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For anyone attending or listening to today’s all-Brahms concert, here are a few things to keep an ear out for during the choral pieces so that you can appreciate some things that differentiate our performance from what you might hear on recordings or YouTube videos:

In Nanie, you’ll hear that the melodic lines are very difficult, with lots of sustained notes.  Notice how the chorus keeps renewing the vowel sound, with the sound constantly “spinning,” to make sure the tone doesn’t bottom out and get lazy, or the pronunciation of a vowel slip back into a schwa.

See how the character of the piece changes slightly when we switch to 4/4 from 6/8 time as we sing about all the daughters of the sea-goddess coming to the surface to sing a lament.  It’s a majestic moment that previews the moral of the story, revisited in the reprise of the opening hymn.  (Oh, and the oboe solo is delicious to listen to.)

There’s also a great moment where we sink to a barely audible pianissimo as we talk about even the perfect and beautiful dying.  It’s a great moment.

And, of course, there’s the great agogic accent toward the end, but I’ve written too much about that already.

In Schicksaslied, the contrast between the two sections is what makes the piece shine.  Here are the people in heaven, the gods, the souls that have ascended, living in a utopia.  As a chorus, we have to convey this beauty in our legato without getting lost in the music ourselves.  Meanwhile, the rest of us on earth suffer, water falling from rock to rock into the darkness below.  (Great word painting there as we fall vom Klippe zum Klippe).   We will spit out consonants and maintain a harsh rhythm, but we must still keep a legato line so that the whole piece has unity.

FdB pointed out that Brahms did something marvelous at the end, returning to the same heavenly utopian theme, but in the tonality of the second half, perhaps suggesting that there might be a way for us to transcend this earthen prison and make it up there.

Finally, in the Alto Rhapsody, prepare to be blown away by the wonder that is Stephanie Blythe.  In an earlier rehearsal she apologized for “marking,” or singing softer or down an octave from the actual music.  This was hilarious, because her idea of marking is still louder than many of us can sing.  This piece is for men’s chorus only, and originally we were creating a beautiful accompanying sound.  Now, we are forte right from the beginning, because, as John Oliver pointed out to us, it’s really a five note chord (bass 1, bass 2, tenor 1, tenor 2, and Stephanie) and she was blowing us away.  So we will try to keep up with her volume while still making a sumptuous, rich tone, rather than shouting or oversinging, or trying to hard to keep up.

I hope you enjoy the concert.  I believe it will be broadcast on the Internets around 2:30pm EDT from http://www.wgbh.org/995/index.cfm.

There’s nothing like a good agogic accent to add a little punch to a special moment in a piece.  Once you come to expect one in a piece, it’s really hard to listen to it or perform it any other way.   Its use works well in a few Brahms pieces, including one we’re singing this weekend.

My favorite agogic accent has always been in the Wie lieblich fourth movement of the Brahms Requiem, right before the subito piano toward the end after the series of die loben phrases.  But alas, not every performance features it.  I find that that heartbeat of a delay is so powerful.  The entire choir takes a breath as the onset of the next note is moved off the beat enough to make eyebrows raise.  It makes the next note, word, or phrase have extra oomph and meaning.  In the Requiem, it’s the word immerdar (“forever”).

In the Nänie piece we’re performing tomorrow, we’re including an agogic accent right before the word Herrlich (“glorious”) and, again, it adds extra emphasis on the importance of the word.  At today’s rehearsal both John Oliver and Fruhbreck de Burgos insisted on it being there.  Now I can’t imagine the piece without it.   Unfortunately, others can.  The difference between plowing through that last section – the whole point of the piece – and this one, which observes that break.

One of our three Brahms pieces this weekend is Nänie, which roughly translates to “Funeral Song.”  I agreed with that translation initially, because when I first began listening to it, I figured I’d rather be dead!  Every time I put it on, my brain would drift away.  I’d think of something else.  I’d have to back it up to hear sections again.  I’d get lost in thought.  To me, there was nothing remarkable or imposing about the piece, certainly not like the sumptuous chords of the Alto Rhapsody or the drama of the Schickslaslied.  To make matters worse, it would be the hardest to learn of the three.  It has the most text.  It has no structure short of a brief reprise of the opening tune towards the end.  It has only one truly dramatic moment.  It has many sustained notes that are hard to sing in one breath.

As is often the case, by the time I was done studying it — no, immersed myself in it — it became my favorite of the three pieces.

It turns out John Oliver agrees.  When we sat down for our first piano rehearsal with him Thursday, he was unusually exuberant in his conducting. The 71-year-old founder of our chorus stepped off the stand and moved around the rehearsal hall, practically leaping across from sopranos to altos, evoking with dramatic hand and body gestures the sound he wanted from each of us.  Initially I attributed it to the fact that he had already been through the earlier concert cycle with Stephanie Blythe that Wednesday.  But later today, he confessed how much he loves this piece and has conducted it many, many times in his career — even as far back as putting it in his senior recital in Jordan Hall back when he was in his 20’s.

