect of this unlikely new bedfellow. The city proved remarkably resilient in the face of the Bethlehem Steel closing, said Bridget George, the festivals executive director, and as change comes, we have to be as creative and reinventive in our own response to what Bethlehem is and how passionately we feel about it.

The festival, which began over the weekend and resumes on Friday, is actually more than 100 years old. It is presented by the volunteer Bach Choir of Bethlehem, which was founded in 1898. The inaugural festival, in 1900, included the first complete American performance of Bachs Mass in B minor, which was performed again on Saturday afternoon, as it is every year. Not quite annual at the start, the festival has appeared regularly since 1934.

By all accounts the chorus remains as vital an institution as ever, having installed a popular series of noonday Bach concerts on the first Tuesday of some months. But the choir is not as big as ever. Once 300 voices strong, it was down to 200 or so when Greg Funfgeld, its current music director, took over in 1984 and now hovers around 100.

The reduction was partly because of more stringent quality control, partly a concession to current notions of how big — small, really — a Bach chorus should be. (The most advanced thought, embraced by Michael Marissen, a music professor at Swarthmore College, in the distinguished scholar lecture on Friday, now suggests a single voice per part.) But for this chorus to become much smaller would defeat its very reason for being, as a vehicle for mass community involvement. Were not whittling much further, Ms. George said.

For the same reason pitch-perfection, incisive brilliance and consummate virtuosity are beside the point. The spirit of the enterprise carries the day beautifully in context, in the reverberant confines of Packer Memorial Church on the Lehigh campus (though less well in the bright acoustical light of Carnegie Hall, as in a performance of the Mass there in 2000).

The chorus was bigger for the B minor Mass here, filled out with 50 singers from the choir of Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. This collaboration, which also took the Bach Choir of Bethlehem to Severance Hall in Cleveland last month, was intended to celebrate not only the Bethlehem milestone but also the 75th anniversary of Baldwin-Wallaces Bach festival, patterned after Bethlehems and said to be the oldest collegiate Bach festival in America. The B minor Mass performance was rousing, committed and touching, if hardly a model of clarity and detail.

The other big work, performed on Friday, was Bachs St. Matthew Passion. This too was ardently and lovingly performed. But in the fashion of some festivals it was performed in two parts around a dinner break of more than two hours (in contrast to the hourlong intermission in the Mass).

The break seemed to do the singers few favors. The performance lost much of its focus in the second half, and the tenor Frederick Urrey, who had gamely coped with the punishing role of the Evangelist in the first half, lost control of his upper range. A listener might have been willing to ascribe the difficulty to physical problems, but Mr. Urrey, in an aria of the Mass that could have turned over to the other tenor on hand, Benjamin Butterfield, appeared again to similar effect.

To a lesser extent all the vocal soloists were uneven, but good moments generally outweighed the bad for the baritone William Sharp as Jesus; Anne Grimm and Rosa Lamoreaux, sopranos; Daniel Taylor, countertenor; and Mr. Butterfield. Christopheren Nomura, a bass-baritone, was the most consistently pleasing, and in his performance, the cleansing, uplifting aria near of the end of the Passion, Mache dich, mein Herze, rein worked its usual wonders.

Another example of the festivals openness to innovation came with its first venture into dance. On Saturday morning in the Zoellner Arts Center at Lehigh, six dancers from Taylor 2, a touring arm of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, gave vibrant performances of Airs, to music of Handel, and Esplanade, to violin concertos of Bach. To judge from the clamorous audience reaction, dance will be back at the festival. Which, to anyone who has traced the origins of so much of Bachs music to dance forms, must seem only appropriate.

The festival will conclude on Friday and Saturday with repeats of these performances (without the Baldwin-Wallace College Choir) and a concert by the Baltimore Consort, followed by a celebratory jazz cabaret and concert; bach.org, (610) 866-4382.

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