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“How many of you have sung this more than 10 times before?” asked our assistant conductor Bill Cutter in the middle of our second weekend rehearsal.  A good 30+ hands shot up of the hundred or so choristers assembled.  “And that’s the problem,” Bill said with a grimace.  He admonished us (correctly) that too many of us were mailing it in, and not seeking that deep connection we need to have with the music.  Bill did an admirable job not letting us sit back on our haunches and forced us to reconnect with the text and the meaning behind it.  We needed a little flexibility, because Bill’s direction didn’t always match what the grizzled veterans were used to for this piece.

That’s going to be incredibly important, because every performance of the Brahms is very different.  And we don’t really know what to expect heading into Monday night’s piano rehearsal with Maestro Tovey.

My wife sang with Tovey for the chorus’s performance of Porgy and Bess.  Neither of us sang with him for his return to the chorus with Candide this summer, though everyone raved about what a fantastic performance it was.  Tovey certainly has a flair for turning musicals into crowd-pleasing concerts.  I was fortunate enough to sing with Tovey for the Lobgesang, and see a bit more of his joie de vivre at the chorus holiday party afterwards.  He was the life of the party even before the afterparty, because on the podium, Tovey is full of positive energy, humor, and gusto.  Here’s what I wrote back then:

Choristers who sang for Maestro Tovey in the Berkshires for last summer’s Porgy & Bess often gushed about how great he was to work with: personable, musically knowledgeable, and able to clearly communicate what sound he wanted from us. Those of us experiencing Tovey for the first time were not disappointed. He immediately set to work identifying the moments of drama that were hidden in plain sight, and gave us concrete tempo and dynamics adjustments to highlight them. He added personality to the pedestrian, directing us with words like “warmth” and “beautiful” and “prayerful.” He challenged us to embody the reverence and joy and relief from pain that lay beneath the surface of the text. And he did it all with a wink and a laugh that quickly earned the fierce loyalty of the whole chorus. One couldn’t help but want to sing for him and to deliver what he asked from us. We became committed to his vision of the piece, long before he endeared himself to the group at Saturday’s winter chorus party by joining the jazz band and hitting the dance floor.

Come performance time, Maestro Tovey continued his outstanding leadership at the podium. He was animated, demonstrative, and inviting in his conducting. At no time did the chorus really feel we were competing with the orchestra’s sound, with Tovey holding the reins. Through it all, we successfully captured and conveyed the piece’s character and intensity.

It’s hard to imagine the happy-go-lucky, musical showmanship of Tovey applied to a Requiem.  But this isn’t a sad Requiem… it’s a celebration of the living.  It’s a service for the living, not the deceased.  It’s victory and power and mocking death’s inability to triumph in the end.  It’s reflective peacefulness and the blessings of your friends and family that let you keep carrying on.

So I fully expect Maestro Tovey to take us on quite a journey. Where Maestro Dohnányi was about philosophy and precision, Tovey will almost certainly be about color and emotion.  Though they’ll both share the same directive: to rejoice in our lives even as we comfort the mourners.

John Oliver is not going to be available to prepare us for our upcoming Brahms performance.  (Assistant conductor Bill Cutter will be doing the honors.)  This may not be that big a deal, given that at Bill’s preliminary rehearsal, I saw fewer than 10 hands raised when Bill asked who hadn’t sung it before.

This is only too bad because I had been planning to make a 4×4 “JO Brahms Bingo” card for rehearsals this weekend, using the 16 coachable comments that I expected from him during the run-throughs.  That’s because, having sung the Brahms with him 3 times now (twice with TFC, once with MIT), I’ve gotten used to many of the particulars he emphasizes.

None of it truly matters once the conductor arrives and adds his own personal stamp to our performance.  But anything he doesn’t change becomes The Way We’re Doing It, and I like that.

So here are the minor moments I love in John Oliver’s interpretation of the piece.  Many are already indicated in the score; much of this won’t mean anything to those not intimately familiar with the piece.  And Bill will likely not observe them, as he has his own technicalities to pursue.  But it’s how MY favorite Brahms Requiem goes.

