Two concerts to remember

Ovid Vickers
The Newton Record

NEWTON July 09, 2008 04:39 pm

— I have always had a great appreciation for music and musicians. To be able to read music and play an instrument, I am convinced, is a gift from God. Great composers are to be admired and envied for their talent. I recently spent some time in Vienna, Austria, the home of some of the world’s most outstanding musicians, including Wolfgang Mozart whose statue stands in the center of the city park. We spent the day sightseeing, but it was the anticipation of an evening concert which dominated my thoughts.
My wife and I put on our best “bib and tucker,” and had a cup of coffee while we waited for transportation to the concert hall. The afternoon had been filled with threatening clouds, so we took along an umbrella which proved to be a justified precaution for it began to rain as we walked from the parking lot to the portico of the concert hall.
Vienna is an old city, and unlike cities in the United States, buildings from the past are preserved rather than demolished. The foyer of the concert hall was lined with pink marble columns leading to a grand staircase. The stairs led to a former ballroom filled with row after row of upholstered chairs. Three giant chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and the stage was actually a large platform on two levels. The upper level was for the instrumentalists, and the lower level was used by the vocalists and dancers.
Once we had checked our umbrella, ascended the stairs and taken our seats, the musicians entered the hall dressed in tuxedos and black evening gowns which fell to the floor. The orchestra consisted of a pianist, three violinists, three viola players, a flute player, a clarinetist, a young woman who played the timpani and a base player.
The program included twelve pieces by Strauss, Mozart and Lumbye. Four of the pieces were arias and were sung by two outstanding vocalists. The arias, although taken from operas, were masterfully sung and filled with emotion.
For two of the waltzes, “The Blue Danube” and another titled “Wine, Women and Song,” two young dancers moved with beautiful gestures and footwork to the music. These dancers seemed to enjoy what they were dong, and at the conclusion of each number the audience responded with sustained applause.
When the concert ended and an encore was played, we retrieved our umbrella and walked a few blocks to a café for a late supper. I had trouble listening to the conversation at table because the notes of the music I had just heard kept floating through my head.
When the ship we were traveling on docked at Wertheim, Germany, we learned that an organ concert had been arranged for us. We walked through this quaint old German town to the Catholic cathedral of Wertheim.
Germany is a predominantly Catholic country, and the churches were built as the centerpiece of all villages and towns. The churches were constructed long before the majority of the congregations could read and write. For this reason, the churches are decorated with paintings, frescoes, and stained glass windows depicting scenes from the Bible. The priests could move from one scene to another and explain to people about the birth of Jesus, the parable of the lost sheep and other essential Christian stories.
These churches were built and beautifully decorated to represent the glories of heaven to a hardworking, uneducated group of people who were burdened with work and lived difficult lives.
The church in Wortheim was a typical European Catholic Church. The sun spilled through brilliant stained glass windows. Behind a carved and ornate altar, a lifesized representation of Jesus on the cross was surrounded and bathed in light from six stained glass windows.
At the appropriate moment, the organist, a gentleman named Dieter Bender, spoke from the pulpit and welcomed us in flawless English to Wertheirm and to the church. He then walked down the center aisle to climb the stairs to the great pipe organ in the choir loft at the rear of the church.
As he played, the music filled every corner of the church. He played some familiar pieces such as Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Bach’s “Jesus, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and the “Hallalujah Chorus” from Handel’s “Messiah.” Some of the selections were not of a religious nature including Hayden’s “Three Pieces for a Musical Clock” (under the music we listeners could hear a clock ticking) and Bach’s “Air in D-Major.
We left the cathedral and walked into a strange, small town in a foreign country, but the message of the music was the same as it would have been anywhere in the world.
These two musical programs, the one in Vienna in a concert hall, and the other in a church in Wertheim were very different. They did give a good idea of both the religious and secular music played in concerts across Europe.

Ovid Vickers, a retired East Central Community College professor, writes a weekly column for The Newton Record.

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