Category: Music

Alone in the crowd

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There are some days where my love of Tanglewood bumps up, hard, against some of the less ideal aspects of the place. I speak of the crowds.

I think part of the reason I love coming here with the chorus is those glorious early days of the residency, when we and the orchestra are almost the only people here. But come Friday night and a concert in the shed (in which I’m not performing) and I find it a bit… overwhelming. Call it agoraphobia, but partway through the search for friendly faces among the blankets and lawn chairs I’m invariably seized with the urge to flee. So it was that I couldn’t hack the crowds for last night’s concert.

But of course I still want to hear the music. So this residency I’m taking full advantage of that secret of the Tanglewood experience: the open rehearsal. While they can still be crowded, particularly this morning with Yo-Yo Ma, the crowd is not as dense, and one can sit inside the Shed and feel insulated from the worst of it. And the best part is how cheap the tickets are–I mean, they let the chorus in for free, in recompense for our services, but even for the general public an open seating ticket is less than $10.

Small world

It was over four years ago that I wrote about my choral doppelgänger (aka doppelsänger), Scott Allen Jarrett, who directs the Back Bay Chorale among other musical responsibilities in Boston. In the meantime I’ve never actually met him. Until last night, when I was introduced to him by a fellow TFC member in Lenox.

The introduction, coming as it did after a marathon day of rehearsals that ended at 10:30, was an unexpected capper to the evening. Until I realized that on the other side of the restaurant were the guys from Chanticleer, whose performance I had been unable to attend because of the aforementioned rehearsals.

So, a red-letter evening: a successful (ultimately) series of rehearsals for Onegin, a great dinner when by all rights all kitchens in town ought to have been closed, finally made the connection with Scott, and got to greet the guys from Chanticleer. At this point, the only thing left is for me to bump into David Weinberger, who’s spending time out this way this summer, and the nexus of coincidences would be complete.

The gloaming

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So here I am back in Lenox. It’s beautiful but ominous skies and a day of Russian ahead; our residency for Tschaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin has begun.

I’m currently flashing back to my one encounter with the language, a class in 1986, and am very grateful that I was exposed to the soft consonants ahead of time. Some of our Boston-bred palates are having real difficulty with the vowel sounds, though you can’t tell en masse, thank goodness.

It’s always a crapshoot, the lodging that our fair parent organization provides. Usually it’s just fine, but tonight my roommate isn’t here, they almost mixed up my room with a bunch of sopranos next door, and I had to manually configure my IP address so that I could get on the motel wireless. But I’m on now. (And it’s a good thing I’m not doing demos anymore; it’s slow, slow, slow.)

Mahler 2nd with Haitink, from afar

I wasn’t at Tanglewood this weekend, though I would have liked to be. You never get too many shots at Mahler’s Second, and the repertoire that I heard for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus’s Prelude concert was superb.

I’ve only seen two reviews so far, both of which make me even sorrier I wasn’t there. The first was the review in the Daily Gazette (Schenectady, NY), which gives the TFC a nice callout for Prelude, calling the chorus “so good by now that it can show off early in the summer. It opened the weekend with a virtuosic Prelude program Friday — all 20th-century, all appealing…”

The Gazette (which has had good coverage of the festival so far this year) also had nice things to say about the Mahler, as did the Berkshire Eagle, which wrote, “John Oliver’s festival chorus was made to sing music like this. The magical first entrance of the chorus, embracing resurrection, came through in an awed hush. When the roof blew off in the ending, the large audience, deprived of opportunities for applause between linked movements, erupted.”

(I wrote about my experience singing the piece under Seiji in 2006.)

A farewell to Troyens

I leave Berlioz’s massive magnum opus, which we gave our final Tanglewood performance this weekend, with reluctance. It’s such a tremendous work, full of enormous dimensions of art, drama, mythology, and humanity.