So what’s to love about this seemingly drab piece?  I first realized what I wasn’t understanding about it when I saw a comment in the previous performance’s program notes, where a contemporary of Brahms lamented that it felt wrong to perform such an intimate piece in a large concert hall.  And that’s what this is — a very intimate, personal, exposed piece.  It wasn’t until I fully understood the translation that I could match the mood to the subject matter.  Once those meshed, I was once again in awe of Brahms and his ability to convey such heady concepts as coping with death in his music.

What’s so deep about this text?  It professes that “all beauty must die,” and gives three examples from classical mythology of Death triumphing.  Its message is that rather than try to defeat Death, the glory — the “Herrlich”, literally “Herr” (Lord / God) + “lich” (-ly, or -like) — can be found in the song that honors and laments their passing.  This powerful concept is born out through the music, which evokes the dying beauty, the attempts by even the gods to stop death, and then the one dramatic portion of the piece (one of the few forte moments, coupled with a switch of  time signature to 4/4 from 6/8) as we describe all the Daughters of the sea-goddess Thetis rising from the sea to sing a lament for her fallen son Achilles.   The conclusion, again coupled by the same beautiful oboe solo that introduces Auch das Schöne muß sterben (“But Beauty must die”) line at the beginning, states that “Auch ein Klagelied zu sein im Mund der Geliebten ist herrlich” (“But a lament-song on the lips of a beloved one is glorious”), and this line repeats again, with emphasis on the glorious word Herrlich, so that the last line of the poem (roughly, “only the undeserving go down to the underworld without a song”) is offset by the glory of a funeral song to honor our loved ones after death.

Now if I can just keep all the small words straight and not get distracted by the difficulty of the piece, I can hopefully convey this very powerful concept – a precursor to themes from the Brahms Requiem – to an audience who has never heard the piece before.  Hopefully they won’t drift like I did when I first heard it!

This summer I’m in only “0.5”  of three singing weekends out at Tanglewood — though that’s mostly by design, as the residencies for many conflicted with my work schedule or the ability for my wife to participate!  Trade-offs must be made when your career is not a singing one.

That said, I think I win, because as far as I’m concerned, I’m singing for the best of the 3 concerts: the all-Brahms concert on August 14th.  (Okay, the Berlioz was pretty darn good too; please humor my sour grapes approach to my wife’s singing out there.)  We’re singing three shorter pieces: Shicksalslied (Song of Fate), the Alto Rhapsody, and Nänie.

We had one short all-men’s rehearsal for the Alto Rhapsody just before the July 4th holiday.  Literally, about 15 minutes total time — for the small handful of us who are not in the series of Stephanie Blythe concerts earlier in the week and are just doing the back half of the residency, it’s inconvenient but understandable that we would have to drive into Boston for this.  John’s advice to us was straightforward, as we sounded pretty good.   “Don’t sing behind the beat” was his primary advice, as we tend to fall in love with the Brahmsian harmonies and linger too long through the cadences.  He reminded us that there is very thick orchestration that we’ll have to sing through, and one way to do that was to keep our vowels more closed and focused.

We’ll polish that one up tonight with another early rehearsal before we dig into the other two. I’ve got the Rhapsody memorized at this point and I’m halfway through memorizing the Shicksalslied.  I’ve sung it once before, almost 9 years ago with Lexington’s Masterworks Chorale under Allen Lannom, but I don’t remember falling in love with it so much back then.  (Maybe because Allen Lannom, for all his musicality, was rather a bully of a chorus director!)  This time, I’m loving the German Requiem-like turns of phrase, the perfect stereotypically Brahms cadences, the interplay between the orchestra and the chorus, the word painting, and the transition in singing character from the Elysium of the gods to the gloom and doom of us mortals who have no such retreat from fate.  We’ll see what else is said tonight as we clean these up, but as far as I’m concerned… yay Brahms!

In many ways, the Berlioz has been the polar opposite of the Bach.  You name it: the language, the fluidity, the logos vs. pathos, the approach to learning, the pickiness of the conductor, the amount of time spent memorizing, the mastery of technical mechanics vs. the mastery of emotive singing, the chorus as center of attention, the size of the chorus, the presence of John Oliver for the run — everything.  The only similarity so far has been the thorough enjoyment of being in each performance.

Tonight was the first of three performances of Romeo and Juliet.  I never thought I could have so much fun “yelling” at the other half of the chorus!  The back and forth answers — sorry!  Interruptions.  If you’re “answering,” then you’re LATE — that interplay adds so much vitality to the piece.  I make my mean face every time as we holler back and forth: “Non! (Non!) Non! (Non!) Non! (Non!)” while the music builds up the [melo]drama.

Maestro Charles Dutoit is all swirls and graceful, occasionally exaggerated, movements.  You’re not always sure where the beat is — in fact, some choristers commented that he somehow manages to take a slightly different tempo every measure!  But it doesn’t matter, because you’re still always in time, as he’s somehow very clear amongst the movement.  He has strange cues sometimes like holding his hand up and opening his thumb and forefinger to indicate our upbeat.  His rehearsals usually involved playing through an entire movement, as if to capture the entire emotional sentence.  (Compare that to Maestro Suzuki’s rehearsals, which, as you may recall, stopped every 10-30 seconds for a correction.)  Maestro Dutoit’s corrections were often for balance or volume, rarely if ever for pronunciation or mechanical concerns.  (In fact, sometimes we weren’t even sure WHY he stopped us, as he would pause, smile, and then start us again!)  The result of all this is being fully engaged and part of the big picture, rather than the individual elements, of the piece.  This is forest, not trees.  It’s Degas and his ballerinas, not Seurat and his pointillistic compositions.

