Category: Music

Rehashing the Brahms

Photo courtesy Boston Symphony
Photo courtesy Boston Symphony

This performance of the Brahms Requiem was unique in a lot of ways for the TFC: luminous piano and pianissimo singing, intricate moving lines, and of course our hashed formation. I thoroughly enjoyed singing Saturday but had some difficulties on Thursday and Friday; I think the novelty of singing hashed made it challenging for me to relax sufficiently to provide the right level of vocal support for piano singing, and as a result I had tightness of the voice that affected my high range. But all’s well that ends well, right?

Review time! Generally the reviewers were receptive to our hashed approach, with one significant exception.

David Weininger for the Boston Globe, “BSO stages fruitful dialogue between past and present“:

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, prepared by guest conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, generated plenty of power but didn’t exhibit the kind of precision and command evident in previous performances. There were messy entrances, unsteady pitch, and blurry diction. The dynamics were mostly limited to loud and soft, without much middle ground, and balances between chorus and orchestra were sometimes askew.

Georgia Luikens for the Boston Musical Intelligencer, “Widmann and Brahms Obsess Over Death“:

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, expertly prepared by Lidiya Yankovskaya, brought out this humanism. From the opening “Selig sind…”, the propulsive certainty of faith and hope kept growing. This nuanced take included polished solos from baritone Thomas Hampson and soprano Camilla Tilling. The special qualities are rather difficult to quantify; it goes beyond great musicians making great music. Rather, there was a meditative quality to the more circumspect passages. While the first half of the fourth movement was glorious, the true range of the TFC emerged in the sixth movement, “Oh death where is thy sting?” where the full power and force of this mighty chorus came into full cry. Any choir can sing loudly, but even in the most fortissimo passages, this choir enunciated with precision and control, yet they never lost sight of the narrative.

Aaron Keebaugh for Boston Classical Review: “Nelsons, BSO explore contrasting takes on the eternal from Widmann and Brahms“:

The heroes of this performance were the singers of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Prepared by Lidiya Yankovskaya, the ensemble found the soft elegance and stirring emotionalism of Brahms’ score. There were a few tentative moments in the final chorus “Selig sind die Toten,” where the soft passages suffered from some unfocused attacks. But elsewhere the ensemble sounded at its full, resonant best, singing with warm buttery tone in the most famous movement, “Wie lieblich sind die Wohnungen,” where the serpentine lines crested and broke over one another like waves.

Jonathan Blumhofer for Arts Fuse Boston: “Concert Review: Boston Symphony Plays Widmann and Brahms at Symphony Hall“:

The biggest reason for this owes to the excellence of the TFC’s singing throughout the evening: it was warm, focused, and perfectly blended. Excellently prepared this week by Lidiya Yankovskaya and singing with the music in front of them (a departure from the John Oliver days of total memorization), the Chorus sounded notably confident and, even if enunciations of certain words (like “getröstet” in the first movement) were, to begin, questionable, the group gained in Germanic fluency as the piece progressed.

Mid-week Brahms Requiem thoughts

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I learn something different each time I perform the Brahms Requiem. This time, what I’ve learned is that singing hashed is wonderful in the chorus room and slightly scary on stage. But once you get past the fear of exposure, it’s still pretty darned glorious.

We’re singing this one with Thomas Hampson and Camilla Trilling. Some of us caught Ms. Trilling singing the sixth movement fugue with us, quietly, from memory. Some pieces are made to be internalized.

From Dakar with love

Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: Duke Ellington Orchestra – Festival Mondial d’Arts Nègres, Théâtre National Daniel Sorano, Dakar, Senegal, April 9, 1966. I’m so ambivalent about this. I mean, on the one hand, yes, every bootleg or live broadcast recording of a long-dead jazz artist makes it that much harder for live, working jazz artists to sell albums and earn coin. On the other: DUKE ELLINGTON. WITH PAUL GONSALVEZ, HARRY CARNEY, and JOHNNY FREAKIN’ HODGES. LIVE IN DAKAR.