Movement I

1. Making that first entrance (and later recap) as light a touch on Selig as possible

2. Two /t/ — Articulating lied tragen and und tragen carefully

3. Getting in and out quickly on the selig swells, to match the brass

Movement II

4. The darker tone, legato, and double consonants of denn alles Fleisch

5. The flinging sensation of spitting out wird weg

Movement III

6. Aspirating the /h/ and rolling the /r/ for movement III’s opening  Herr

7. Each Nun Herr sounding like two bell peals ringing out

8. The stentando keine Qual finish to the fugue

Movement IV

9. The piano espressivo melodies for the tenors and basses

10. Sempre piano for the recapitulation

11. Stepping back to become the accompaniment for the orchestra at Wohl denen

12. The all-important agogic accent, separation, and subito piano before the final immerdar.

Movement V

13. The prayer-like intonation and cadence of einen seine Mutter each time

Movement VI

14. The drudgery and step-by-step plodding of the opening Denn wir haben, like dragging yourself home after a long day of work

15. A big separation and subito piano right before the next to last Ehre und Kraft

Movement VII

16. Attacca this movement, sopranos be damned.

At a Tent Club Q&A session on Wednesday, someone asked our conductor John Oliver, “What is the purpose of the conductor?” Rather than focus on the mechanics, like “beating time” or “keeping everyone together,” John’s answer was more profound. “The purpose of the conductor,” he said without even pausing to think, “is to distill the soul of the composer, and give it the orchestra, chorus, and soloists so they can communicate it to the audience through the piece.”

Throughout my stay at Tanglewood this week, I’m finding many applications for that statement during our rehearsals as we prepare two Verdi opera excerpts and Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony.  It applies at three levels: the mechanics, the emotions, and the message.

The Mechanics

At an almost superficial level, it’s about what the composer wanted tactically within the music. Our conductors have been excellent at giving us technical details to further their interpretations.  Maestro Honeck is very clear about the placidity he wants at the chorus’s entrance in the Mahler, asking us to dramatically de-emphasize all the German consonants and maintain even dynamics and flow — it goes against all our instincts for singing German!  Maestro Lacombe for the Verdi has worked intensely with us to capture the character of each chorus, which is particularly tricky given Aida has bad-guy priests demanding blood, broken prisoners pleading for clemency, and victorious citizens celebrating.  He’s made the priests’ sound darker and more biting.  He’s asked us in the prisoners chorus to watch him closely for rubato to better shape our cry for pity.  He’s turned the people’s chorus into a baseline for the other choruses, asking for precision in consonant placements and dynamics, while bringing out subtle rhythms to maintain the driving pulse of the piece.

All of these adjustments are de rigueur for the week of Tanglewood.  I’ve always accepted them as part of the process, as the means by which the conductor shares his vision of the piece with us.  But never before have I done so with the broader purpose in mind; that if the conductor is giving us his interpretation, who is he interpreting?  It’s not just the notes and dynamics on the page, it’s what the composer wanted when he captured that music onto paper.

The Emotions

At a deeper level, it’s about the emotional interpretation of the music and what we want to deliver.

The lovely melody of Va, Pensiero from Nabucco is deceivingly simple, and it’s easy to get carried away lustily singing it.  Remembering that it’s a chorus of Hebrew slaves lamenting their exile from their homeland tempers that notion.  Mechanically, you sing more sotto voce, you shape phrases to avoid outbursts, you hold back until the third stanza’s fortissimo to give more impact to your lament to the fate-seers about times gone by.  But that’s all in service of the emotion.  Emotionally, you need a hushed reverence, an unquenched longing for what cannot be, that must carry through the entire piece.

