Times have changed since concerts ran four or five hours in length. Today, an hour and a half of live creativity is all the average listener is expected to digest as one time. Two hours is considered long. Two and a half is considered an interesting experiment in the ability of performers and listeners to keep up the kind of concentration needed to hear good music. The effort was great but the results were worth it to those who heard the concert given by the Harvard Summer School Chorus under conductor Harold Schmidt. On the program were the Schubert E Flat Mass, No. 6, madrigals by Schein, Morley, and Monteverdi, the Gabrielli In Eclesiis, Giuseppe Sarti's Fuga a otto voci reali, and Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms.

The Schubert Mass is itself a work which is long in the hearing and long in the understanding. It is big and loosely organized. What contributed most to conductor Schmidt's reading of the work was his complete control of balance among singers and players. At times, one began to lose track of the development and growth of themes but this could be entirely laid at the door of technical inadequacies on the part of the performers. In addition the repeated fugal entrances of the chorus in the Credo and Gloria were, through their overt pompousness, a built-in weakness in the performance which was a tremendous accomplishment for an amateur group.

The three madrigals were Thomas Morley's "Phyllis I fain would die now," Mein Schifflein lief in wilden Meer by Johann Schein, and the two-part madrigal Altri canti di Marte by Claudio Monteverdi. They were sung under the direction of Mr. Schmidt by the Chamber Chorus. The Chamber Chorus, which is made up of a small portion of the Summer School Chorus, produces an over-all sound which, while generally excellent, sometimes becomes a bit too rich and developed to permit the listener to savor the true flavor of this type of music. The actual interpretation of the music -- balancing between the voices and phrasing -- was flawless.

In spite of a few unconvincing utterances from the trumpets, the Gabrielli was most satisfactory. While here and in the Sarti one might have hoped for a slightly less room-fulling sound from the organ, the ecclesiastical air of the music was quite effective. Soloists for the In Ecclesiis were Sally Thomas, Soprano; Pamela Gore, alto; Carl Schmidt, tenor; and James Jonse, baritone. The Sarti Fugue, a double fugue of a relatively primitive sort, demonstrated the ability of the singers to make a somewhat intricats, overworked piece into a worthwhile listening experience.

The Sumphony of Psalms is always a treacherous adventure. Since it so often concentrates on developing a brief melody by very slight changes in the background harmony or by interchanging the chords backing up the melody, any subtlety of phrasing that is missed when the melody first appears becomes painfully magnified. Conductor Schmidt was most successful in evading this trap, leaving only the "Alleluia" motifs in the last movement a bit raw. A very strange circumstance about the performance was that the tiredness of chorus and conductor after wading through all that went before resulted in exactly the right amount of energy being channelled into it. Had the Symphony of Psalms been performed first on the program, it is probable that the extreme delicacy of it would have been greatly marred. As it was, the sort of dying breath timbre at the end provided an almost overwhelming end to the concert.