When Tom Hall was a young man living in Atlanta, just after finishing college and while trying to find himself as a musician, he took all kinds of jobs.
"I was both a lounge lizard and a church singer," says Hall, with a twinkle in his eye.
It's impossible to conceive of Hall, the music director of the Balti- more Choral Arts Society and one of the area's best loved and most respected musicians, as a lounge lizard. He's the kind of guy who ,8l wouldn't even cheat at tennis.
But singing in bars is just one thing this former classical guitarist and classically trained singer did during the year he spent as a moonlighting high school music teacher. For Hall is a musician of considerable breadth -- something that is reflected in his programming.
In his nine years as head of BCAS -- perhaps the city's premiere choral group, which is marking its 25th anniversary -- Hall has not repeated a single work. Not only has he performed great but rarely performed Haydn Masses, he has paid attention to such obscure 20th century masterpieces as those of Benjamin Britten and even commissioned new works.
Now Hall, 36, is readying himself, his 30 musicians and his 80 choristers for the supreme challenge in choral music -- a &L performance this Saturday in Meyerhoff Hall of what may be the greatest piece of music ever written, Bach's St. Matthew Passion.
Not only has Hall planned the performance of this 3-hour-and-20-minute marathon, but he also organized a symposium last week -- in cooperation with the Institute for Christian-Jewish Studies -- that brought internationally distinguished scholars to the College of Notre Dame to discuss questions that have vexed performances of the work since World War II.
Put simply, the questions have to do with anti-Semitism. Matthew wrote his gospel 60 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, when the early Christians were trying to distance themselves from the Jews, from whom they were then almost indistinguishable, and to absolve the Roman authorities of any responsibility for crucifying the Christian Messiah.
But if Matthew's Gospel is anti-Semitic, Bach's setting isn't. For Bach hired a poet specifically to write additional verses to emphasize that guilt for the crucifixion falls upon the individual Christian sinner (and not an entire people). And the experience of the music proclaims that the proper response to Jesus' sacrificial love is love itself -- and for all human beings.