The Mahler is all about emotion at the end, and I’ve written before about the musical orgasm of the finale, as you pour forth every ounce of your being into a joyous crescendo, a tidalwave of sound that overwhelms the audience.  We will rise again!  It’s almost impossible not to be affected listening to this piece.  My wife and I get goose bumps in the car just listening to a recording.  Here, too, though, there are subtleties before that moment, which Maestro is giving us.  Rubato again, but to signify the wings we win, to the point where we can visualize a feather darting back and forth in an uplifting wind.  The utmost silence of the opening is now a vehicle for the soloist to rise out of, her part splitting from the chorus and ascending just like the resurrection we sing about 5 minutes later.  Lots of neat colors are being painted with the music that I’ve not experienced as part of this piece before.

The Message

At its deepest level, I’m realizing how important it is to study the composer himself; what his life was like, the circumstances of his composition at the time, his comments about the work to peers. I’d always enjoyed reading about that anyways, purely out of my own interest. But I never really consciously consumed that with the intent of better delivering the message to the audience.

Verdi’s wife and small children had just died when he wrote Va, Pensiero.  What mindset must he have been in to pen this song of loss of one’s love, be it country or family?  How was he representing his loss through the chorus of the Hebrew Slaves?  

Mahler was obsessed with death; it’s no wonder the first movement of the 2nd Symphony is this threatening, funereal march to the grave. Moreover, he was a Jew who converted to Christianity. Before that conversion from Judaism, there was no afterlife for him. So the 2nd Symphony’s emotional center is the 4th movement’s “Urlicht” about the promise of heaven, before he celebrates that resurrection in the final movement, first quietly and then with raucous joy.  The music’s emotion is unmistakeable, but in the umpteen times I’ve performed this piece, I’ve never thought about the childlike wonder of a composer who is exploring, perhaps for the first time musically, the concept of salvation from the death he had brooded about for the first half of his life?

Artist’s interpretation

Somewhere while wandering through art museums, I picked up a notion that I hadn’t heard before: once a work of art is submitted to the public, it is no longer about what the artist intended when he created the work.  It is about the art community’s interpretation of the work.  Never mind what Picasso had in mind whenever he painted bizarre portraits of his lover–he relinquishes ownership of its meaning.

Perhaps that is as true in music as it is in the visual arts.  But since music is digested through performances, there is a more active element involved, one that mandates a translator.  The conductor is our view into the composer’s soul.  I can only hope to be a contributing puzzle piece to achieve that vision and bring people into the moment, to extend that composer’s vision to their lives.

This Sunday, John Oliver held another outstanding session in his series of Master Classes for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.  But in addition to the notes I captured from the class, I wanted to jot down my personal reactions as well.

The singers were all super impressive, in one of two ways:

1) Many of them introduced themselves as juniors or seniors attending Boston Conservatory, or New England Conservatory, and majoring in vocal performance, or pedagogy, or somesuch super-impressive on-the-way-up music-is-my-life dedicated studies, such that I wanted to slink out of the room and never come back.  It’s not that they were bragging about it; all of them were quite humble, almost embarrassed, to put forth the claim.  It’s just that, as I joked with some fellow alumni after the class, the “MIT Conservatory” didn’t exactly have that level of study available — and even if it had, I doubt I would have qualified for it.  And even if I had qualified for it, I doubt I would have pursued it.

These are people who are going deep where I’ve gone broad.  They are experts where I’m Just Another Bass, a dabbler happy to be merely near the same stage as them.  This is not intended as false humility or humble-bragging on my part.  What’s the saying?  “A novice practices until he gets it right.  A master practices until he can’t get it wrong.”  Or the other old piece of wisdom, that as you study a subject, eventually you learn enough to recognize how much you don’t know.  I can see these singers know a lot that I don’t know, and may never truly know.

2) The ones who did NOT introduce themselves as vocal students were impressive, too — precisely because they did not slink out of the room!  They were all clearly a little uncomfortable since they were new to singing, or majored in psychology and history, or were otherwise not in the same place in their musical journey as the others.  But what courage it takes!  For them to ALSO pull together the confidence to stand up in front of ~75 fellow singers and daringly bare their throats to our potential fangs.

