"Encore!"

by Lloyd Schwartz

Boston Phoenix, November 9, 2001

On the weekend after the terrorist attack, I went to hear a chamber music concert at the Friends Meeting House in Cambridge by Sarasa, a group that also does a lot of community service. It was the planned concert - nothing special in response to the horrible events. I was moved and charmed by the loveliness of the program: a Haydn quartet, restrained but full of feeling; an inventive and appealing Boccherini quintet - a colorful depiction of Spanish street life at night; and a rhapsodic string quintet by Dvorak. Just music, with no message, and played in the spirit of loving co-operation. As if to say it is music itself that is important, that is part of what is best about being human.

Sarasa's next concert, devoted to Bach, was also planned before the attack, but it was introduced by Baroque-violinist Brian Brooks as "an extended meditation for troubled times." Bach is like that. The pieces were two sinfonias from cantatas, two movements from violin sonatas, and the lively, exquisite F-minor Harpsichord Concerto (based on a lost Oboe Concerto in G minor); they were played with tender conviction, rich tone, and rhythmic point by violinists Brooks and Claire Jolivat, violist Jennifer Stirling, cellist Timothy Merton (Sarasas director), Deborah Dunham (double bass), and Richard Earle (oboe), with Maggie Cole doing the honors on the harpsichord.

The central event, though, was baratone Sanford Sylvan, in lustrous voice, singing an aria of spiritual rest and consolation ("Hier, in meines Vaters Statte") from Cantata No. 21 and the full Cantata No. 82, Ich habe genug - a work confronting death, moving from resignation to final reconciliation. It's one of Bach1s most profound works, and this year fortunate Bostonians have had the chance to hear it sung by two of the most profound Bach singers of this generation, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (in a performance conducted by Craig Smith and staged by Peter Sellars) and now Sylvan.

In the resonant acoustic of the Friends' Meeting House, Sylvan's voice filled every inch of space. The experience was less like listening to his voice than like being inside it. Sylvan leans into words like "hoffen" ("hope") in the first aria of Ich habe genug, or the tonally ambiguous phrase about the troubled spirit in the otherwise untroubled aria from Cantata 21. In the great aria "Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen" ("Slumber now, you weary eyes"), Richard Earle exchanged his obbligato oboe for a more plaintive oboe da caccia, which looks - and sounds - like a bent English horn, the brass bell at the end of the long wooden instrument leaning against his thigh. Smith and Hunt made this aria a slow, ecstatic vision, with almost no forward movement - as endlessly repetitive as eternity. Sylvan sang it at a faster tempo, with the lilt and deep sweetness of a lullaby. He has excelled in Handel, Mozart, Schubert, and such contemporary composers as John Harbison and John Adams (he created the roles of Chou En-lai in Nixon in China and Leon Klinghoffer in The Death of Klinghoffer). But I think Bach is the composer he really owns.

After a performance the next day in Concord, Sarasa and Sylvan were scheduled to take the program to prisons and residences for troubled teens. "It's outreach," Sylvan said,"only this time we're reaching out with great music."