This week my wife and I are singing Carmina Burana with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and instead of a guest conductor, the BSO’s own Andris Nelsons is conducting. We can already tell from the rehearsals that it will be another glorious retelling of these irreverent, primal stories of springtime, young love, heavy drinking, and the whims of fate. Having sung the piece in five previous concert runs, and already gone through the process of re-learning it when we performed it seven years ago, I knew there’d be an adjustment period. What I didn’t expect were new insights into the relationship between organizations and their institutional knowledge.
New additions to a group bring new energy but require guidance and training
Like any volunteer organization, TFC members come and go. That has its benefits and drawbacks.
The fresh perspectives of new members are the lifeblood for any living, growing, self-perpetuating institution. New members mean progress.
However, new members may not understand expectations or unwritten rules. Our conductor James Burton and his staff had to repeat familiar speeches, ranging from an impassioned “don’t be late to rehearsal” to logistical chestnuts like off-limit bathrooms and proper behavior while on stage. Andris’s faster tempo choices quickly made it clear how well the chorus needs to internalize the music. James needed extra time to coach us on removing disjointed sibilant /s/’s in the first movement, so that semper crescis and aut decrescis don’t sound like sssssemper cressssstssssissss and aut decressssstssssissssss.
The veterans of any group maintain its tone and character. For instance, the long-standing members of the chorus put together a comprehensive survival guide for the Berkshires. They organized buddies for the dozen or so new members to answer questions. Experienced members mean stability.
Yet veterans often retain “that’s the way we’ve always done it” habits. Left unchallenged, as they were when we were between conductors, those habits lead to complacency and stagnation.
In other words, choruses like ours are a never-ending balancing act between educating the newbies and preventing calcification by the old guard. (I include myself with that label, now, as this is my 25th year in the chorus.)
In a sense, our leaders are new members too
If you think about it, though, it’s not just our first-time-in-Tanglewood singers that are new. This concert represents the first time Andris and James have collaborated with this particular roster of singers and instrumentalists to perform this piece. Oh, sure, our leaders know this piece, but every performance means starting anew, and fixing problems that weren’t there last time, and re-making choices… from whether it’s pronounced “quod” or “kvod” to how long to hold those fermatas.
Both Andris and James have chosen a fairly literal reading of the score, as far as tempi, the timing of dynamic changes and accelerandi and ritardandi, though they (as many conductors these days) have decided not to honor using a smaller coro piccolo for some movements, relying on the chorus to regulate our volume. In initial rehearsals, those choices really threw off not only choristers but also the orchestra itself. It’s hard to resist the autopilot of slowing down here and adding a lunga pausa there because “that’s the way we’ve always done it” with past conductors. So just as we “unlearned” the piece 7 years ago, we had to re-learn it again this week.
The leakage of institutional knowledge
All this had me thinking once again about Rafael Frübeck de Burgos (affectionately known as FdB), who was arguably one of the conductors most intimately familiar with Carmina Burana. His 1966 recording with the New Philharmonic Orchestra is still heralded as one of the best, and he only deepened his understanding and interpretation of the piece over the years. When FdB was preparing it with us in November 2008, he punctuated one of his directives by saying, “When I was discussing this with Orff…” and that certainly left an impression on me that he had the receipts for his decisions!
But here’s the thing. FdB flat out ignored some score markings for his choices. For instance, despite the opening and closing movements being identical, he insisted the last movement should be slightly faster (technically, the score does show a tempo range?) He added big breaks in the middle of sections. He moved where accelerandi and ritardandi would start and end. He gave extra space for the flautist to soar during solos. Each one of these decisions had a clarity born out of experience and his total control of the piece. He infused it (and the chorus) with a curious coupling of passion and precision that came through each of our performances at Symphony Hall, and made it a bawdy, rollicking good time of a sing.
So, what’s lost when there’s a changing of the guard? How much oral history and hidden-beneath-the-markings has disappeared without knowledge keepers like Rafael Frübeck de Burgos around to proselytize them? Just as musicians learn how, say, to observe conventions of the baroque era that aren’t explicitly written in the score, I find myself wondering what’s disappeared over the last two decades. Andris will make decisions, and his decisions by definition are correct because he is the conductor — his opinion trumps all, and we literally follow his lead. It’s certainly better than going on autopilot, which means people “mailing it in” for a performance. Nevertheless, if we’re collectively wallpapering over these older ideas — ones that I’ve certainly grown to love in my own personal head canon for this piece — I hope they are re-discovered for future performances and not lost forever.
Just Another Bass 