http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/arts/music/mass-leonard-bernsteins-teeming-effort-from-1971.html 2014-11-04 00:50:00 ‘Mass,’ Leonard Bernstein’s Teeming Effort From 1971 The production of “Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers,” at Queens College on Sunday, encapsulated its composer, Leonard Bernstein. === Leonard Bernstein’s Perhaps more than any other Bernstein work, the jam-packed “Mass,” commissioned for the 1971 inauguration of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, and rarely performed these days, encapsulates its composer: his ambitions, his charm, his quaint liberal pieties, his desire to bridge classical and popular culture, his craftsmanship, his grandiosity. It’s alternately stirring and embarrassing, a work so teeming that it needs to be approached with utter clarity if it’s not to seem simply messy. An enthusiastic but untidy performance on Sunday afternoon at the Prominent among those strengths, as always with Bernstein, is the songwriting. Interweaving the traditional Roman Catholic liturgy with the lightly sketched story of a charismatic leader who gains and then loses the support of a restive, doubting community clamoring for peace, “Mass” alternates brooding Modernist interludes with infectious numbers recalling the best of Bernstein’s Broadway work. “Thank You” is a guileless aria for soprano, “Easy” a flamboyantly swinging crowd pleaser. Days after a performance of “Mass” you may still be singing to yourself the line “Lauda, lauda, laude,” in Bernstein’s serenely simple melody. The performers on Sunday, particularly the sweet-voiced young tenor Victor Starsky, as the Celebrant, dived into the work with gusto. But while their emotions were strong, they weren’t always lucid: the relationship between Celebrant and community was vague at the start, so the conflicts that racked it lacked impact. The enormous musical forces weren’t always deployed with precision, and amplification — always difficult to calibrate — muddied some textures. The work itself still inspires as much doubt as faith. While the crushing blues of the Agnus Dei are effective, the integration of rock into a theatrical structure was more skillfully handled, in the years immediately before “Mass,” by the Who’s “Tommy” and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which also anticipated (and, arguably, was better than) Bernstein’s capacious eclecticism here. And “Mass” does feel mired in a certain era. At least in this performance, its gently anti-establishment liberalism came off a bit mild for the time of Occupy Wall Street. Its theological skepticism is sourly flavored with hippie narcissism: “I believe in God, but does God believe in me?” For all these reservations, the final, calm chorus of praise is a highlight. It is possible to leave the work feeling overwhelmed and amused, yet not uninspired.