Month: July 2006

As I was looking through the Feedster and Technorati listings for reviews of the Gurrelieder concert, I was pleased to run across a couple of other people who have been blogging about (and from!) the TFC:

• Rishi, who performed in February’s and July’s Gurrelieder
• Carol Minor at Minor Music, who attended the performance last weekend and with her keen eye noted some details of Levine’s conducting
• Five O’Clock Shadow, who attended the February performance and appears to be a Boston student
• Maury D’Annato of My Favorite Intermissions, who joins the chorus of bloggers and reviewers griping about balance problems with the soloists
• Kelly Corcoran of, um, her MySpace, who sang with us in July (and whom I didn’t realize was a conductor)
• fanw, who writes intelligently about the trade-offs involved in singing in a major work like the Gurrelieder as an amateur chorister
• Andrea, who sang in the February Gurrelieder and wrote about some of the logistical challenges of singing the last five minutes of a 130-minute-long work
• Marie, whose dad is in the TFC and who wishes she could sing like Karita Mattila (don’t we all?)
• Willowfinn, who had an impromptu Gurrelieder dance party with his/her friends in the back row at Symphony Hall back in February, and who also points out the real reason for the piece’s magnificence: “Schoenberg + zombies + a dude named Waldemar + a veritable forest of violins = WIN!”

I don’t always go back and gather links to the reviews of concerts that I’m in, but it’s a habit that I’m trying to get into. Not because I’m egocentric (though as e.e.cummings once wrote, I have yet to run into a peripherally situated ego), but because for years I sang in groups that didn’t get reviewed and I’m trying to make up for lost time.

This time the first review I saw was Sunday’s Albany Times-Union story, which was Page 1. The New York Times and Boston Globe reviews followed yesterday. Mercifully, all three avoided the temptation to use the common review of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, “as usual, the chorus sang superbly and from memory.”

• Albany Times-Union: Cantata by BSO, singers classy: “The huge male chorus (and the women when called upon) sang superbly, especially in the “Wild Hunt” section. By the time, the final chorus to the sun rang out, the music of “Gurrelieder” was anything but ugly or boring.”
• New York Times: At Tanglewood, James Levine Transforms Students Into Pros (about both the Gurrelieder and the following night’s Strauss Elektra performance): “Even in the orchestral prelude, which evokes the natural world with plangent harmonies, glowing strings and twittering woodwinds, Mr. Levine paid heed to the harmonically restless bass lines, glints of dissonance and ominous stirrings amid the musical bliss. The orchestral and choral textures are often daringly thick in this music. Schoenberg had to manufacture special manuscript paper with 48 staffs to notate the work. (That oversize manuscript is on display this summer at the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan.) Yet though the textures are dense, they are never gloppy. In a good performance all the inner voices and details should come through, and this performance was superb. The Boston Symphony continues to sound like one of the glorious ensembles of the world under Mr. Levine. He was joined by the impressive Tanglewood Festival Chorus and some noted vocal colleagues from the opera world.”
• Boston Globe: BSO’s ‘Gurrelieder’ is luminous, heartfelt: “The men of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus really pumped out the sound in their demanding music. The work is a favorite of Levine’s; he knows how it works and how to make it work. The orchestra responded to the conductor and to the challenges of the music with playing that told the story and bathed it in an ardent glow.”
• The Patriot Ledger: CONCERT REVIEW: Levine carries off grueling task with a flourish: James Levine is definitely back. Just a week after his return to the podium after months-long recovery from a fall and rotator cuff surgery, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director led thrilling back-to-back performances of two blockbuster scores during the weekend at Tanglewood, a daunting feat for any conductor… orchestra and chorus sounded glorious in this opulently orchestrated score richly depicting nature and a vast range of human emotions. The love theme bloomed with memorable depth and sheen, while the Wild Hunt with the ricocheting men’s chorus sounded frighteningly unleashed. The mixed chorus made the concluding sunrise a stunning soundburst.
• Berkshire Eagle: Unforgettable Schoenberg: “John Oliver’s festival chorus — and especially the men, who sang in three antiphonal groups and carried most of the choral burden — wakened heaven and earth with its outcries and murmurs. But perhaps the real star of the performance was the BSO, which, under Levine’s knowing ministrations, took a narrator’s role of its own and delivered it in sonic splendor. The delicate opening invocation to nature, the shouts of passion, the eerie rumblings and seethings: All told a tale of undying love.”