Making a hash of Brahms

We’re in the middle of a rehearsal run for the BSO’s upcoming performances of the Brahms Requiem with Andris Nelsons, Thomas Hampson, and Camilla Trilling. On the one hand, it’s a work we’ve performed quite a bit in the eleven years I’ve been in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, starting with our 2008 performances under James Levine (later released on CD), then at Tanglewood the following summer, then a few years later with Christoph von Dohnányi, and then again just two years ago with Bramwell Tovey. One would think it would be old hat by now.

But there is no such thing as a routine performance of this work. The emotional load alone is enough to make it an incredible experience each time, and the technical aspects of singing the work (as I’ve written previously) both demand and reward close preparation and work.

This time is especially interesting, as we are in the midst of what will hopefully be the second and final transitional season between the forty-plus year reign of founding TFC conductor John Oliver and the selection of his successor. We are working this go round (as we did during the Adams Transmigration) with Lidiya Yankovskaya, who has also been a member of the TFC and worked closely with John.

For this go round, she’s working closely with us on diction (of course), but also on the production of a rich, supported piano/pianissimo sound and on overall blend. Her tool for working on blend is a simple one: the 130 or so of us have been sitting “hashed” for the last several rehearsals. Each individual sits near someone singing one of the other voice parts. There are others on your voice part nearby, but not right next to you. The effect is immediate: you have to listen better to hear the others on your part; you immediately find the places where you need to own and improve your individual performance; and you quickly learn to adjust so that your performance complements that of the other vocal parts next to you. We sounded better in places last night than we have done for quite a while.

Apparently John’s chorus used to perform like this all the time; I can only imagine a conductor of Seiji Ozawa’s great musicianship managing to work with directing such an arrangement. I wish we could do it more often.

Transmigrating

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Seven years ago today, I summed up the things that happened eight years ago before that: the small amount that I could write, stunned, on September 11, 2001; my more elaborate write-up from 2002 and, after singing in the Rolling Requiem, my detailed recollections from the day; my thoughts from 2003, on the brink of invasions; my thoughts from 2008, in which I assert that in spite of the attack, we’re still here.

All of which is to say I thought I had processed and finished my grieving for the victims of that bright fall day fifteen years ago.

Then, one night this week after rehearsing Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, I attempted to describe Doug Ketcham to one of my TFC colleagues. And I could not speak. I was suddenly dumbstruck by the immense unfairness of what happened to him: twenty-seven years old, a rising star at Cantor Fitzgerald, who retained enough presence of mind to call his parents from underneath his desk after the first plane hit the towers to tell them that he loved them.

Doug was an acquaintance who I wish I had known well enough to call friend. Other UVa friends, like Tin Man, knew him much better. But he was a decent human being who never blinked an eye when I joined the crew that hung around with him. He made you feel less alone.

I spent some time thinking about him in our final rehearsal of Transmigration on Friday. I thought about the fact that I haven’t come to terms with his death after all these years. I thought about the fact that this anniversary still has the power to turn me somber and sour.

And then I thought about the structure of the piece. It opens with street sounds, footsteps, and then the words “missing… missing…” and the reading of names. The choir and orchestra slowly emerge from shifting tonalities to sing words, not of high poesy, but from the families of the victims, who posted them on fliers around the site of the Twin Towers in the weeks after the attack. Everyday words. “…he was tall, extremely good-looking, and girls never talked to me when he was around.” (Which could have been written about Doug.) Or the words of one woman: “I loved him from the start…. I wanted to dig him out. I know just where he is.”

It is at this moment that the orchestra gives a tremendous wrench, building in intensity and volume until at the top of the crescendo the chorus bursts into the moment of transfiguration: “Light! Light! Light!”