As I bid my farewell (aside from the reviews, which are rolling in and will show up in my daily links), a few thoughts about the work and our performances:

I previously called the opera a beast, but this description is, strictly speaking, only applicable to the first half (the capture of Troy). The first act plays the ill-fated celebration of the Trojans against Cassandra’s foreknowledge of the city’s doom, and the music continuously underscores the comparison–slashing punctuation from the orchestra under sunny arias, rising chromatic chords under the chorus’s premature victory march–until the terrible truth of the horse is revealed. The second half is a love tragedy, and has a broader palette on which to play out its psychodrama.

The whole first half hinges on the characterization of Cassandra. The soloist must strike a balance between portraying her fear and anguish and her love for Chorebus. In our Symphony Hall performances, Yvonne Naef gave a magnificently dramatic reading of the prophecy but was less convincing in convincing the audience that the love of Dwayne Croft’s Chorebus was more than a distraction. Anna Caterina Antonacci’s Cassandra was more equally passionate in both sides of the role, and her performance lent a warmer color to the love duet that deepened the calamity of the fall.

Berlioz may have intended the work to be performed in a single monumental evening, but there are so many parallels between the first and second halves of the work that the opera’s division works well in concert. There are repeated themes and motifs–the Trojan March is the most obvious example, but a more subtle and chilling parallel can be found in the descending chromatic scale sung by the Ghost of Hector in Part I and by Dido as she contemplates her suicide in Act II, as well as the muted French horns and piccolos denote the appearances of ghosts throughout the entire work.

The thing, then, with Les Troyens is that it more than adequately repays the listener for working through all its complexities (and in fact its sheer bulk). I hope I have an occasion to see it again in my lifetime. I would sing it again in an instant.

Heading for Tanglewood

It’s always hard to get on the road for a bunch of days away from the family; this time I have the compensation of what’s on the other end of the road. It’s time for the Tanglewood season opener, where the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus will reprise this spring’s performance of Berlioz’s magnificent Les Troyens in its sprawling entirety. Should be a fun time, and there are already signs that the BSO front office is having fun with the production. Witness: the 10-foot-tall Trojan Horse (no doubt stuffed with a pair of ninjas) that will grace the opening night gala. Now all we need is someone to play the role of Cassandra and predict great doom should the caterers wheel it into the tent.

Radiohead on iTunes, five years on

Five years and almost a month ago, I wrote a post called Interesting absence(s) about the disappearance of Radiohead and Sigur Rós from the then-new iTunes Music Store. When I expanded it for Blogcritics, I laid a finger on one of the causes—friction between artists and labels over digital rights and reimbursement. At the time I thought it might take a few months or a year before the Radiohead catalog returned. It only took Sigur Rós until February of 2004 to return, but it took until this week for the Radiohead back catalog to reappear, and then only after In Rainbows proved such a hit on the service.

The Red Herring post makes a few points about the reasons bands hold out, but they don’t answer one question: why is Radiohead only dipping its toe in? There is only one EP on the service, meaning only two non-album tracks, compared to other artists like U2 and Sting who have been far more generous with posting digital rarities—which fans like myself would be motivated to shell out cash for. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time.

(Confidential to Matt F: Hey, Fish, see what you can do about getting Thom and the boys to post some more b-sides and exclusives, won’t you? Much love.)

links for 2008-06-01

Audiophile quality music download club

Peter Gabriel’s RealWorld Studios have teamed up with Bowers & Wilkins (B&W speakers) to bring an online music club targeted at audiophiles. It’s not really a store, because the service offers only subscription pricing and the content is exclusive–up and coming musicians recording at RealWorld. The B&W Music Club is part of a set of B&W content offerings, including a blog and an article series on the industry. The intention appears to be to start conversations about bringing high fidelity audio back into the picture, after “audiophile” concerns have been pushed to the side for a few years by the prominence of MP3. It’s a smart marketing strategy for B&W, of course, who have their fingers in both the traditional high-end speaker market and the iPod accessory field; they have a strong interest in making sure that music listeners find out that uncompressed audio through premium speakers sounds much, much better than MP3s through earbuds. This is a classic market education play, in other words, and one that (presumably) has the benefit of sounding really good.

I would appear to be in the target market for this announcement; my primary home listening speakers are B&W bookshelf units (Series DM602s), and when I rip audio rather than purchasing it online, I rip losslessly to Apple Lossless Audio, the same format as the new B&W service. I think I need to check out the free trial of the service to give a better opinion on what it can provide.

