South Florida Classical Review

Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered was performed by the Master Chorale of South Florida Saturday night in Fort Lauderdale.

Nature has inspired some of the most celebrated and evocative works in the classical canon—the storm of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the sea of Debussy’s La Mer, the forbidding Nordic landscapes of Sibelius and the elemental, surging Rhine of Wagner.

But while past composers may have been moved by nature’s beauty and majesty, composers of today are often inspired by its fragility. 

The Master Chorale of South Florida performed two works Friday evening at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale that portray the vulnerability of the natural world, in a concert called “Heaven & Earth.”

Mass for the Endangered, a 2018 work by the American composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, uses the form of the traditional Latin mass with its Kyrie, Credo and so on. But the words added to the Latin text by the poet Nathaniel Bellows ask mercy not for humanity but for “all wing and paw, mercy to all creed and claw, on flower, seed, leaf, and root.” The text asks forgiveness not of God but of the earth, and not for all of our sins but for those we have committed against nature.

The music reflected the same mix of traditional and contemporary, with passages that sounded starkly medieval placed next to ones of astringent modernism. While masses typically have moments of serenity, devotion and triumph, the tone of this one was sad, restless and, at times as the orchestra grinded away at eerie repeated figures, one of horror.

Few could argue against the idea that two centuries of industrialization have taken a heavy toll on the earth or that human beings commit atrocities upon the animals through such enterprises as factory farming and commercial fishing. But while the text was specific in denouncing such practices as shark-finning and fur farming, Snider’s music was not excessively literal or preachy and could be appreciated at a purely musical level.

At the start of the opening Kyrie, the piano plays a nervous, expectant motif that would recur much later, establishing the tone of restlessness and uneasiness that would prevail through touthe mass.

The most astringent music seemed to come from the orchestra, as if it represented the forces of industrialization that were killing off wildlife. In the Gloria, for example, unearthly, spiky figures in the harp seemed to clash with the serene vocalism of the female singers.

In the Alleluia, as the screen projected a moonlit scene of fishes swimming in the ocean, the orchestra played a restless, undulating figure that suggested waves. The orchestra’s work here, paired with predominantly male voices, was particularly prominent, rising to a searingly dissonant climax.

The environmental message was particularly strong in the Credo, where the text reads in part, “Lay down the spear, lay down the hook, lay down the gun, the knife, the net.

No majesty in poison.” Over a grid of repeated figures in the orchestra, the female-dominated voices rose and fell in dissonant music whose overall tone was one of violence and despair.

The tone lightened for the Sanctus/Benedictus, which stuck to the traditional Latin text. Here the music was less strident, with flights of lyricism in both male and female voices that provided a welcome contrast to the sorrowful music that preceded it. In the Agnus Dei, the restless piano figure of the opening returns, as the singing alternated between lyricism and anguish, with the work ending ambiguously on a soft note held for an unearthly amount of time before it faded away.

Under the direction of artistic director Brett Karlin, the Master Chorale sang with vigor, delicacy and searing emotion, with pianissimos that filled the church with soft-edged sound. But the English words of the text were almost impossible to make out. This might have mattered less in a traditional mass, where the words are standard and known, but the text for this work was crucial for its meaning and impact.

Because the church was darkened for the video projection that accompanied the music, it was also impossible to follow the text provided in the program. The video portrayed drawings of tigers, elephants, sea turtles and other wildlife in motion. Unlike many similar attempts at video counterpoint, the visuals enhanced the performance without any excessive complexity or drawing too much attention away from the music.

The overall message was clear though, and it was not necessary to understand any particular lines of text to appreciate the music’s prevailing elegiac tone.

The concert opened with the world premiere of a piece commissioned by the Master Chorale of South Florida from the American composer Marques Garrett, associate professor of choral studies at the University of North Texas. Like the first work on the program, The Sky Remembers focused on environmental decline, in this case with a focus on South Florida, in its references to mangroves and herons.

Sung to a piano accompaniment, the work had the tone of contemporary church choral music in its harmony and phrasing. Like the mass on the program, the composer avoided a didactic approach or excessive literalness in the music, with delicate phrases, touches of polyphony and an elegiac tone that movingly captured the passing of a Florida that once was.

The Master Chorale of South Florida will repeat the program 8 p.m. Sunday at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton. masterchoraleofsouthflorida.org

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