But after the transfiguration moment, the chorus drops away, the instrumentation drops back down, and you can hear that the voices and names are still speaking. And so it goes until the end of the work, with a final wordless tone cluster from the chorus yielding to a slendering thread of string sound, which after the thirty minutes of the piece finally resolves upward into a new major key—but not triumphantly, but so quietly it can almost not be heard.

And I think about this ending, and I think I finally understand what Adams was trying to get at. The dead are still with us after the transmigration because they always will be. It is we who must be transmigrated, who must allow ourselves to be changed, to not continue to stand, breath held, on the edge of that dreadful day. We who must resolve upward.

Friday Random 5: Welcome to the terrordome

By special request, I bring the Random 5 back this week. Let’s see what craziness this weekend begins with.

The Cure, “Sinking”: In middle and high school I was aware of the kids who loved the Cure, but never became one until Disintegration came out. When I finally listened to The Head on the Door, I liked it fine, but I found it facile compared to the later effort. The highs were giddy, but the lows felt shallow when stacked up against the massive thundering tracks of “Disintegration.” I still feel that way about songs like “Sinking.” Robert Smith is trying to reach for that note of despair, and for most of the song he doesn’t get there—maybe it’s the keyboards that don’t work for me. But then there’s that bridge: “So I trick myself/Like everybody else/I crouch in fear and wait/I’ll never feel again/If only I could remember/Anything at all.” And then I feel the connection to the dark heart that the best Cure tracks touch.

Herbert von Karajan/Vienna Philharmonic, “Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem. I. “Selig sind, die da Leid tragen”: One choral masterwork that has become completely embedded in my soul. This recording doesn’t draw out the precision of some of the interior orchestral lines the way that Levine was able to on his recording with the BSO (on which I sang), but the way that the choir emerges from the void in the beginning, completely seamlessly, with all voice parts completely seamlessly blended is something to hear.

White Stripes, “Why Can’t You Be Nicer to Me?”: Back when the White Stripes were refreshing because of their relative lack of pretense and you weren’t sure whether they were brother/sister, husband/wife, or both, or what.

White Stripes, “I’m Bound to Pack It Up”: Proof once again that the iPhone’s random is really random, this second track from De Stijl sounds like the bastard child of “Going to California” and “We Are Going to Be Friends.”

Patrick Watson, “Big Bird in a Small Cage”: Ever run across a track that you’re not sure how it got into your music library? That’s this track. Wikipedia tells me it was a Starbucks Pick of the Week in 2009, which is probably where I got it—and the last time I heard it. But I like it. Sort of Devendra Banhart meets the Beach Boys and Dolly Parton.

Thoughts on Johan Botha

New York Times: Johan Botha, Operatic Tenor, Dies at 51. I woke this morning to news of the great tenor’s untimely demise in my Facebook feed.

I sang on stage several times with Botha during the James Levine era at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he was on tap for the most heroic roles: Waldemar in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, Florestan in Fidelio, Walter in Meistersinger. His was a magnificent voice: as I wrote in 2007 about his Florestan, his voice could convey both sheer power and powerful emotion. His rendition of the “prize song” from Meistersinger has always stayed close to my heart for its sheer magnificence.

I think, though, that I’ll always remember him for his approachable humanity. He always was glad to see the chorus, and could be relied on to liven rehearsals, especially as he grew more comfortable: clowning during Don Carlo, or bringing beer steins onto the Tanglewood stage for himself and James Morris. (They drank water from them.)

And, of course, in this miserable 2016, the cause of death was cancer. It was just six weeks ago that he headlined a cancer fundraiser in South Africa at which he was prominently billed as a “cancer survivor” and having been given a “clean bill of health.” That performance now stands as his final bow.

The video at the top is an audience film of the intermission bow from the 2006 Symphony Hall performance of Gurrelieder under James Levine, featuring Karita Mattila, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, and Botha. The latter two have been taken from us, both by cancer, and Levine himself will never again walk as nimbly as he does in this footage. It’s a sobering reminder that none of us are allotted much time.

