Ten years after

The Maine Music Society celebrates

By Doug Hubley

Peter Frewen: classing up L/A for 10 years now.

The Maine Music Society, which supports and administers the Androscoggin Chorale and the Maine Chamber Ensemble, has been celebrating its 10th performance season these past months. That’s a milestone some thought the society would never see, having been founded in a place and time that were less than auspicious. The Lewiston-Auburn area is no hotbed of classical music, and support for arts nonprofits was scarce in the recession year of 1991.

So the Maine Music Society can be forgiven a bit of self-congratulation. Last October it opened the anniversary season by reprising its very first concert, and in February revived its “American Classics” concept for a fund-raising dinner performance. The finale comes on June 2, when Artistic Director Peter Frewen revisits a piece the Chorale has done twice previously: Mozart’s Requiem in D minor (K. 626).

It seems counterintuitive to end months of celebration with one of music’s most intense interpretations of the Roman Catholic Mass for the dead. But Frewen has his reasons. For its 1987 performance of the Requiem, the Chorale, for the first time, was able to hire an orchestra. Not long after, that orchestra became the Maine Chamber Ensemble. So, in effect, that concert set the course for today’s Maine Music Society.

Besides, the Requiem is a peak of the choral repertoire, an unlikely but unforgettable alloy of ecclesiastical grandeur, Baroque fugue, and the subtlest mood painting. Its creation is one of music’s favorite stories: The dying Mozart works feverishly to finish the masterpiece that will symbolize the tragedy of his passing. Ratcheting up the poignancy is the fact that he didn’t quite make it, and he Requiem was completed by his protégés. But the prospect of death concentrates the mind wonderfully, as they say, and — even incomplete — Mozart’s deathbed achievement was masterful.

Known for operatic music that can convey scene or character with a handful of notes , Mozart used that skill here to portray a believer facing death: feeling dread at the end of this life, anxiety at the prospect of judgment, abject yearning for forgiveness. His model was in the mirror. “The fact is that toward the end, Mozart knew he was more than just sick. The man knew he was not going to make it,” says Frewen. “Mozart’s intensity is the white heat of somebody who’s trying to finish a creation — which happens to be dealing with the very subject that’s keeping him from finishing the creation.

“And I hope that we’re able to get that heat into the music and across to the audience, because it’s awe-inspiring.”

The June 2 concert features 40 singers in the choir, a Maine Chamber Ensemble with 27 instrumentalists, and four vocal soloists. New to the Maine Music Society is soprano Danielle Vayenas, who sang a lead role in the Portland Opera Repertory Theatre’s Rigoletto last summer. The other soloists — contralto Jennifer Hansen, tenor Jan Berlin, and baritone Peter Allen — are all familiar to Maine audiences. Also on the program are Beethoven’s Elegiac Song, an 1814 work for chorus and string quartet, and Mozart’s way overexposed Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (“A Little Night Music”). The 8 p.m. concert will be held at Lewiston’s United Baptist Church.

For years, the Requiem’s origins were surrounded by a certain amount of hooey, including tales of a wraithlike stranger who appeared at the Mozarts’ door to commission the work, and, as long as he was stopping by, foretell the composer’s demise. Actually it was just the agent of a local count who often hired composers to write music that he then presented as his own — which he would in fact do with the Requiem, in 1793. But Mozart, sensing a decline in his always fragile health (chronic staph infections, experts speculate), did see the commission as a portent. He accepted the job in July 1791, started on it in the fall, spent part of December 4 singing it with friends, and died early on the 5th. Maybe he took too seriously the notion of being a ghost composer.

Mozart checked out having completed the first of the work’s eight major sections and made definitive sketches for three more. His students, primarily one Franz Süssmayr, completed the work. Süssmayr based the concluding Communio directly on Mozart’s introduction, but otherwise scholars aren’t sure how much, if any, guidance the dying Mozart provided for the rest. On the one hand, some goofy counterpoint, the weirdly abrupt end to the Sanctus, and a general coarseness in the orchestration pretty definitely say Süssmayr.

On the other, the Benedictus, which is credited to Süssmayr, “is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music ever written,” says Frewen. “It has so much of the spirit of late Mozart — the longing, yearning kind of spirit, and his ability to spin out phrases and keep the expectation alive before it resolves. If Süssmayr did that, he was more of a genius than people give him credit for.”

The Requiem will grab you right from the start. Its opening bars capture the uncertainty felt by anyone unlucky enough to approach death fully conscious. But the emotional heart of the piece is the Sequentia, in whose six sections Mozart alternates between choral statements and exquisite writing for the solo voices. Here the narrative viewpoint shifts from the collective to the personal, from ritual proclamation to one individual’s abject pleading for mercy. What a choice for eternity: finding bliss by God’s right hand or joining the cast of a Hieronymous Bosch painting.

For Frewen, the pivot point comes in the Tuba Mirum, whose title refers to the trumpet heralding Judgment Day. Entering one by one, the soloists lay out what will happen to everyone else on that day — and then the soprano comes in and makes it personal. Suddenly , here is someone who understands her total inadequacy to the moral assessment awaiting her. “During that prayer, the music turns lyrical,” says Frewen. “And more than lyrical, it’s heartwrenchingly tender. The effect of that music is to melt stone hearts. It implores for mercy, and I can’t imagine anybody not showing mercy after being affected by that.”

Frewen has conducted the Requiem three times to date — once with another group he directs, the Oratorio Chorale; and with the present ensembles in 1987 and 1993. Formed as a community chorus in 1972, the Androscoggin Chorale hired Frewen as music director 10 years later. Frewen, raised out West, by then had been in Maine for about four years, one of the 1970s “back-to-the-landers” who came here seeking a serene lifestyle.

Early on, Frewen set himself the goal of building the Chorale, musically and organizationally, to the point where it could perform a major work on the strength of its own resources. “The Mozart Requiem in 1987 was the first fruit of that development,” says Frewen, who lives in Auburn. “We all recognized at the time what an achievement like that meant in this town, this part of the state, in those days.”

Frewen hired Maine players, including members of the Portland and Bangor symphony orchestras, to accompany the Chorale on that date. He soon formalized the arrangement by creating the Maine Chamber Ensemble, a flexibly staffed group that performs its own programs as well as supporting the Androscoggin and Oratorio chorales.

And, of course, Frewen founded the Maine Music Society in 1991 to run both ensembles. The idea, first, was to create an organization that could play all kinds of music, from large-scale oratorios to small chamber works, from Bach to Cole Porter, and don’ý forget the ballet and musical theater. And second, to bring it to underserved audiences, not just in L/A, but in Oxford Country and other sparsely populated areas. (However, Frewen notes, the sheer strength of the Portland music market increasingly brings the society down our way.)

Not bad for a project born under a cloud of skepticism. “I recall very vividly, when I went around in 1990 and 1991 trying to assemble a board of directors, how many people said, ‘You really must be crazy to try to start a nonprofit in these times,’ ” Frewen says. “I’m just so pleased that we are here and we seem to be strengthening.”

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net.