Super-Duper Bach

For the first time in 25 years, America's most famous community choral group, the Bethlehem Bach Choir, brought their music to Manhattan last week. It was a major job of logistics: 233 singers and 50 members of the Philadelphia Orchestra made the trip.

Conductor Ifor Jones, 46, a Welshman who was once a Manhattan church organist, had rehearsed his choir of housewives, mill workers and college professors three times a week for their Carnegie Hall performance. His singers ranged from white-haired Mrs. George W. Halliwell, 78, who has sung in every one of the choir's 39 Masses, to gangling Hall Drummond, 17, who sang his first Mass last week. Others: Tenor Maurice Bowker, 42, a scrap inspector in the Bethlehem Steel Co.; Miss Lillian Graves, 71, a soprano who also sings tenor and bass at rehearsals to keep busy ("She's a nut about Bach," says Jones); blind Fay Linn, who moved from Philadelphia just to sing in the choir, and learned the soprano text from Braille.

From the opening blasts of the trombone choir to the contrapuntal majesties of the Sanctus and the serene Agnus Dei, Bach's B Minor took nearly three hours. During the 45-minute intermission the choir drank coffee and the audience gossiped over Cokes.

Some critics recalled that Bach himself had been content with a choir of 17 voices. Wrote the New York Herald Tribune's waspish Virgil Thomson: "Any chorus of 200 can make a majestic noise; and Mr. Ifor's [sic] chorus makes the most agreeable, the most brilliant and bright-sounding choral fortissimo I have ever heard. . . . But how much richer and grander it would be if Mr. Jones would cut his chorus down about 80 per cent and his orchestra by half. . . ."

Conductor Jones was content to follow the precedent of Felix Mendelssohn, who in 1829 started a Bach revival in Germany. The Mass was sung with even more voices than the Bethlehem choir used last week. Said Ifor Jones: "Mendelssohn was an oratorio writer [with] large choruses and super-duper performances."

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