And that was my big takeaway.  I’m not going to be auditioning for an opera lead role any time soon.  But it was encouraging to hear others still at the start of their journey.  I was able to take away pointers from their lessons just as much as I picked up snippets of awesomeness from John’s advice to those who call it their craft.  And that made the experience truly rewarding.

Here are the notes I captured for each of the eight singers.

It’s been ages since I posted here — namely because I had a long spell without any official singing gigs.  There were only three summer concert weekends with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus this year — I had conflicts with two of them, and I ceded the third to my wife (you know, the one whose career is singing… remember, I’m Just Another Bass.)  Fortunately, Holiday Pops is coming up to exercise my vocal chords, and even more fortunately, I’m on the roster for one of my favorite pieces, the Verdi Requiem, this January.

But that meant almost 7 months without being on the stage of Symphony Hall or the Koussevitzky Shed.  When I skip any activity for even a few months, my competency decays.  How can I keep up my singing with no singing goal?  The obvious answer is to take some more lessons, but that’s not sustainable on my pocketbook.  It’s tough, but I’ve found a few activities to help fill the gap.

I had the pleasure of singing with my wife’s church choir for their “music Sunday” in June.  They picked 4 choral pieces and several arias from Mendelssohn’s Elijah, assembled a small (but, it turns out, quite impressive) band together of some strings and woodwinds to cover the orchestral parts, and gathered as many occasional singers from the congregation as possible to put it together in a night of practice.  It’d be false modesty if I told you I wasn’t the strongest bass singer there, especially having sung Elijah before.  But the group was pleasantly balanced and it was a joy to sing.  And I, for one, was happy to get some more classical singing in a formal environment that gave me something to practice.

The other interesting diversion which occupied several months of my time was preparing for Otherworld.  Otherworld is hard to describe succinctly; it’s a non-profit group whose goal is to give ordinary people extraordinary adventures.  I’ve been part of the group for 15 events across some 20 years.  Each event is a massive production held at a 4H camp in Connecticut.  How massive?  Around 80 staff members host about 55 participants in an adventure weekend as they become the heroes of an intricately laid out story.  It’s like walking into a book, or finding yourself an actor in one of those dinner theaters.

In any case, Otherworld has a significant amount of music in it.  There’s a part where singers hidden in the woods gently sing a Taize melody to make a moment feel magical.  There’s a Big Musical Number (think an Elvis movie or Broadway musical, where in the middle of a scene suddenly people break out into song).  This year there was a Barbershop Quartet–I wish I could tell you WHY there was a Barbershop Quartet, but it would involve too many spoilers for the weekend should you ever decide to come (and you should!).  And there was a part where carolers show up and sing, except they’re singing for a holiday that doesn’t exist in our world (a cross between Thanksgiving and Christmas.)

I had the distinct pleasure of being involved in all four of these musical singing endeavors.  While the Taize had been done in past events, the other three were brand new.  I would arrange a medley of Bob Dylan’s Quinn the Eskimo and the 70’s hit Lay a Little Lovin’ On Me, for a group of singers who wouldn’t all be in the same place together until the day of the event.  I worked with three other singers remotely to identify Barbershop songs that we could learn independently and then blend together, again on the day of the event.  And, I had to compose a short holiday carol.  Each of these with a different group of people on staff.

Sound like a nightmare?  Well, the whole experience was quite exhilarating!

While I enjoy arranging music, having done so for past Otherworld events and for a few weddings, it’s by no means my forte–I’ve seen so many others who can arrange music faster and better than I can.  I probably spent about 15-20 hours of time listening to recordings of the music, first casually during commutes, and then more intensely while trying to map out the song and transfer it into Finale the way I was hearing it.  Getting the transitions in the medley was tricky but I was super-excited when I figured out a way to musically handle it.  I did some test recordings of just my voice on all parts to get a sense of whether my arrangement was working.  I switched midway through from all-male back to a mixed chorus.  Then getting the music into the computer and onto paper for the 8 of us I had singing, and making practice recordings where I would delete some of the parts so people could listen to it on their own.  We then got 5 of us who were local into one place to rehearse, and recorded THAT for distribution and practice… overall it was probably a 50 hour labor of love… and it was all for about 3 minutes during the weekend.  The best part?  It came out PERFECTLY.