The performance tonight was sound–at least, what parts we were involved in.  Frankly, there are few places for us to make any big mistakes, I think.  I expect reviews will praise the strong soloists and Dutoit’s masterful direction.  They may scoff at the fluidity of the tempo,  which I think confused a few orchestra members from time to time.  And the chorus will get maybe two adjectives talking about the convincing strength of our argument and subsequent denouement.  It was definitely a pleasant performance that will live in our memories pour toujour.

Well!  Saturday was every bit as much the workout we expected.  Fortunately, it was the “staying in shape by running on the treadmill” sort of workout, rather than the “4 hours of helping some move” workout.  It felt rewarding rather than annoying, and I daresay there was a bit of a glow in the chorus by the end of it.

With John Oliver out for the rest of the run as he recovers from his emergency ankle surgery, there was some worry that we might not get the choral direction and shaping we needed to handle a large piece like the Bach St. John Passion.  After yesterday’s rehearsal, I’d say that worry has evaporated!

Maestro Suzuki came on stage before us at 1pm: short, sort of poofy white hair, an affable smile, and rather unassuming.   He took the podium and asked us to start at #1.  We sang through the whole movement and he nodded his head appreciatively.  “That was very good.  Very, very good.  I mean, not that I expected not good,” he said with a chuckle, “but it was very good.”  We beamed a bit.

We then went back to the first measure and he proceeded to tear into us, measure by measure.  (Thank goodness it wasn’t ‘not good,’ or who knows how rehearsal would have gone!)

Fortunately, every criticism he levied was accurate and made sense.  He would stop us and make us repeat something if we didn’t demonstrate we understood what he meant.  He would even say “just the basses” or “just the sopranos” for specific spots.  More importantly, making his adjustments made us sound better.  Sometimes it was just getting us all to do the same vowel.  Sometimes it was style — he changed our thumpy plodding through the runs into a more horizontal, connected phrase.  In many places he asked us to remove vibrato and go for a purer sound.  Sometimes he would add specific commas, crescendos, subito dynamics, or accents.  He even coached us on bringing through the meaning of a movement.  For instance, I never understood that the “Lasset uns den nicht zerteilen” movement, about the guards casting lots to win Jesus’ tunic rather than rip it, could work as “playful,” but that’s totally how it works.  (And his short little surprise ritardando at the end for it is just adorable, for lack of a better word.)  The chorales in particular now have characterizations ranging from reverent to sorrowful to pleading to introspective.  Before yesterday’s rehearsals they were simply chorales.

Suzuki focused a lot on consonant placement — I’m used to the exhortation by conductors to get the German consonants ahead of the beat (“Krrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreuzige” he demonstrated, telling us we really couldn’t be too early with the rolled r on that one), but he also had us putting some trailing consonants AFTER the beat, which felt very unusual for us.  Take a phrase like “Petrus, der nicht denkt zurück,” which is the first line of the fourth chorale.  He wants the -ück to happen after his cutoff, with an extra oomph behind it.  Likewise, “das wider deinen Willen tut,” at the end of the second chorale, needs an -ut at the end instead of just the /t/.

In general, Suzuki dragged us kicking and screaming into the baroque period.  He even said at one point that we were singing like it was a romantic piece, and asked us to focus more on the shape of phrases.  At this point he also confessed that this is the first time he’s ever done this piece with a symphony orchestra.  At first I thought he meant the BSO, but after discussion with other chorus members we think he meant ever — he has either only done this with smaller orchestras, or period instruments, or maybe only both.

I have to say, it was a relief to discover his English was more than passable; only occasionally during the rehearsal did he have trouble expressing what he wanted, or said “how do I say this in English…”  No “what the heck did Seiji say?” moments here!  That said, the main result of any residual language barrier was that he didn’t sugar-coat anything.  Typical verbatim comments included: “You are too early,” “Try not to be so late,” “No, that’s not right,” “Stop rushing,” and “Your intonation is… is not good.”  Never mean or confrontational, but a contrast to, say, Jimmy’s “That was great, phenomenal… what would make it even better is…” style.   Suzuki doesn’t bother to translate anything subtle.  And you know what?  I’m fine with that.

The result of all this is that for the first time, the piece is really starting to come alive and mean something for me.  It’s like looking at an impressionistic pointillism painting — you get the big picture from far away, but as you get closer you start to understand the specific choice of color and brush strokes and whatnot that make it what it is.  This is now becoming less an exercise of notes and text as we become more intimate with the work.  By late next week, I expect the personal relationship we all have with the piece to shine through for an excellent performance.  (I just hope he can rein in the orchestra so our pianissimos can be true pianissimos!)