Preparing John Adams’ “Transmigration”

This coming weekend will mark the culminating celebration of the centennial of the Pulitzer Prize, with a two day series of symposia and concerts at Harvard University. I’ll be singing on Sunday night, not coincidentally the 15th anniversary of September 11, as part of a performance of John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls.

The Adams work was commissioned for the first commemoration of the 9/11 attacks and was first performed September 12, 2002. It’s a powerful work that combines symphonic and children’s choruses, orchestra, and tape of voices reading names of 9/11 victims, fliers that were left, and interviews with families. From a performer’s perspective, the great thing is that the music is so rich and demands so much attention for pitch and rhythm that it’s very unlikely that we’ll get swallowed by the subject matter and become too choked up to perform—which might otherwise be a very real danger.

It’s going to be a very atypical performance for the TFC, as it is not a BSO performance and is held in an unusual venue for us—though not a new one for me, as I performed in Sanders Theater in 1993 with the Virginia Glee Club, almost 23 years ago.

Some free tickets are still available. It should be a hugely worthwhile event. I’m only sorry I won’t be able to see Wynton Marsalis in his part of the event the night before.

Audio ripping toolchain

A few years ago I wrote about the tools I was preparing to use to digitize some LP records and get them into iTunes. The software has changed a bit since then, and I thought it was worth a post to document my current workflow, which works either for ripping vinyl or for converting long form digital audio (e.g. radio broadcasts) into tracks.

  1. Downloading a radio broadcast is pretty straightforward. My tool of choice here is curl, and I output it to a single MP3 file, which then gets post processed in Amadeus (see below). Or…
  2. Rip the LP, step 1. To rip an LP, I play it back on my 1983 Denon DP-45F turntable, which passes through the built in phono pre-amp in my Onkyo receiver, then out through the tape out monitor into my vintage Griffin iMic. The USB end of the iMic then plugs into my MacBook Pro.
  3. Rip the LP, step 2. Step 2 means turning the LP sound into a digital file. To do this, I use Amadeus Pro from HairerSoft, which has been my go to sound file editor for over a dozen years. This is pretty simple; set the sound in to use the iMic, create a new sound file, click Record, and push play on the Denon. I’ve set the levels over the years to a level that keeps the input from clipping, which from experience is about halfway in the second to last region on the right. When the side of the record finishes, I stop recording and I have a music file, ready to post-process.
  4. Post process the music file. First thing is to trim any long periods of silence from the beginning and end of the track, including needle-into-groove noise. I then amplify the track by 4 dB, either once (for radio broadcast) or twice (for vinyl) so that playback from iTunes isn’t too quiet but the sound forms don’t get clipped. That’s usually all the post processing I have to do.
  5. Add album metadata. Anything that will be common across all the tracks, including album name, artist name, genre, artwork, etc., gets added here.
  6. Divide into tracks, using markers. This requires listening to the track, but you can almost always start by eyeballing the track and finding the periods of silence; they almost always indicate track separations. I use the song/track/movement name as the name for the marker in Amadeus.
  7. Save as an Amadeus file. Just in case.
  8. Split the tracks according to markers. Using the handy dandy Amadeus feature “Split According to Markers” option, this creates a separate file for each marker in the audio format of your choice. For vinyl I’ll usually use Apple Lossless encoding here, but for radio broadcasts, which start as MP3, there’s no point in using lossless encoding.
  9. Import into iTunes and clean up. Amadeus Pro does a pretty good job with the metadata, but track names are prefaced by numbers which I don’t like, and I generally have to fix the track numbers — it considers each side of an LP to start with “1.”

And there you have it. Pretty simple, and I’ve almost gotten to the point that I can process one side of an LP while I’m ripping the next.

Beethoven 9 with Andris Nelsons

Last Sunday’s Tanglewood season ender was in some ways not out of the ordinary: a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. But there were some exceptional things about it.

