Music Review | Stravinsky Festival: Stravinsky’s Mass Resounds In Armory

The performing arts have played shy suitor to the Park Avenue Armory. There have been visits to the front door, but a reluctance to knock. Think of a concert Saturday in the Miller Theater’s Stravinsky Festival as a first date.

The Vox Vocal Ensemble and the Gotham City Orchestra, conducted by George Steel.

As a potential summer home for the New York Philharmonic, the armory is informal and big. Both adjectives are understatements. Well-swept at least, its floors scruffy with peeled-away paint and with no indication that looking nice matters, the armory is inviting if only for its lack of pretension.

As for big, it is, so let’s get the gags heard from Saturday’s audience out of the way. The space is not a hangar for a jumbo jet, nor is there room for one to land. It is not Victoria Station gone to seed. The view from one end to the other is not obscured by the curvature of the earth. Stravinsky’s “Variations (Aldous Huxley in Memoriam)” was played twice after intermission (on the theory that more is more revealing), but the echo did not mean that you heard it four times. Being a Southerner steeped in the beauties of dilapidation, I liked the armory a lot.

At one end of this immense rectangle, George Steel’s Vox Vocal Ensemble and Gotham City Orchestra faced the audience, with the side walls at their backs. Rough sheets of plywood leaned out from the catwalk above and behind the players; acoustical engineering didn’t seem to get much past this.

People pay too much attention to acoustics anyway and not enough to their powers of imagination. A place like this, on the other hand, pushes music and musicians around. The time taken for a sound to make its way to the far walls and back is startling. Close your eyes, imagine yourself in some gigantic high-ceilinged cathedral and then add a second or two to your expectations.

It’s easy to say this is the wrong way to hear music; I think it’s a different way with its own rewards. Having good performers helps, and I much admired Mr. Steel’s chorus and orchestra in difficult music. Although the armory is designed for soldiers not of the onward Christian variety, the program was deeply religious.

Stravinsky’s Mass, “Requiem Canticles” and “Symphony of Psalms” reminded us that devotion and humanity can be expressed without sacrifice of dignity. The chantlike sequences of the Mass were mesmerizing. The nine parts of the “Requiem Canticles” appeared and disappeared like imperfect fragments; they speak in 20th-century abstractions, but sound like archaeological discoveries. The “Symphony of Psalms” rises out of the horrors of the 20th century as one of its redeeming acts of good.

The success of the performances varied with Stravinsky’s instrumentation, which assuredly did not have the Park Avenue Armory in mind when written. The Mass, with its wind-band ensemble, worked beyond expectations, cutting through the acoustical haze and making use of the space’s resounding accentuation. The spareness of the “Requiem Canticles” was in the piece’s favor too. The orchestra “Variations” were simply too complicated to explain themselves well in these conditions.

One had hopes for the “Symphony of Psalms,” but its multiple flutes and relatively delicate double-reed figures tended to lose themselves in clouds of sound. To the rescue, the Vox Vocal Ensemble sang this great piece with style and devotion. I hope the music business was made curious enough to come knocking on the armory’s door again. It’s never a good idea to reveal too much on first dates.

The Stravinsky Festival continues on Tuesday with piano music at St. Bartholomews Church, Park Avenue at 51st Street; millertheatre.com.

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