I thought you might like to read the review of today's inaugural concert. I just streamed this in from the author's telethink site. I wish I could attach the file, but you don't have the technology to access it yet.---Al Schweitzer

Despite the surprisingly clear influences of both Igor Stravinsky and George Crumb on the theme of this morning's celebratory cantata, the piece was quintessentially Bach. His delicate and hauntingly beautiful melody, introduced by the elfin C-G-A-B in the upper rank, was tossed to the lower woodwind stops, braided into a glorious fugue by the strings, and delivered into the reverential tones of the deepest pipes as a fitting offering for God's magnificent new Schweitzer organ.

Solo soprano Jenny Lind was joined by the Etruscan prodigy, Valo, for an exultant exaltation of voice and ten-stringed lyre. Simply glorious, as we have come to expect from the Angel Choir, the chorus was neither too pious nor too full of vibrato. Instead there was a precision of pronunciation, a clarity of tone, and a blending of harmony reminiscent both of early Tibetan chant and of a Polynesian rowers' chorus. The level of performance was exceptionally high, especially in the case of the surprise appearance of the Imps' Glee after the third recitative. Accompanied by the highest and smallest pipes, these imps joined with the celestial choir in a planned discord juxtaposing the melodic Procession in the lower registers with the cacophonous keening and ululations of the exquisitely rehearsed imps. Truly it was a marriage of heaven and hell.

For his text, Bach used both William Butler Yeats' famous posthumous poem "Elegy for the Mortal World" and the Phoenician poet Oephra's epic Á'ħ [Eternity]. Truly the performance was beyond magnificent. It was sanctifying, inspiring, diabolically pleasurable, and rapturously transporting. An instantaneous re-experience of the concert is now available by telethinking the universal access number TX^/4462.

Dietrich Buxtahude