Tag Archives: George Frideric Handel

Under the Arches

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I walk into the room after the rehearsal has begun, and the men are working on a slow passage of Handel. Choirs I and II sing the same tenor, baritone and bass parts at this part of the piece, and they have unified their pitch and the round warmth of their Latin vowels so that despite having only ten of them singing a relatively soft phrase, the sonority is beautifully intense and sweeps me into the room on an almost ecstatic wave.photoI sit and finally have a look around. The doctoral student assistant is conducting, and one of the voices raised is my husband’s, from where he’s joined Choir II. I close my eyes for just a moment to listen to the lilt and roll of the men’s voices.

When the women rejoin and the full ensemble begins to move forward, picking up speed and volume as the text becomes more buoyant, I feel myself lifted further on the waves, transported far from this concrete box of a room and its cold fluorescent lights.photoSuddenly I am under the morning light pouring through a cathedral’s oculus, gazing up into the curves of the arched nave and dome. I am pacing sedately through the arcade of a cloister, the afternoon sun warming my heels as it peers into the intervals between the pillars. I am in the garden, watching the sun set on the curled canes of the roses climbing there,the bows of the water leaping in the fountain, the draped arms of the willow as it leans out to embrace the day’s last rays of light.

This is the sweetness of music, and in this wash of light and dark, cool and warmth, joy and meditation I can gladly lie for a thousand years.photo

It’s All Rehearsal, Really

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Blog.08-30-2013.all-rehearsalWe may look like we’re all geared up and doing important stuff, but mostly, we spend all of our lives practicing, learning and getting ready for one thing or another. Some of those things happen in due course and many more of them either never quite come to fruition, or far more often, change along the way and we end up following along and seeing where it all takes us. All of this is quite normal and perfectly valid.

As a privileged observer and listener in many musical rehearsals long after the years when I was an active amateur participant, I can tell you that I think these more explicit practice sessions can have much the same sorts of both trajectories and outcomes. What anyone not privy to the backstage view of any sort of practice may easily forget, even if they once knew it, is that whether the moment is strictly obligatory, is amateur in the finer sense, or is wholly professional, it can have the same range of characteristics, studious, soulful, playful, predictable, heartrending or hilarious–or some grand combination of them all.

The experience of listening in on the preparations for musical performances is distinct from the performances themselves in a multitude of ways, but perhaps the most striking to a non-participant is arriving at a high-level rehearsal and seeing all and sundry set up camp for it in their work clothes. The star soloist is wearing old jeans. The conductor, who no matter how rigorously the singers and players enact their parts will likely move around and sweat the most, is wearing shorts and a short-sleeved, thin shirt. The players have open cases near their chairs with spare instrument pieces and alternate score parts strewn across them, and the singers, no matter what the temperature, are wearing neck scarves and lugging big containers of fluids to protect their own precious instruments. The rehearsal accompanist at the beat-up old piano is wearing glasses both on the bridge of the nose and the crown of the head, one for the easier to read individual parts and one for the microscopically reduced full score. All of this in a sort of ordered chaos the shows they are all there to Do Things. It’s work. It’s fun. It’s messy, like life.

Our Big Summer Road Trip, a driving circuit of over 6000 miles this July and August, was a multipurpose travel package designed to accomplish a number of ends, not least of them to attend and study and enjoy music-related adventures with friends, colleagues and other musicians and music lovers in several disparate events. First, we went to the Oregon Bach Festival to see the newly anointed Artistic Director make his debut interview marking the occasion, and more importantly to see maestro Helmuth Rilling conduct his grand finale performance as AD in this season when he officially passed the baton to his successor after 44 outstanding years at the Festival’s helm. The Festival is a fine one, Rilling a justly revered conductor and teacher, and many of the singers and players who participate, along with many regular OBF attendees, are longtime friends and colleagues, so it’s always a joy and privilege to go to the Festival ourselves, but particularly meaningful to see Rilling lead the B Minor Mass on his way to Conductor Emeritus status, since my husband Richard had the good fortune to sing the same piece under Rilling during the maestro’s second year at OBF. A great deal of water has gone under the bridge, and though a lot has changed in that flow of time, many things remain the same. Rehearsals and performances, practice and action go on as ever.

I had been reminded of all of this, of course, by the opportunity to attend the Boston Early Music Festival and see my spouse conduct and his Collegium Singers and the university’s Baroque Orchestra in June, along with admiring all of the other marvelous artists and events at BEMF. So many wonderful concerts and recitals; so much hard and happy work to prepare them! And how quickly June disappears into the mists of memory as the summer rolls forward. Thus, a long road trip seemingly becomes an amazingly fresh outing to experience more variations on this theme.

