Word: musicalization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...group in these two scenes is called Musica Sacra. The conductor is a hearty, frustrated baseball player and onetime concert organist named Richard Westenburg. Musica Sacra is a time whose idea has come. That is, it embodies a period and style of music-the great sacred, choral works, especially of the baroque-that few before had been able to move from church choirs and amateur choruses into a professional concert series. In the past three years, the group (which works with a nucleus of 29 singers and 28 instrumentalists) has given notable performances of such works as Mozart...
Still, it was the ardent, intelligent music making of Musica Sacra that provided the festival's best moments. They came in the final choral sections of the Magnificat; in the orchestral Suite No. 3 and the Cantata No. 4 ("Christ lag in Todes-banden") under Westenburg; and above all, in resplendent, moving performances of the Mass in B-Minor that Westenburg conducted on opening and closing nights...
Musica Sacra performances have a luminous clarity, not only in the music but in the text. "I'm a word man," says Westenburg, 47. "Very few people can get as excited about a well-phonated vowel or a well-timed consonant as I can." The group's work does not suffer from the chilly immaculateness of many other early-music groups, especially those of the more-authentic-than-thou persuasion...
...best music is music that makes a strong statement...
Besides serving as head of the choral department at Juilliard, Westenburg is now music director at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (where most of his Musica Sacra singers also perform) and conductor of the Collegiate Chorale, a 160-voice amateur chorus. And he is planning another Basically Bach festival for next year. All of this has forced him to forgo his weekly summer baseball games and subside to the status of a merely passionate fan. His team? "The Yankees-I guess because they're winners." Coming from a man with Westenburg's recent record, that figures...