The Barbershop Quartet was equally challenging.  Having never sung Barbershop before, I received some tutelage from fellow staffer Chris Reichert, whose “Notable Ring” quartet in Austin has won awards in a few regional contests. He recommended some tags, procured some music and learning tracks (which are awesome — left side, just your part; right side, other three parts), and coached all of us about the style: less vibrato, aiming for a ‘ringing’ on sustained chords, emphasizing the ‘sour’ notes whose dissonances drive the music forward, even such logistics as gathering together to find your opening pitch then spreading into a circle and nailing it.  We were worried because when we first got together in person to practice, we discovered that it’s harder to sing your part with three other people who are also trying to learn their part, as opposed to a recording of three solid singers on a learning track.  But with Chris’s coaching, we made it first to barely passable, then quite acceptable, and finally to knock-people’s-socks-off when we performed.  To untrained singers, we were amazing.  But even singers (and at least one participant who sang barbershop), we were top-notch.  Another case where hours put into a labor of love paid off handsomely, even though we were only “on  stage” for a few hours of episodic singing.

The holiday carol required much fewer hours, more of them spent thinking than composing or practicing.  I needed something that sounded Christmas-y but wasn’t a known carol, and that could be learned by a group of about 12 singers with mixed levels of experience singing — just as you might have at a holiday gathering.  For that reason, I quickly ruled out part-singing.  I ended up taking “Joy to the World” and flipping the melody upside down.  That way, the rhythm was known to the singers, the chords (if there were any) would echo other carols, and the tune would sound vaguely familiar to listeners.  I sang it for a group of friends and it had the desired effect.  So we printed up some sheet music and made little caroling books.  I recorded it on the piano and recorded me singing it, and got a copy to everyone in the makeshift chorus.  The only problem?  The singers were too good!  (The scene called for them getting interrupted toward the end of the chorus by a boorish character who thought they weren’t doing a good job, which leads to another character confronting him, and… well, that’s a story for another time.)

All in all, it’s amazing how busy you can make yourself musically if you look for ways to fill the gap.  And now — onto Holiday Pops and the Verdi Requiem!  The Verdi is going to be AWESOME!

Sometimes you gotta get away from the formality of the BSO concerts and embrace the cheese of the Boston Pops. Normally this is reserved for the holidays. But I was fortunate enough to get on the roster for a three night series of Pops concerts called “City of Champions” — a star-studded celebration of Boston’s sports culture.

What do I mean by schlock? Our songs include the star spangled banner, O Fortuna, take me out to the ball game (which has verses?!), Heart from Damn Yankees, to be a football hero, we are the champions, an Olympic fanfare from John Williams… Andre Tippett of Patriots fame is narrating a piece. More guest stars have been promised. The whole thing is just way more fun than anyone should be allowed to have at Symphony Hall.

For instance, as i write this at rehearsal today, we sit behind the Drop kick Murphys as they warmed up. We were warned that the organist from Fenway Park would be “warming up the crowd” before the concert and at intermission on Thursday. We were also told not to be alarmed if we heard the T shirt cannon going off.

First concert is tonight. In typical pops form, we had one rehearsal which was the first time many of us saw the music, and the on stage rehearsal is now. Should be a blast!

Our conductor is Bobby Valentine.

