Tag: mahler

Cocktail: Veni Creator Spiritous

Photo courtesy Boston Globe

We’re doing Mahler’s 8th Symphony this weekend. It’s the first time for me since 2015 and only the second since I joined the Tanglewood Festival Chorus 19 years ago. (I wrote about that experience performing with James Levine, the late great Johan Botha, Deborah Voigt, and Heidi Grant Murphy (the soprano in the rafters) among others, at the time.)

The work remains galactic in its scope and stentorian in its volume. (We have a little grassroots decibel reading practice among the choristers; last night reached “only” 106 from my position on the fifth bench, and we’ve hit as high as 108 in rehearsal.) But it feels different. For one thing, years of in-rehearsal vocal coaching from the TFC’s music director James Burton have made it much easier to sing properly, and “bloomin’ loud” as he’s said on at least one occasion, without screaming. Which is a skill you need if you’re going to be hitting those decibels.

For another, I’m an experienced hand now. While I won’t have a special marking next to my name in the program book until I complete this year plus five more, there are far fewer in the chorus who have a double digit tenure than when I started.

And so, it felt appropriate to mark this weekend’s performances, again, with a special cocktail. As I did for Mahler’s Second, I took inspiration from the text. While it was tempting to just go with the memorable text from Part II’s opening (“Waldung, sie schwankt heran/Felsen, sie lasten dran/Wurzeln, sie klammern an/Stamm dicht an Stamm hinan/Woge nach Woge spritzt…”) and make a “spritzt,” that didn’t feel sufficiently … impactful for a piece that featured two full choirs and boys’ choir, offstage brass, eight soloists, four harps, a harmonium, a pipe organ, and two mandolins. (There were around 300 of us on stage last night.)

So I went with the opening text instead, and made a “Veni Creator Spiritous.” (Groan.) The jumping off point was a Sazerac, but I switched everything up while keeping the overall slightly boozy affect… and, as with the Aufersteh’n, made sure to include herbal liqueurs in honor of Mahler’s vegetarianism.

As always, you can import the recipe card photo into Highball. Enjoy!

Mahler 2, Boston Symphony/Andris Nelsons, Tanglewood, July 7, 2017

Between a week-long vacation in Asheville and a residency at Tanglewood, plus the usual work and family stuff, posting on this blog has ground to a halt. But it’s not as if I haven’t been busy.

Take the Tanglewood residency, for instance. This was my third performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony with the Boston Symphony Orchestra; my first Mahler 2 was with Seiji in 2006, my second with Christoph von Dóhnanyi in Symphony Hall. This was my first performance of the work under the baton of Andris Nelsons, and my first time through the piece with James Burton, the new conductor of the TFC.

It was a pretty magnificent experience, all told. Besides the improvements to tuning, diction, and affect that I’ve come to expect with Jamie, the chorus also found its way deeper into the work than we’ve done in the past. We talked about the difference in vocal tone required in the “Bereite dich” to ensure that we were strong and assertive but not aggressive. We were more attentive to the maestro than I remember being before.

Here’s the audio of the full performance.

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.)