I knew that my residency in the Berkshires was no vacation, but between rehearsals, calls for work, the concert tonight, and driving home afterwards (ETA: 1:30 am), I’m gonna be dead tired. So here’s to the Friday Random 10, which is hopefully going to do its job and take my mind off the next twelve hours:

1. Smashing Pumpkins, “Stumbleine” (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness)
2. Nada Surf, “Concrete Bed” (The Weight is a Gift)
3. Dead Can Dance, “Song of the Nile” (Spirit Chaser)
4. Hank Williams, Sr., “Hey, Good Looking’”
5. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, “Leap Frog (alt tk)” (Bird and Diz)
6. Wynton Marsalis Septet, “Marthaniel” (Citi Movement)
7. Wynton Marsalis Septet, “Spring Yaound&eacute” (Citi Movement)
8. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “13 Steps Lead Down” (Brutal Youth)
9. London Chamber Orchestra (James MacMillan, composer), “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (MacMillan: Seven Last Words)
10. Radiohead, “Faithless the Wonder Boy” (Anyone Can Play Guitar [single])

Just posted a new set of photos from the Tanglewood grounds from the last few days of rehearsal for Gurrelieder. Hopefully it will stop raining soon and tomorrow’s will be a bit brighter.

Many of these photos were taken in the formal gardens on the Tanglewood grounds, which are well hidden near the theatre building and seem a bit forgotten (though the hedges are cleanly clipped, they’ve grown to the point of beginning to obscure some pathways).

Incidentally, the photo to the right may help provide some context for why Maestro Levine had difficulty being heard over the rain. Imagine him sitting just inside the building near the open side, with a 120-voice men’s chorus facing him; then imagine a torrential downpour on the outside.

It’s not a promising start when you’re standing in the second row of singers and you can barely hear James Levine’s comments over the pounding rain.

To back up: I’m at Tanglewood this week, and we’re up to our eyeballs in water as we prepare for the Gurrelieder performance on Friday. So far it’s playing out weatherwise like a replay of last year, though I feel much more part of the group this time around. (It helps that I already know the music too.)

Hopefully it will dry off soon. Then I can relax and enjoy myself a little.

Boston.com: Obituary: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; her luminous voice lifted Boston Symphony Orchestra, transported listener. I had the rare privilege of singing in the chorus behind Ms. Hunt Lieberson during the Gurrelieder this spring. She stole the show, quietly stepping on stage during the tenor’s penultimate aria in the first half to announce the downfall of his love and set the stage for the rest of the action.

I got word this weekend that our performance of the Gurrelieder on Friday at Tanglewood will be prefaced by the fourth movement from the Brahms Requiem, “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen” (known in many churches by its English title, “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place”). We rehearsed it last night on stage and chills went up my spine. I can’t think of a more appropriate tribute for an artist who moved so many lives with her voice.

Lisa and I took today off and we’re heading out in a little while to see the new, improved James Levine leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the opening concert at Tanglewood. Should be fun. In his honor, I’m bending the rules a little and doing a shuffle of all-classical tracks—not that they’ll be all-orchestral, given how my collection goes.

1. Dieter Goldmann (Frederic Chopin, composer), “Nocturnes Op. 27/2 Des-Dur” (Masters’ Classic: Chopin #2)
2. Hilliard Ensemble (William Byrd, composer), “Mass for Four Voices: V. Agnus Dei” (Masses for 3, 4 & 5 Voices)
3. The Sixteen (François Poulenc, composer), “Un soir de neige, II” (Chansons francaises)
4. Peter Schickele and the New York Pick-Up Ensemble (P.D.Q. Bach, composer), “II. Andante alighieri” (Concerto for Two Pianos vs. Orchestra, S. 2) (Two Pianos are Better Than One)
5. Gewandhausorchester Leipzig (Franz Liszt, composer), “Les Préludes, S 637” (Liszt: Les Préludes, Hungarian Rhapsody)
6. Hilliard Ensemble (Carlo Gesualdo, composer), “In II Nocturno, Responsorium 2” (Gesualdo: Tenebrae)
7. Hilliard Ensemble, “Three songs of St. Godric: Crist and Sainte Marie“ (Sumer is icumen in (Chants médiévaux anglais))
8. Steven Drury (John Cage, composer), “Suite for Toy Piano” (In a Landscape)
9. Les Violons du Roy (J. S. Bach, composer), “Sinfonia” from the Peasant Cantata, BWV 212 (Bach: Secular Cantatas)
10. Theatre of Voices/Paul Hillier, “Sangilio (Organ Solo)” (Hoquetus)