Atlanta Gay Men's Chorus:
Adler Memento Mori [premiere]
There was a dismal relevance in the choice of Atlanta as the site of the world premiere of James Adler's Memento Mori, billed as "the first requiem dedicated to those living with or who have died of AIDS." Less than a mile from Emory University's Glenn Memorial Auditorium, where the requiem had its premiere, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been at the epicenter of the global AIDS battle fro mthe time the agency reported on the first cases of the unknown, unnamed disease in June 1981 up to the report, a few days after the premiere, that AIDS had claimed the lives of 319,849 Americans through the end of 1995.
The April 13 event was an altogether somber occassion. The Atlanta Gay Men's Chorus, which commissioned the work and has lost scores of its own members to AIDS, distributed a booklet with the names of 127 people associated with the chorus who had died. And there was the grim, unspoken certainty that some of those in the audience or on stage would, inevitably, join the list.
Memento Mori is an ambitious work, almost 90 minutes long, that has aspirations to a sort of comprehensive experience of grieving and healing. The forces, by contemporary standards, are massive. In addition to the male chorus, there is a full orchestra supplemented with piano and organ, and the customary quartet of soloists: soprano, mezzo, tenor, and baritone. The range of expression in the text and music is also expansive. Adler has woven a pastiche of verses from the traditional Latin mass, Hebrew prayers, and poems by Quentin Crisp, among others, to serve a musical palette that ranges from polytonal chant to an almost Verdian roar.
The variety of utterance, both literary and musical, is nearly boundless -- from the ferocious nobility of the traditional "Rex tremendae" to the deeply personal, explicit, almost lurid account of one man's AIDS death by Philip Justin Smith (sung with chilling intensity at the premiere by baritone Steve Huffines). Over the course of the evening, Memento Mori achieves its effect by accumulation: there is a certain inevitability, if not predicatbility, in the work's harmonic progressions and melodic line. But this serves only to focus the listener's attention, without distraction, on its disquieting subject, with all of its political, sociological, medical, and personal overtones.
Jerry Schwartz