A Big Bash for Bach Backers

New festival brings Musica Sacra into its own

Time: Christmas 1975. Place: a comfortable apartment on Manhattan's West Side. The members of a New York chorus and orchestra, having failed to raise money for expenses, have had to cancel their planned performance of Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall. After a potluck supper, the singers and some of the instrumentalists squeeze into their conductor's dining room to perform the work for themselves and a few friends.

Time: last week. Place: Lincoln Center. The same group, now flourishing, is sponsoring and performing in its own festival, called Basically Bach. Inspired by Lincoln Center's long established Mostly Mozart festival, the twelve-day event is complete with buttons, T shirts (I AM A BACH BACKER), lectures, concerts, organ recitals at various churches, and free open-air performances by brass ensembles. The conductor watches concertgoers stream into Avery Fisher Hall and happily ponders the leap from his dining room.

The 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's Requiem, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Haydn's Nelson Mass, and yes, the Messiah, every year.

The 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 pieces.

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.

For me, the best music is music that makes a strong statement."

During performances, he tends to abandon approaches agreed upon in rehearsal, spontaneously switching tempos, reshaping melodies, emphasizing new articulations. For Westenburg, who has spent 25 years exploring baroque performance practices, none of this is arbitrary:

"The more you know, the more you find a tremendous latitude within the bounds of stylistic authenticity and good taste. My score markings from earlier years are in ink, because I was so sure there was only one way to go; my markings from more recent years are all in pencil."

His earlier markings might as well have been in red ink. Musica Sacra began precariously in 1964 as an outgrowth of concerts Westenburg organized as choirmaster of Manhattan's Central Presbyterian Church. Encouraged because the decision to charge admission had doubled audiences, the group incorporated as an independent entity in 1973 and progressed rapidly toward bankruptcy. The trouble was that Westenburg tried to do everything himself: collect texts, read program proofs, deliver checks to the musicians' union. Finally, with help from the New York State Council on the Arts, he hired an administrator, assembled a board of trustees and learned the ways of fund raising ("We'd invite people to dinner and then sock it to them").

Today, with subscriptions and ticket sales rising, Musica Sacra seems assured of a secure place in the New York concert scene. But only in the New York concert scene. "When you have a group as expensive and cumbersome to move around as ours, you can't just take it out to Davenport, Iowa," says Westenburg. "Our future for expansion lies in records and television, and we're working on both."

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.

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