The Master Chorale is a 160-voice volunteer chorus of "bankers and lawyers and house moms and house dads and college students and teachers," as its artistic and music director, Dr. Richard Zielinski, put it the other day. It's also the principal chorus of the Florida Orchestra, and a group that's willing to take on the most ambitious music in the choral repertoire. This weekend the Chorale performs Bach's The Passion According to St. John, a two-hour music drama about Christ's betrayal and eventual crucifixion.
Comparisons to a "Passion According to a Certain Someone Else" are inevitable at the moment. The Chorale's publicity poster exclaims, "You've heard about the movie. Now experience the music," and Zielinski is no less eager to play into the current passion for passions. "No matter if you're a Christian or not," he said in a recent phone interview, "there wouldn't have been all this discussion and hype if not for [Mel] Gibson's movie, and a lot of people who aren't even Christians were commenting on it or wanting to go see it or are curious."
But going to hear Bach's Passion because you are curious about Gibson's Passion is like buying a Jurassic 5 album because you are intrigued by 50 Cent: The artistic vision differs somewhat. "It's not going to be a blockbuster with a lot of high-tech hoopla and the editing that movies have," Zielinski cautioned. The Master Chorale generates the special effects in this production, with the aid of a 30-member chamber orchestra and six soloists who represent important characters in the drama: Jesus, Peter, Pilate, the Evangelist himself, and Everyman and Everywoman soloists. "It's so intense when you see human beings up there singing," Zielinski said.
The most special effect of all, of course, is Bach's music. When the Evangelist narrates Jesus' beating at the hands of Roman soldiers, he sings a spine-tingling flourish on "scourge" that goes on and on and on, and manages to exhibit Jesus' suffering at least as graphically as any image could. Through empathy-commanding moments like that, Bach funnels audience into story. The opening chorus, an apocalyptic vision of distressed humanity, exerts a current of fascination that has the potential to wear down detachment; it demands that you identify yourself as one of the afflicted multitude.
The Passion has universal sweep, but can it galvanize a contemporary audience as it presumably galvanized 18th-century Lutherans? It takes practice to insert your spiritual worldview into a particular doctrine, whatever that doctrine may be. If your heart is secular, how do you lose it to a piece whose spiritual charge is encased in the Gospel? Dr. Zielinski makes the case for its relevance. "I don't want this to be a theatrical piece or a concert piece," he insisted. "It's a very spiritual piece. No matter if you believe in Christianity or mythology or folklore or you're an American Indian, most societies or cultures — there's a great book by Joseph Campbell, Many Faces of God — have a Christ figure."
Preparing the piece has had an impact on the choir members, according to Zielinski. "I can sense over the last couple of weeks, people are getting really emotional about it," he said. "You know, like when Christ is talking about his mother, and He's on the cross and He's really kind of saying that He's feeling sorry for her. And so you relate to that, how you feel about your mom, if you miss her, if she's still here."
Dr. Zielinski and the Chorale are singing the Passion in an English translation. They also will project the text to five of the chorales so that the audience can sing along, just as it would have done in 18th-century Leipzig. Whatever your view of the passion story, you will at least get to feel the buzz of the congregation running through you, which is a very good feeling indeed.
Bach's Passion According to St. John, Master Chorale (813-258-9468). 7:30 p.m. Fri., April 2: Lake Magdalene United Methodist Church, 2902 Fletcher Ave. W., Tampa; 3 p.m. Sat., April 3: Pasadena Community Church, 227 70th St. S., St. Petersburg. Tickets: $15 in advance; $20 at the door; $15 senior; $7 students.
Contact Weekly Planet-Sarasota Staff Writer Travis Wilds at 941-321-6294, or travis.wilds@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Apr 1-7, 2004.