Our two performances of the Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass were sufficiently remarkable that they merit two posts. I’ll begin by considering the problems I encountered in learning the Mass.
The obvious one is the language. It ought to be no harder than, say, Rachmaninov’s Vespers, but rather than being transliterated for the benefit of English speakers you have the words written out for speakers of Czech, and it can be hard to spot the difference between, say, n and ń. Fortunately there are not too many words for the chorus (the lower voices seem to have more) and so it is possible to memorise the tricky bits.
The score used was the new Bärenreiter edition, but the chorus hire copies were Universal Edition’s, which tended to obscure the dynamic markings and orchestral cues, and had some of the nastiest page turns I’ve ever encountered. A particular speciality was splitting the first and second soprano parts in the first bar at the start of a new page, without warning.
This is all apart from the difficulties in the work itself. Some people I know who’ve sung the Mass have said they found it unsatisfactory because it was very ‘stop-start’, without long, sustained lines. This may just be because of Janáček’s style, or the fragmentation of phrases could suggest an uncertain belief. I think for example of the moment when the chorus sing ‘And I believe in one holy …er…um…’ and a few bars later the tenor soloist finishes off ‘…Catholic and Apostolic Church’. At any rate, the short phrases make the work less physically demanding to sing, and although there a fair number of high notes in the soprano line it is not difficult to nail them to whatever it is you nail high notes to.
Janáček also has ways of varying repeated phrases that you would never have expected. My favourite was the phrase which had an accelerando towards the end first time round, but not when it was repeated immediately afterwards. When he said that his Mass lacked ‘the sound of the usual imitative procedures’, he really meant it!
I’ll write about the actual performances in my next post.