The second of the trio of musical events we attended on the road trip was the regional gathering of choral conductors in our former home area, a great opportunity to renew ties with longtime fellow conductors, teachers and friends over grilled wild salmon and to revisit musical literature options, audition processes, mull over the usual academic topics, share hints about favorite new compositions and gossip about who is the up-and-coming hottest new choir or conductor in anyone’s neighborhood. Driving up to the chapel that serves as the main conference space, whom should we see sitting visiting on the porch but a man who was the excellent recording engineer serving in that artistic task for many of my husband’s choirs’ recordings over the years, and with him, the teacher-conductor-mentor who led Richard to music as a vocation and profession in the first place and so became not only his ‘choral father’ but a lifelong dear friend. To follow this greeting with collegial renewal among many other fellow musical artists, from colleagues and collaborators to singers and students, composers and coordinators of conferences and musical programs at all levels, and then to have dinner a week later with both of those two first friends we’d spotted, was rich beyond words.

Third on our list and rounding out the road trip with our stop in Vancouver, BC, was the Vancouver Early Music Festival. A perfect bookend to starting the trip with OBF in Eugene, VEMF attendance had much the same purpose for us as the Oregon visit: see and hear good friends and other artists at work, and attend the events honoring the longtime AD’s retirement. While Jose Verstappen has served a mere 34 years in Vancouver, he has had as much impact of his own on the Festival there as Rilling has in Oregon, just a very different sort. Jose is a modest and self-effacing man, but as warm and as hardworking and dedicated, and certainly as hard for donors and supporters to say No to, as Rilling, and so both have created environments of commitment and excellence that will thrive long after both have abdicated their thrones. Matthew Halls, Rilling’s successor, and Matthew White, Verstappen’s, are both bright, gifted and able men and I expect to enjoy attending both festivals with as much outstanding artistry on display as ever in years to come.

While in Vancouver, besides the great fun of attending Verstappen’s farewell party, seeing many dear friends, meeting Bruce Dickey–the leading light of cornettists nowadays, he will be playing in the production of the Monteverdi Vespers Richard’s conducting in October–and hearing some terrific music of various kinds in concert, the highlight was sitting in during rehearsals for Händel’s ‘Israel in Egypt’. It was there that I was most struck by this lovely interweaving of labor and lightness that can happen when the people at practice are fully engaged in their work and love what they do. The piece itself is a marvel, full of potent and piquant and even picaresque melodies and moments, and those singing and playing it made the most of these riches. When Tyler Duncan and Sumner Thompson started singing the bass duet ‘The Lord is a Man of War‘, not only was the music and text mesmerizing (never mind my personal feelings about the story’s theology) but their obvious pleasure in exploring the expressive potential in the piece together with the players and conductor (the impressively sensitive and dramatic Alexander Weimann) moved me to pay special attention to this juxtaposition of the remarkable and the workaday, the plain and the powerful. So to all of you out there who sing, play, work, rehearse, prepare and perform, and especially to the players, singers, composers, conductors, administrators and Artistic Directors encountered on this summer tour of ours, I dedicate this poem.digital illustrationNumber Thirty-Eight

Strike, then carry on, and so the sound

Belies in beauty such a martial start,

When ragtag troops in everyday are found

To sing and play at battle from the heart–

Who seemed so simply destined for the soil

As laborers in neither art nor war

But some plebeian, plodding sort of toil,

Then strike, and decimate what came before–

Show the illusion is not acted out

Through violence or merely artifice,

But rather, note by note dispelling doubt

That mystery’s all quite undone by this–

Where love and war are mingled in their way

By songs more eloquent than words can say.

Oceans of Music

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photoRecent weeks have seen our household in full music immersion. The casual observer or fly on the wall might be rather skeptical of the claim, when our home–other than occasional brief bursts of singing from my partner’s office while he’s studying a score–is, if anything, more silent than usual. That’s simply because the music is mainly taking us both elsewhere. And thanks to our practice of managing a one person/two places of employment, one car household economy by means of my sometimes chauffeuring him between gigs and staying through on the sidelines when possible, I get to share in the musical inundation.

It’s no surprise that a conductor, especially one who works in one of the largest university music programs on the continent and therefore has colleagues and students almost beyond the counting who offer musical rehearsals and programs well worth our sharing from morning until late every day right alongside and overlapping his own, would be so surrounded by sound. The Anglican church where he’s currently serving has, in addition, the average Sunday in which the choirs he conducts will sing anthems, Psalms and liturgical service music at two full morning Eucharistic services and one Evensong. All of this is, in fact, hardly unique among conductors, many of whom like him also do guest conducting, clinics and lectures and all of the adminis-trivia that accompany choral, educational, ecclesiastical and institutional operations everywhere. I’m still often astounded at what he manages to do, not only logistically but with continued thoughtful musical scholarship and grace.

And always, always, I am moved to gratitude that I’ve had the incredible good fortune to link my life with his, this person whom I not only like and love but also admire immensely for his integrity, artistry and good humor. On top of all this, I get to Go Along for the Ride and listen to it all.

