Michael Horvit
The Mystic Flame - A Choral Symphony

* Twyla Whitaker (soprano), Katherine Ciesinski (mezzo), Joseph Evans
(tenor), Richard Paul Fink (baritone), Moores School Symphony Orchestra &
Festival Chorus/Franz Anton Krager
Albany TROY533  {DDD} TT: 67:44

Summary for the Busy Executive: A good heart.

I sing in four different choirs (my evenings are pretty much booked).
I've actually sung music by Michael Horvit: A Child's Journey and Even
When God is Silent.  They lie well within the capabilities of the volunteer
groups I belong to, and they're beautiful besides.  Both essentially
about the Holocaust, they have an elegant restraint to them, getting a
lot from a few, right notes.  The Mystic Flame has greater ambitions
and, as far as I'm concerned, far more problems.

First, the good news.  Horvit -- who studied with Piston, Foss, and
Copland, among others -- has the necessary craft to write a large work.
A three-minute piece is one thing, an eight-minute movement something
else.  However, I can't call The Mystic Flame a success, despite some
lovely things.  First, although one hears themes reused and varied, this
is no symphony, but a suite of nineteen choral pieces.  No "movement"
(that is, group of choral pieces) moves symphonically, in the sense
of presenting a thematic argument.  We really have a bunch of brief,
self-contained musical units.  It's something to remark upon, only because
Horvit has made a point of it in his subtitle.  He can call it whatever
he wants, as far as I'm concerned.  The more important question remains
the quality of the pieces themselves.

The work has ambition, but it overreaches.  The Holocaust, like war in
general, is one of the big artistic subjects, one which few artists do
justice to.  One's heart may be in the right place, but that doesn't
guarantee a great work.  The Horvit is no Tippett Child of Our Time,
Shostakovich Babi Yar, Britten War Requiem, or Lees "Memorial Candles"
Symphony.  In spite of Horvit's sincerity and craft, The Mystic Flame
fails to convince.  I'll talk about, for me, the main reason.

Either Horvit has no idea what makes a good text to set to music,
or he can't overcome the limitations of a text he knows to be, in the
usual way of things, unsuitable.  It's not that the texts are necessarily
bad in themselves (although there are some pretty hokey things here,
including something from my former rabbi), but that they don't move in
a way conducive to a musical setting.  Many of the pieces are prose and,
like a lot of prose, construct arguments.  Music, on the other hand,
tends to work best with images.  It seems to me awfully difficult to get
musical gold from a passage like the following (from the final movement):

   The history of every people fixes its eye upon a particular
   moment in which its qualities and attributes shine forth
   with special radiance.  No one can doubt that it was just
   such an incandescent moment that has been kindled in the
   life of the Jewish people.

This may be eloquent prose, but it's a lawyer's eloquence, not a poet's.
It moves like the political speech it is (Abba Eban on the establishment
of Israel).  The music also moves in the same prosaic way.  Horvit gets
almost none of the prose sections to work -- not the excerpts from
Niemoller, Anne Frank, Howard Samuels, Sartre, Gorky, Herzl, Brandeis,
and so on.  Listening to these sections is like listening to me singing
this review.  The music goes along evenly, without ever rising to some
sort of occasion.  The most expressive sections all have words by poets:
Emma Lazarus, Itzik Manger, Nelly Sachs, and a stunning setting of the
traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead, the Kaddish.

The performance is good enough.  I doubt a "star" contingent would make
a significantly greater effect.  Too much of the music is just too bland.
However, the soloists in particular are fine, especially Whittaker and
Ciesinski.  A slight case of vocal fatigue seems to have touched the
tenor, Evans.  Richard Paul Fink, the bass-baritone, despite an overly-hard
edge to his voice and rough way with a musical line, nevertheless
communicates.

Steve Schwartz