Chorale director makes impressive debut

By Ellen Pfeifer, Globe Correspondent, 11/19/2002

CAMBRIDGE - Anyone the Back Bay Chorale engaged to be its new music director was going to have very large shoes to fill. The chorale's most recent leader - the young, charismatic, and prodigiously gifted Julian Wachner - left last year to take a position at McGill University in Montreal. But with James Olesen, who made his debut with the chorale Sunday afternoon, it appears that the ensemble is in very good hands indeed.

A veteran of the podium, Olesen has been director of choruses at Brandeis University since 1972, has guest-conducted extensively, and has prepared choruses for a variety of symphony orchestras in the United States and abroad. A singer himself, he has appeared in Lieder and vocal quartet concerts and performed with numerous choruses under conductors ranging from Robert Shaw to Leonard Bernstein to Leopold Stokowski.

What that adds up to is an intimate acquaintance with the literature for voice, solo and choral. That expertise was clearly on display Sunday afternoon. In his brief remarks from the stage, it was also clear that Olesen's wide experience has nourished his spirituality and that he was eager for the audience to allow the music to ''reveal some of the realities that are usually covered over.''

With that introduction, he opened the concert with Mozart's ''Ave verum corpus,'' one of the briefest yet most sublime pieces of sacred music in the repertory. The performance was deeply moving in its simplicity, its voicing of harmonies, and its refined sonorities.

The remaining two works on the program, by J.S. Bach and Mozart, were wedding pieces. The former, Cantata BWV 196, is a brief, sunny, and festive work. The latter, Mozart's Mass in C-minor, was written to celebrate the composer's own marriage. A complex work, it reflects ambivalent religious faith while delivering the liturgical text with operatic vividness.

In both works, Olesen revealed a keen sense of musical architecture and pacing, a wide palette of dynamics, and expressive intensity. This was nowhere more effective than in Mozart's troubled ''Qui tollis peccata mundi,'' with its dramatically accented rhythms, its drooping melodic line, and chromatic harmonies.

Throughout the afternoon, there was fine solo singing to complement the noble sound of the massed chorus. Soprano Pamela Murray gave a pretty and confident account of Mozart's ''Laudamus te'' and the aria ''Er segnet'' in the Bach. Soprano Jodi Frisbie applied her diamond-bright sonority and fearless technique to the challenging ''Et incarnatus est,'' where she was beautifully accompanied by oboe, flute, and bassoon. Tenor Frank Kelley and bass Donald Wilkinson, though entirely upstaged by the women in the soprano-dominated Mass, gave an elegant performance of the duet ''Der Herr segnet'' in the cantata.

The Back Bay Chorale
James Olesen, Music Director
Music of Bach and Mozart
The Orchestra of Emmanuel Music
Jodi Frisbie, Pamela Murray, sopranos; Frank Kelley, tenor; Donald Wilkinson, bass
At: Sanders Theatre, Sunday afternoon

This story ran on page F6 of the Boston Globe on 11/19/2002.
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