The Boston Phoenix 2000
local heroes

Thirty years ago, Craig Smith had an idea. He was just starting as the music director at Emmanuel Church, two doors down from the Ritz on fashionable Newbury Street. His idea was to perform Bach's cantatas as part of the Sunday service, which is how Bach intended them to be heard. His purpose was not to make money or sell tickets. Rather, the performances offered a way of uniting our musical and spiritual lives. Seven years later, the cycle was completed. It was the first time in this country that any group had performed all the Bach cantatas. The performances are still going on every Sunday morning, and in the Emmanuel Orchestra and Chorus and soloists you can still hear a spirit of cooperation that's rare in the musical world.

From this small, selfless idea, Emmanuel has grown into an organization known and admired worldwide. Smith's memorable productions of Mozart and Handel operas -- performed in collaboration with the brilliant young stage director Peter Sellars, who wanted to work with Smith after hearing an Emmanuel performance of Handel's rarely presented opera Orlando -- have been staged all over the US and in Europe and have been shown on public television. But Smith and Sellars did not stop there. They got Mark Morris to choreograph for them, then joined Morris in Brussels in his residency at the Theatre de la Monnaie. Just last week, Emmanuel vocalists were singing Schubert songs at the Shubert Theatre for a Morris ballet.

Numerous Emmanuel musicians have gone out into the world and launched major careers. The beloved mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson -- now a superstar of Baroque music who sings at the New York City and Metropolitan Operas and with major orchestras -- started out as a violist in the Emmanuel Orchestra. She sang her first major Mozart role with Smith at Castle Hill; in February she'll be singing in Mahler's Third Symphony with the BSO under Met music director James Levine. Baritones James Maddalena and Sanford Sylvan, who created the roles of Nixon and Chou En-lai in Nixon in China, are Emmanuel alums.

The Lydian String Quartet, now in residence at Brandeis, was started by four women in the Emmanuel Orchestra. The sublime oboist Peggy Pearson, flutist Christopher Krueger, and horn player David Hoose were part of the Naumberg Award-winning Emmanuel Wind Quintet. Pearson now directs her own concert series, Winsor Music. Krueger has become one of America's most sought-after Baroque flute specialists. Hoose, who rarely plays horn anymore, but who did some of his earliest conducting gigs at Emmanuel, leads two of Boston's most distinguished musical groups, Collage New Music and the Cantata Singers, as well as the BU student orchestra. He also leads the Tallahassee Symphony.

What speaks volumes for Emmanuel is that all these figures, and other major performers such as pianist Russell Sherman, still love working at Emmanuel and return there often. This February, for example, Smith will conduct Hunt Lieberson in three Bach cantatas staged by Sellars before going on to Lincoln Center and Europe. And such musical luminaries as Seiji Ozawa and Christopher Hogwood, who make so few forays into Boston's musical community outside of their own organizations, regularly return to conduct Bach cantatas at Emmanuel. So does composer John Harbison, whose music Emmanuel discovered before most of the rest of the world did.

Besides Bach and Handel, Emmanuel has done complete cycles of Schumann and Debussy chamber and vocal music, and is now midway through a seven-year Schubert project. After 30 years, Smith and the musicians associated with Emmanuel Music have not yet lost their idealism. They haven't forgotten that they play because they love music and want to repay their debt to it. They're still giving to the community -- and to the world -- more than they receive. And isn't there some old-fashioned idea that the world is better that way?

-- Lloyd Schwartz  

Back to News & Reviews