First was the pairing of the work with Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City,” featuring some stunning playing from Tom Rolfs and Robert Sheena. Then there was the conductor, Andris Nelsons, marking (as the Globe’s Jeremy Eichler remarked) one of the first times in recent memory that the BSO’s music director has conducted the season ender. James Levine did it once, but at the beginning of the season, and otherwise left it to guest conductors. Maestro Nelsons was totally engaged. From the first movement there was an electric energy on stage. The announcement he made from the beginning that he would be in residence for a full month next summer didn’t hurt either.

Then, there was our performance. The Beethoven capped a month of work by the chorus with guest conductor James Burton, and his skill showed in our diction and attention to detail. It was the first time in my memory that the men of the chorus didn’t completely immolate the tenor soloist when we made our “Laufet bruder…” entrance, and overall the singing felt spectacular on stage.

The BSO released the clip above not half an hour after the concert ended, and I love how it plays out—although I wish there were a little more of the performance captured. Maybe when the radio clip is posted (update 9/6: here it is).

PS Confidential to Andrew Pincus: the chorus only numbered 140, not 200, and I think at no time were we in danger of covering the soloists.

Come unto these yellow sands

IMG_6457It’s almost go time.

Tonight we sing a Prelude concert. A Tanglewood tradition, these are concerts by groups of musicians that are free with admission to a Friday evening main concert. Often in Ozawa Hall, they are an opportunity to hear different ensembles or repertoire than you otherwise would on the grounds. There are a lot of chamber performances—last week I heard the Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time. And once a summer, the chorus performs.

This is my eleventh summer at Tanglewood and the first time I’ve sung a Prelude concert. And my anticipation is high. The repertoire is a selection of settings of Shakespeare’s writings, including two settings of Ariel’s song from The Tempest.

Each time we perform the settings—either the Ralph Vaughan Williams or Frank Martin settings of the “Full Fathom Five” text in particular—I am reminded of the incredible depth of Shakespeare’s ownership of the English language and of his imagination. That this one poem could resonate with these composers, and also Eliot and Laurie Anderson…

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Review roundup: Rossini Stabat Mater, Verdi Aida

The TFC lines up at the back entrance to the Shed prior to Aida.
The TFC lines up at the back entrance to the Shed prior to Aida.

Coming back from Tanglewood is always challenging, and doubly so after a weekend like the one we had August 19 and 20. As I told a co-worker, it feels weird to walk into our office and not hear the magnificent Aida trumpets heralding our approach.

I go back out tomorrow for a Prelude concert (music set to the words of Shakespeare, mostly by British composers) and the Beethoven 9. Before I lose the music in my head, here are a few reviews that came in.

Rossini Stabat Mater with Charles Dutoit: I had never sung this piece before, and surprisingly the BSO had never played it at Tanglewood, and had only played it twice before, in 1974 and 2010. It turns out to be a fairly monumental work that blends sacred and operatic choral traditions, with some seriously intense solo writing (the tenor’s high note in the second movement comes to mind) along with choral writing that runs the gamut from amazingly delicate pianissimi to operatic descending lines. The fifth and ninth movements, sung a cappella, might have been my favorites.

Boston Classical Review (Lawrence Budmen): Dutoit, BSO serve up a Rossini rarity along with a heartening solo appearance at Tanglewood. “Under guest choral director James Burton, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus brought gleaming vocal sonority and subtly terraced dynamics to their a capella voicings of the ‘Eeia, mater’ and the lamentations in ‘Quando corpus morietur.’ Dutoit skillfully blended both chorus and vocal soloists with the orchestra’s highly charged playing.”

Boston Musical Intelligencer (James Prichard): Stabat Mattered at Tanglewood. “The choral work that opens the masterpiece (Stabat mater dolorosa) immediately established the high standard that was to prevail throughout the performance. Prepared by guest chorus director James Burton, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus once again displayed the smooth voice blending and comfortable control over a wide dynamic range that Boston audiences came to expect from them during the long tenure of founding director John Oliver.”