New mix: Picture of you where it began

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Inaugurating the new blog in style, here’s my latest mix, which started as a party and ended as a lullaby. Of course, the Art of the Mix service is down right now, but here’s a quick tracklist:

  1. Italian men, “Su Tenore A Ballu” (field recording)
  2. M.I.A., “Bamboo Banga”
  3. The Beatles, “She Said She Said”
  4. The Arcade Fire, “Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)”
  5. Vampire Weekend, “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”
  6. Beirut, “Elephant Gun”
  7. Guided by Voices, “As We Go Up, We Go Down”
  8. Elvis Costello, “Clown Strike”
  9. Talking Heads, “Stay Up Late”
  10. Grandpaboy, “Psychopharmacology”
  11. Elvis Presley, “Crawfish”
  12. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, “100 Days, 100 Nights”
  13. Bob Dylan, “Call Letter Blues”
  14. Sonic Youth, “Shoot”
  15. Black Angels, “You in Color”
  16. Mission of Burma, “Dead Pool”
  17. Radiohead, “House of Cards”
  18. Frank Sinatra, “Last Night When We Were Young”
  19. Duke Ellington, “The Controversial Suite (Later)”
  20. Low, “In Metal”
  21. Big Star, “I’m In Love With a Girl”

Copies to the usual suspects on request; just leave a comment. (Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say that!)

Update: Art of the Mix came back online sometime since I wrote this, so the mix is linked now.

Les Troyens: Early reviews in

Boston Globe: Glimpses of Fire, Passion at Symphony Hall. As I mentioned last night, Dwayne Croft’s cold was in evidence, and Jeremy Eichler mentions it, and is negative about Marcello Giordano’s performance as well. But he gives thumbs up to Yvonne Naef and practically glows about the TFC, giving the longest review mention (a full paragraph!) that we’ve had from the Globe in recent memory:

The hero of last night’s outing was the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which sang, from the outset, with unflagging energy, commitment, and focus. The expansive contours and sheer tonal force required for the score’s massive climaxes were all present, but so were the delicacy and transparency necessary to bring across passages such as the beautifully tender prayer sung by the Trojan women at the outset of the second tableau of Act II.

Oh, and thanks to the angle the photographer took for the article photo, you can clearly see me. Look directly above Clayton Brainerd (the second standing soloist from the right) and I’m two rows up, with my mouth wide, wide open. Hey, it was a big scene.

And regarding the “rough-edged” comments about the work: we have three more performances, and history tells us that each one will be better and better.

Wow, that was something: Les Troyens

Opening night is past. Les Troyens, Part I is a magnificent beast, and it has already bloodied the cast—poor Dwayne Croft had a cold the likes of which I’ve never heard from someone singing a part like that. I think we all breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the duet. All the soloists were magnificent, but the prize has to go to Yvonne Naef, or as I called her in my Facebook status “Yvonne Fricking Naef” in homage to John Moltz’s Jennifer Fricking Connolly. Her Cassandra is vulnerable, fierce, and fey, and easily the strongest presence on stage. A close second would have to be our women: hats off to Fanw and other women of the chorus, whose second act number is one of the great heart-seizing moments in Berlioz (or in all women’s chorus literature, for that matter).

I’ve been overwhelmed with the rehearsals, but now I can’t wait to sing it again. Good thing we repeat Part I three more times!

Performing for the Pope

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My friends and colleagues in the Suspicious Cheese Lords have been busy lately. This weekend they sang for Pope Benedict XVI (Yes, seriously.) at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center. The piece was a composition by George Cervantes, a setting of the Peace Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, making the occasion that much cooler. Plus Skip was interviewed on CNN about the performance. And the video is prime Skip. Full video of the performance (starts at around 18:30). and other activities at the center is available through the EWTN Global Catholic Network site.

Way to go, guys. I expect to hear about your official appointment as choir in residence at the Sistine Chapel any day now. (But maybe not an appointment to be a CNN correspondent! Boy, they cut Skip off pretty fast in that interview!)