Bear with me for a second on this analogy, especially you non-Red Sox fans: the new Red Sox manager this year, Bobby Valentine, is seen as a markedly different manager than his predecessor, Terry Francona. Terry “let the players play” because he considered them professionals and figured they knew how best to prepare themselves. He managed gametime decisions and kept the clubhouse moving in the same direction, and let the players police themselves. In contrast, Bobby Valentine has implemented some new policies perceived to be harsher than during Terry’s reign. During the offseason he flew to several players’ homes, even out of the country, to establish a better rapport with them. He’s been emphasizing fundamentals, he’s been all over the place during spring training, he’s been heavily involved—some might even say micromanaging—in every aspect of the Red Sox player’s preparations.

Let’s just say our conductor is not letting the orchestra and chorus figure this out on our own, like Francona did with past Red Sox teams.  In the last three orchestra, rehearsals, Christoph Von Dohnányi has:

• Stopped the chorus to correct our tuning when he felt it was going flat, to the point where he would have an entire section sans orchestra singing the same two measures until he was satisfied
• Stopped the chorus to correct our diction, because the consonants were not strong enough for him
• Asked various orchestra members, by name, to make adjustments. (“Mike, could you give me a little less on the second horn in that measure?”)
• Given specific (though inaudible) suggestions and criticisms to the soprano soloist, presumably on her diction and the timing of her entrances
• Told the harpist she was playing a chord too fast for his liking
• Asked the violists to use short focused strokes, by using his arms to wildly mimic their current bowing technique as all over the place
• Asked the timpanist to use a shorter stick [edit: other choristers have told me he said either “softer” or “smaller” but some heard “shorter” as well.  Shrug.]
• Gone back to that timpanist and asked if he had anything between the two sticks he had just tried, for a darker sound
• Stopped the orchestra several times for not playing more quietly than the chorus was singing
• Asked the second bassoonist to play a little sharper to fix his chord with the first violins and flutes, which he perceived to be off. (I’m still not completely sure if he was serious or joking when he asked the bassoonist if he was tuned to 41 or 42.  Later someone explained that he meant “441 Hz” which is imperceptibly above the standard A of 440 Hz that modern orchestras tune to.)  [edit: I’m told the orchestra regularly tunes to the higher pitch for a brighter sound.  Best guesses are that this was a polite way of telling the violins and bassoons that they’d better figure out how to stay in tune with each other.]

As a concert goer, it’s easy to forget that most of the work for a world-class conductor does NOT happen on the podium during the concert. The waggle of the maestro’s baton does not control the notes played by the strings, woodwinds, and brass—contrary to what numerous cartoons and at least one Marx Brothers routine might tell you! Sure, he’s holding the ensemble together with his “in-game management,” indicating tangibles like timing and tempo and dynamics and conveying intangibles like interpretation and emotion and drama. But most of that comes from the hard work he does ahead of time setting his expectations.   And that’s built upon the foundation that John Oliver and the chorus prepare before we walk into our first rehearsal with him… call it our own spring training for a piece.  By the time “the season starts” and Coach Von Dohnányi is at the podium, he’s not giving us direction, so much as he’s giving us reminders.

The result, as we’ve discovered, is a clarity of sound and a unity of purpose that few if any of us have experienced before in preparations for a concert. Our dress rehearsal last night for a small crowd of special guests (read: donors) was astounding.

When John Oliver had to take over at the last second for the Missa Solemnis, he was like an interim coach after the previous manager was fired:  he pretty much had no choice but to let the orchestra players play.  He had no time to stamp his interpretation and character on the orchestra; he just had what he had prepared with us in the chorus.  (Fortunately, he was able to manage everything quite well from the podium.)  Christoph has whipped us all into shape, from practicing the fundamentals of German pronunciation to quite specific direction on how he wants us to play and sing.  Now we’re working together as a team to deliver a victorious performance.

Unfortunately for the Red Sox, the jury’s still out on whether Bobby Valentine’s hands-on style is going to improve the Red Sox’s performance this year, especially given the injuries, overpaid talent, and aging superstars on the team. (If opening day is any indication, the team may be in trouble.) Fortunately for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, I don’t know of any injuries, we volunteer so we’re not overpaid, and our “aging superstars” have only improved with experience. Looking forward to a great concert tonight!