Verdi, Aida (Acts I and II) with Andris Nelsons: This was an astonishing piece even in performance of only half the opera, with a huge chorus and orchestra supplemented by offstage banda and, of course, the Aida trumpets. We were with a stellar crew of soloists including the stentorian Morris Robinson and Met soprano Kristine Opolais, who happens to be conductor Andris Nelsons’ wife. (The performance featured a total of 17 married couples among the soloists, orchestra and chorus, a fact which did not go unremarked-upon.)

Boston Classical Review (Lawrence Budmen): Uneven singing but thrilling moments in Verdi’s “Aida” at Tanglewood. “For the second night in a row (following a strong showing in Rossini’s Stabat Mater), the Tanglewood Festival Chorus was a tower of strength. The sumptuous sound of the female voices was particularly outstanding in a splendidly coordinated ensemble under guest choral director James Burton.”

Albany Times-Union (Joseph Dalton): A marriage of mighty forces for ‘Aida.’ “…as can often happen in a concert performance of opera, the inner workings of the score, especially the orchestration, were revealed as fresh wonders. Examples were the use of harps with the chorus, and an extended passage of dancing and swaying lines that started in the flutes and expanded into the entire woodwind section.”

Boston Globe (Jeremy Eichler): At Tanglewood, an ‘Aida’ both intimate and grand. “Bethany Worrell, a TFC member, did the chorus proud in her solo turn. Overall the TFC, this time prepared by James Burton, sang with a nuance and confidence that lifted its work notably above the level of other recent outings.”

Berkshire Eagle (Andrew Pincus): With Nelsons’ return, BSO goes adventuring. “The chorus, prepared by James Burton, was a consistent presence as troubled citizens of Memphis.”

Boston Musical Intelligencer (James Prichard): Celeste Nelsons, Opolais, Verdi, BSO, et alia. “Special mention is due soprano Bethany Worrell, a TFC member whose ethereal tone as the High Priestess enriched the texture of the production beyond the few measures of music in which we heard it.”

Friday musical inspiration: Aretha, “Natural Woman”

There are some days where I work hard at music, that it seems a struggle. That I wonder why I do it.

Then I get lucky, and get to have a moment of transcendence.

Those are hard to share. They don’t happen at the front of the stage, and they generally happen while a lot of other music making is going on. And unless you’re a choral singer yourself, I think it might be hard to relate.

But this video might help. Watching Carole King lose it as the Queen of Soul performs her hit, watching the president wipe a tear as Aretha pays tribute to the great songwriter, and getting the astonishing high from watching the conclusion of the performance is a little like what one of those transcendent moments feels like from the risers in the back of the stage.

Tanglewood days

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I am at once thrilled to be back at Tanglewood this week and a little gobsmacked at the sheer amount of singing we’re doing. We arrived Tuesday and have been alternating rehearsal days since then: Tuesday and today on the Rossini Stabat Mater with Charles Dutoit, yesterday and tomorrow on Verdi’s Aida (Acts I and II) with Andris Nelsons. It’s a lot of music. My voice was ragged yesterday and today—I need to pace myself.

That is not to say it’s not a lot of fun. After being in the chorus since 2005, it feels a bit like a family, even notwithstanding all the actually married members we have. But I am desperately appreciating the time off from rehearsals this afternoon.

And I appreciated the few minutes of downtime between rehearsals yesterday in which I got to walk the property a bit and reacquaint myself with some of its less visited corners. Like Highwood, the house that was the residence of Serge Koussevitzky (shown above). After singing grand opera and grandly operatic religious music, it’s humbling to walk by the residence of the man who shaped so much of Tanglewood’s traditions and reflect on the sheer amount of organizational and artistic genius—and hard work—that had to be done for the place to last for this long.