So as things have gained momentum on the calendar chez nous (as they do cyclically in every household), I have been privileged to bathe in oceans’-worth of music to please my ears, to challenge my thinking, rejoice my heart, soothe my sorrows, ease my weariness, shake my complacency, and rock me gently on sonic waves of peace and beauty. I could do with a little more of that household silence, not to mention free time or sleep, and we can safely assume my spouse would welcome these ten times as eagerly. But I can’t think of what I’d willingly cross off the list from among what we’ve been hearing in the last number of weeks.

I always love listening in on rehearsals, whether with groups my husband’s conducting or otherwise, in part for the wonderful music I hear and in large part because, as a non-musician myself, I can enjoy nearly any music more if I’ve not only listened to it a few times to become more familiarized but, especially, if I’ve gotten a sense of what the singers and/or players are being told about the work–its origins, history, style, particular complexities, and so forth–and are being asked to do with it musically and interpretively. Each group of artists converges at an entirely different point in time in the performing arts, each and every time they rehearse or perform, because in addition to gradually improving or changing skill levels and building affinities with the works in question, they each bring different degrees of their daily condition with them for the occasion: health, attitude, and the news of the last hour may color a performance and endanger or enrich it accordingly. All ages and levels of skill and experience and passion can have ‘off’ nights onstage or, conversely, magically exhilarating moments of unsurpassed attunement, somehow, with the universe.photo

I love actual performances, too, of course, where the high drama of potential crash-and-burn or apotheosis resides in every second of the concert, the recital, the act. The power that emerges from the performers nerving themselves and plunging wholeheartedly into the moment is a splendid spectacle and can transport us all to other places and planes. Not having the performance skills myself (nor the will or self-confidence to develop them as necessary), I am all the more aware of what’s at stake and how nearly incredible it is that great things come out of the effort so often. And, of course, that much more appreciative that there are those who can and will share such gifts with the rest of us.

What the last weeks have brought have included a huge range of such gifts. There was an outstanding high school choir whose fine conductors invited my husband to do an evening’s clinic with the singers on literature they’re preparing for a choral competition. Such joy and energy and responsiveness filling the room! Then, some of his sopranos and altos from one of the university choirs singing the lovely and yes, alluring ‘Sirènes‘ of Claude Debussy as guests on a university orchestra concert, calling all of us listeners to wreck our souls on the dangerous promontories of their imagined seashore. Two performances of the uni Symphony Orchestra in a showcase of some of the school’s powerhouse players, including a recently acquired, fabulous violinist who gave a mesmerizing performance of the Allegro moderato of Tchaikovsky‘s violin concerto (Op. 35) each time–once on campus, then at the Texas Music Educators’ Association conference 5 hours’ road-trip south, where if I weren’t musicked up enough lately I certainly could (and did) dive in among the over 25,000 musicians in attendance at the convention.

There was a delightful performance by a doctoral conducting student with his recital choir. Lots of rehearsals and warmups and services with the church choirs, including lovely works by William Byrd, Morten Lauridsen, Gregorio Allegri. Rehearsals with the university Chamber and Collegium (early music) choirs going on as always, and new ones beginning with the combined singers from Collegium and Dr. Jerry McCoy‘s outstanding A Cappella Choir whom my partner was preparing for performances of George Frideric Handel‘s oratorio ‘Theodora‘ under the baton of Maestro Graeme Jenkins of the Dallas Opera, along with the university’s Baroque Orchestra. Ash Wednesday was a road-tripping adventure, with the two of us working at home in the morning, heading to Dallas for him to warm up and conduct the choir in the noon Ash Wednesday service at the church, dashing back to the university for his afternoon Chamber Choir rehearsal, then back to Dallas for the 6 pm service and a following weekly choir rehearsal before going home back north for the night. But oh, so much lovely music sandwiched in between car races!

That was followed by Thursday and Friday nights’ ‘Theodora’ performances–3 hours of ecstatic music about agonizing trials, or good old life-and-death oratorio drama of Handel’s best sort–and then, yesterday’s Metropolitan Opera broadcast of ‘Ernani’, which I told you about in last evening’s post. Squeezed between concerts and rehearsals, a few pauses while at home spent on listening to a Canadian rock CD (yes, pretty listenable!) I just got as a comp for letting the musicians use my art for their CD cover, and especially on stealing bits of time to revisit our nephew’s punk band Honningbarna when I can. Upcoming is, oh, just more of the same: more beautiful liturgical music-making at the church; more rehearsals, recitals, and concerts at school and in town; another major musicians’ conference; the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, opera at the university and perhaps the One O’Clock Lab Band (the university’s top, Grammy-nominated Jazz ensemble), if we can somehow manage the time for it. Holy Week services (about 8 in 5 days, counting only the ones my husband’s conducting). More of the same.photoAnd yet it is music: never quite the same thing twice, nor the same experience of it. Always powerful, always waking up parts of me that I may have forgotten or not even known were there to be awakened. A constantly changing stream of sound-waves that in turn, become oceans of music to buoy me up, toss me around, pull me in, and carry me far, far away.