Word: westenburg
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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...
...Basically Bach festival gave Westenburg an opportunity to make himself and his performers the whole show -which he rejected. "That's fine for a genius like Karajan," he says. "I wanted people to be able to sample various ways of looking at Bach." So he brought in Rosalyn Tureck for an intensely wrought solo recital on harpsichord and piano. Margaret Hillis, director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, led a sometimes wayward program of vocal and orchestral works that ended solidly on the Magnificat. Harpsichordist Anthony Newman "and friends" sped their dazzling, often unorthodox way through an evening of chamber...
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...
...Says Westenburg: "I tend to view life as one earth-shaking event after another...