Music: Hungarian Lutheran performance: Bach's Magnificat in D

A wonderful seasonal performance by a small community.  Some of the choral passages were not up to metropolitan standards.  The entire choir seemed too bound to the their lyrics-books.  This was not so for the bass male soloist, who did not look down once in what I saw.  The tenor (male) and the contralto (female) in their duet again were too book-dependent but they worked well together.  I felt thru-out the amplification was inadequate, and I surmise that in Bach's day the power of projection of voice was much more effective for the audience and demanding of the singers.  Ours in this performance were successfully struggling to maintain their technical standard, but without boosting amplification too much sounded muted and not Magnificat-like, which is sung by Mary in the context of Gabriel's Annunciation of the Coming Christ-child.  The Hungarians were not singing in their first language, all the more reason for greater crispness instead of slurred passages.

--Musikos, refWrite Backpage music newspotter, analyst, columnist


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