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Giya Kancheli (1935-2019): Midday Prayers
Instrumentation: Scored for solo clarinet, alto flute/piccolo, oboe, bassoon/contrabassoon, horn, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, piano, amplified bass guitar, percussion, violin, viola, cello, bass, and soprano voice
Composed: 1991
Duration: 24 minutes

Giya Kancheli’s Midday Prayers, from his 1991 cycle “Life without Christmas” possesses an unquestionable liturgical character, evident in the tolling of bells and the peaceful prayer, “Deus, Deus meus” (Psalm 22), “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” intoned by the soprano toward the work’s end. But taken as a whole, Kancheli’s work is much more than a prayer. It’s a lament. It’s a scream of terror or grief. It is a mystical and serene means of contemplation. Kancheli’s 24-minute score is like a dream, wherein familiar images pass fleetingly through our unconscious, though their concrete meaning eludes us. It is a voice crying in the wilderness. And ultimately, it is peace.

Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, Giya Kancheli left for Berlin with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and then for Antwerp, though he ultimately returned home to Georgia, where he died of heart failure at the age of 84. As with many of his Soviet compatriots, among them Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, and Sofia Gubaidulina, until Kancheli moved to the West, he remained musically shackled, unable to fully disclose himself artistically. Once free, his music flowered and became embraced by major figures and institutions worldwide.

Kancheli’s style is timeless and familiar, modern and archaic. Matter unfolds slowly and with determination, with all elements—color, scraps of melody, pitches at times richly resonant and at other times static, and even volume—guided by a supremely confident hand. Much of Kancheli’s music is marked by mourning or loss and though Midday Prayers occasionally evokes a sense of tragedy, it is just as often sensual or religious and even witty. Ideas come and go on their own terms, yet are provided with enough tonal and rhythmic references to make us feel tethered. If you open your ears to Kancheli’s timeless approach, his breathtaking score will reward you with sweeping swaths of sound and deliver an experience unlike that of anyone else.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847): Symphony No. 2 in B-flat, Op. 52 “Lobgesang”
Instrumentation: Scored for two sopranos, tenor, chorus, pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and trumpets, four horns, three trombones, timpani, organ, and strings
Composed: 1840
Duration: 60 minutes

With the trombone’s magisterial opening chorale, the Sinfonia to Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Lobgesang, or Hymn of Praise, gets underway. The chorale-style introduction, which Mendelssohn sets as a call and response between the trombones and the rest of the orchestra, serves as the anchor for this majestic, hour-long composition, which, like Beethoven’s Ninth, to which it has often been compared, incorporates orchestra, chorus, and vocal soloists. Unlike Beethoven’s Ninth, however, the texts of the Lobgesang are religious by nature and Mendelssohn does not attempt to mold his composition into a four-movement symphonic scheme. Rather, the Berlin-born composer created a unique blend of symphony (the three movements found at the very start) and quasi-religious choral work (ten movements for chorus and/or vocal soloists and orchestra), all in the name of human ingenuity!

Mendelssohn’s unprecedented hybrid was composed in the early months of 1840, as part of a Leipzig festival celebrated to honor Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type 400 years earlier. While many German cities celebrated the occasion, Leipzig was a perfect fit, given its role as the European epicenter of the book trade. But as biographer Larry Todd has suggested, the festival didn’t simply honor Gutenberg’s invention; “the Gutenberg Bible was championed as the lamp that disseminated enlightenment, the means by which German realms had progressed from ignorant superstition to enlightened wisdom.”

Mendelssohn, it would seem, was the perfect composer to craft the music for such an event in such a city. He was, after all, among the greatest living composers and, as conductor of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra, had molded the ensemble into one of Europe’s finest. As a prolific composer of chamber music, songs, orchestral music, concertos, and oratorio, Mendelssohn also possessed—in abundance—all the tools necessary to bring all these aspects into play in celebration of Gutenberg’s miraculous gift to mankind. Indeed, even before the chorus enters for the first time (“All men”), the Sinfonia’s melodic contours, orchestration, counterpoint and pacing make it abundantly clear that we are in the hands of a master.

The vocal movements that follow the three-movement Sinfonia at the start of this musical spectacle, include Psalms and texts based on Isaiah and Romans, thereby imbuing the larger work with a quasi-sacred quality. Images range from praising the Lord with lyre and song to awakening from intellectual and spiritual darkness. There is no “storyline” per se, yet there is a clear movement from dark to light; indeed, the central movement, “The sorrows of death had closed all around me (No. 6), presents Mendelssohn in his darkest and most dissonant vein. The composer’s sublime vocal writing incorporates Baroque-inspired recitative, operatic aria, and the oratorio style that Mendelssohn had so brilliantly demonstrated in his St. Paul Oratorio of 1836 and would again exhibit in his Elijah seven years hence.

Given the unusual scope of the work, Mendelssohn’s critics did not know what to make of his symphonic-choral amalgamation. One writer found the result an ill-conceived imitation of the Ninth, another deemed it an “unhappy conception,” and yet another simply dismissed it as “unoriginal.” This last poke in Mendelssohn’s musical eye was by none other than Richard Wagner, who took offense publicly to Mendelssohn’s inescapable Jewish roots (a story for another time). Nor did posterity quite know what to do with this composition. Because the composer died before the work was published, editors had to subsequently assign it an opus number and attempt to place it within the composer’s oeuvre in some logical way. Two years after the Lobgesang, Mendelssohn published his Symphony No. 3, “Scottish,” but at the time of his death, he had never published a Symphony No. 2, despite the earlier completion of what was known as the “Italian” Symphony. Some historians believe Mendelssohn had planned to revisit that earlier work before its publication but as that never happened, the “Italian” was published posthumously as Symphony No. 4 and the Lobgesang, in turn, ascribed as Symphony No. 2. There is, however, no indication that Mendelssohn ever regarded the Lobgesang primarily as a symphonic work and in the most recent German cataloging of his works, the Lobgesang was indeed listed among the composer’s sacred vocal works.

Perhaps Mendelssohn aspired to “unattainable comprehensiveness,” to again quote Larry Todd. Certainly, hearing and performing this work today, the natural beauty and unsurpassed craftsmanship of Mendelssohn’s music-making leave us breathless. Whether or not Mendelssohn believed he was reaching for the stars, in the end, we are the beneficiaries of his thrilling quest for musical universality.

© Marc Moskovitz
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