Cantata Singers' season takes flight with 'Lindbergh'

For this benefit event, organizers urged guests to come wearing bomber jackets and flapper dresses. Very few actually took up the call to period attire, but before the concert began, a large group of chorus supporters, some with wine in hand, wandered through the extensive fleet of vintage aircrafts at the Collings Foundation Aviation Museum in Stow. Even a cursory walk in this gallery suggested a rather grim evolution in man's relationship to the skies, from the whimsical early flying machines to the menacing steel bombers of the sort used in World War II.

Against this backdrop, Lindbergh's celebrated flight seemed to occupy a brief moment of innocence, a time when crowds around the world could rally behind one man's triumphant voyage. Musically, too, "The Lindbergh Flight," written in 1928-9, captures a time of artistic possibility, when composers such as Weill were dreaming of new models of topical opera, and new means of delivering their art to the masses through emerging technologies such as radio.

Bertolt Brecht's text for the cantata, sung here in translation, relishes the gritty details of the flight. Lindbergh, cast as a tenor, lists his provisions ("hunting knives, a hatchet, a sawmill, a deflatable rubber boat") over a vaguely ominous musical figure that slithers through the winds and brass. Nature, too, is given its own voice in this struggle, with the choir singing to the pilot "I am the fog. . . . Who do you think you are?" and later personifying a snowstorm that labors to toss the plane into the sea. Lindbergh of course triumphs in the end, landing successfully near Paris. But it is a victory that Brecht views with a skeptical eye ("the possible" must be balanced with "the unattainable") and with a faint whiff of Marxism, as Lindbergh's victory is suddenly a collective triumph, and the three vocal soloists repeat the phrase "we have arisen."