There is mystery and intrigue, a whole “dark and stormy night” thing in the story of how Mozart came to compose his Requiem in D minor, his final work before he died young at the age of 35. But there is no doubt as to the quality of the performance by the BPO, BPC, and soloists at Kleinhans at Friday (1/17/2025) morning’s “Coffee Concert” and the good news is that the concert repeats this Saturday evening. You can read all about it in the playbill when you go this Saturday, and you really should.
The Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus continues its past year of brilliant performances of big iconic works by Beethoven, Mahler, and now Mozart, and the way the section voices crisply separated then blended then separated all in waves, all in synch with the orchestra and four soloists made this the most impressive performance I’ve heard, and that’s in a year of impressive performances. I’m not sure what “special sauce” their music director Adam Luebke brings with him, maybe it’s just good old-fashioned hard work, but it’s a winning recipe. It is.
The four soloists, all with Buffalo connections, really made Western New York proud. Andrea Bickford brought her soaring soprano; Fredonia Contralto Lynne McMurtry brought her well-known musical sensitivity; bass Valerian Ruminski brought a clear resonant bass that carried right up to the rafters. I’ve followed Ruminski’s career for decades and he never sounded better. And I’ve saved the tenor for last.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself, and I’m well aware of how Robert Schumann caused all sorts of problems by comparing young Johannes Brahms to Beethoven, but I’ll be damned if Fredonia grad, tenor Jordan Pitts’ voice, the timbre, didn’t sound just like the late, great Luciano Pavarotti. The minute he started to sing I couldn’t believe it. When I asked around, others agreed. And, yes, I know, I’m talking about the most famous voice in opera, but you’ve got to go to Kleinhans and hear this kid sing! Goosebumps.
The orchestra was right there at the top of their game, too. I’m sure everyone has favorite sections of Mozart’s Requiem, but without a doubt, one of the coolest was the “Tuba Mirum” which is fun just to read about. “Tuba Mirum” has nothing to do with the instrument called the tuba, it’s Latin for “The trumpet shall sound” or “Hark, the trumpet” yet it’s not played by a trumpeter at all. It’s actually played on the tenor trombone and after a bit of solo work, there’s a duet between the trombone and the bass voice. It’s just one high point among many.
In a recent interview, JoAnn Falletta was asked what she thinks about when she’s conducting, and in addition to the thousand and one nuts and bolts of maintaining the tempo, providing cues to the musicians, etc., etc. she said that the part of being on the podium she most enjoys is simply listening to the music. And she informed me after Friday morning’s concert that during Mozart’s Requiem, she thought she was “levitating.” I liked that word, meaning floating or being lifted off the ground, a sense of elation, weightlessness, or extreme happiness.
It’s been a phenomenal year for the Grammy Award-winning Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus led by their Music Director, Adam Luebke. Over the past several months, in addition to their annual performances at the classical and pops Christmas concerts and Handel’s “Messiah,” they also sang two titans of classical music, Mahler’s Second Symphony with its themes of death, resurrection, and the afterlife, and Beethoven’s iconic life-affirming Ninth Symphony “Ode to Joy.” As if that weren’t enough, they’ve had several side gigs, including “The Poet’s Voice” at Asbury Hall last October. That concert featured musical settings of works by Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Sara Teasdale, and new works by Buffalo’s inaugural Poet Laureate, Jillian Hanesworth, accompanied by Abigail Rockwood Puehn. (See “A Whitman Symphony” below.)
And just this summer, at The Chautauqua Institution, they were taping the upcoming television special titled “Chautauqua at 150: Wynton Marsalis’ All Rise”. This one-hour documentary, produced by PBS and the Chautauqua Institution, will air on WNED PBS in early 2025. The special will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Chautauqua Institution and will feature a performance of Wynton Marsalis’s “All Rise” by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, along with The Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra and the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus.
But back to this weekend. The concert opens with the overture to Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (thank you, JoAnn, love those overtures) which sets us up for the Requiem, as both the opera and the Requiem are in the key of D minor, where I think that Mozart is his most exciting (well, also G minor). It’s so apt in that the lead character fo the opera, Don Giovanni, gets dragged down into the flames of hell at the end. I’m not sure if Donny G received a requiem mass. But I doubt it.
As a nice, light sonic break from all this drama, we get Mozart’s so-called “Concerto No 2 for Horn and Orchestra in E-flat” which was actually the first horn concerto he wrote for his friend Leutgeb once both of them had landed in Vienna. Very smoothly played, as he plays everything, by the BPO’s principal hornist, Jacek Muzyk. By the way, the latest CD by Jacek Muzyk titled “The Golden Age of the Horn” was released in October and features concertos for two horns performed by Jacek Muzyk and Daniel Kerdelewicz, accompanied by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of JoAnn Falletta. On sale in the lobby, the CD includes works by Friedrich Witt, Franz Anton Hoffmeister, Leopold Mozart (“Mozart’s dad”), and Frantisek Xaver Pokorny.
WHAT’S NEXT? After this Saturday night’s concert, the BPO is back next weekend when guest conductor Keith Lockhart returns to conduct three pieces, each composed in 1931: some French music by Tailleferre (important in the history of women composers), Ravel’s piano concerto in G (the fun one, not the super-serious one for left hand only), and American composer Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite (and there’s a lot more to the suite than the familiar “On The Trail” section).
The Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus will be back on stage for one night only, Saturday, February 1st, for “The Sound of Cinema,” movie music having a surprisingly large number of choral moments. And down the road…
“A Whitman Symphony” will be performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus along with select members of the BPO who perform separately as the “Buffalo Chamber Players” in a one-night-only event in June. They’ll sing verses of “America’s Poet,” sometimes called “The Bard of Democracy,” Walt Whitman. Billed as “an odyssey through the poetic expanse of Walt Whitman’s verse” this world premiere of “A Whitman Symphony” by composer Gian Carlo Menotti disciple Lee Hoiby will be June 14, 2025 at 7:30 pm at Saints Peter & Paul Church in Hamburg.
Kleinhans Music Hall is at “3 Symphony Circle” Buffalo, 14201 where Porter Avenue, Richmond Avenue, North Street and Wadsworth meet at a traffic circle. Visit www.bpo.org or call 716-885-5000. Full-service bar in the lobby or across the lobby in the Mary Seaton Room. Masks are optional. The concert with one intermission runs the usual two hours.
Lead image: MOZART’S REQUIEM CREW – Valerian Ruminski, Adam Luebke, JoAnn Falletta, Andrea Bickford, Jordan Pitts, and Lynne McMurtry