I will say that our Friday performance exceeded our Thursday one — no doubt because we became yet more comfortable with the technicalities of the music (entrances, dynamics, fugues) so we could throw more weight toward the emotional connection as well as the melodic lines, and not sound quite so harsh.  I bet Saturday’s and Tuesday’s performances are even better!  Assuming anyone comes to them — the hall was half empty again on Friday.

Some of Jeremy Eichler’s comments from the Boston Globe:

Last night Symphony Hall had many empty seats, whether due to the unusual repertoire or the prospect of another substitute conductor. It was a pity because Tovey led a swift and sure-footed performance of the work, largely true to its Romantic heft, but never at risk of collapsing beneath the weight of its own grandiloquence.

There were times one wished he managed transitions with a bit more dramatic flair or harnessed the work’s rhetorical force to greater cumulative effect, but there were pleasures to be found in the constitutive parts.

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus unleashed a robust and joyful noise at its first entrance, and by and large sustained its potent energy.  [...]  The work ends without any grand Beethovian apotheosis, but last night the chorus still found plenty to celebrate in the arrival of dawn.

David Wright echoed some of these comments in his Boston Classical Review:

Even a beautifully polished and committed performance by the orchestra, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and three capable vocal soloists under the direction of Bramwell Tovey (substituting for the indisposed Riccardo Chailly) couldn’t quite make the case for this musical miscellany as a coherent symphonic work.

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang with its usual precision, but its sound sometimes went uncharacteristically hard and blatant, as if it were trying to kick some life into Mendelssohn’s chronically short, square phrases.

Privately, there seems to be a consensus from choristers and their attending guests that the piece just doesn’t quite hang together, and that our exuberance sometimes toed the line between fortissimo and “shouty.”  With no subtlety or dramatic tension short of the Watchman-to-Dawn transition, there’s not much to hang your hat on besides making sure your sound reaches the back row.   I do feel we’re finding some of those subtleties and will continue to bring them out in the remaining performances.  Assuming we survive – Tovey may kill us all on these fugues, as they’ve gotten a little faster with each performance.

So how did we do?  Quite well.  We did a remarkable job of capturing the piece’s character and intensity, though I suspect there’s still more we can find in ourselves to give it over the remaining performances.

Maestro Tovey continued his outstanding stewardship at the podium.  He was kinetic, demonstrative, and inviting — but most importantly, consistent.  Consistent with the tempi and the cues and in the feeling he was trying to evoke from us as an orchestra and chorus.  I did think that one of the fugal passages started off a touch fast, almost as if he was daring us to keep up with him, but all in all there were no surprises.

The soloists were impressive — especially the way the two sopranos, Carolyn Sampson and Camilla Tilling.  I can only assume, when soloists like them are selected, that they are chosen not only for their availability and their skill, but also for how well they match each other for a duet like the cantata’s fifth movement.  John Tessier was pretty much what I expected from a tenor in this role – technically accurate, strong delivery, and capturing some of the pleading that’s built into his movements (which, given their nature, provide the work’s only counter to the “praise” theme.)

Our sound as a chorus was full and luscious, reaching to the back of a (disappointingly half empty) hall.  At no time did I feel we were competing with the orchestra for volume.  My throat’s a little sore this morning, so I have to wonder if I still may have been oversinging despite my best efforts to produce an efficient sound.  My singing felt good while I was up there.   Technically, I know we basses had a few shaky parts on some of the fugues where uncertainty pulled back our volume or made a weak entrance, but it was nothing serious and likely not noticeable in the heavy counterpoints we were wading through.  The highlight of the piece remains the Die Nacht ist vergangen! 7th movement as we transition from night into daylight, and we really did nail the a capella chorale that immediately follows it — nuanced, heartfelt singing that carried a prayerful, reflective tone.

We still have more to give, however.  Some of the color and character of the piece that we brought out in rehearsals was still not captured in our performance as well as I’d hoped.  The fugues are still a little pedestrian sometimes, losing some of the pleasantry of the counterpoint and melodic line in favor of the plodding thump, thump, thump needed to get through them correctly.  I think we can get more pathos in the fourth movement and, yes, even in the chorale, where details like a subtle swell on the word Gott didn’t come through to my ears.  I think there’s still a minuscule barrier in our heads that we need to overcome, because of the late memorization — that if we all can truly internalize the music and stop worrying about what’s next, what’s next, that we can break through to an even higher echelon of performance.  Mind you, there’s only so much you can do with this piece given its monologue of praise, praise, praise.  Hopefully, though, it won’t be another 24 years before it’s performed again!

Unfortunately, I think we’re all as a choir still a little behind on the memorization.  Some people are still flipping through their books to check things (guilty!) and in a couple instances, we’d drop out of the fugue in confusion.  Once you fall off the fugue train, it’s hard to get a ticket to get back on!  And if someone next to you is suddenly unsure, that may make you unsure, which makes the guy next to you unsure…  yet another reason why singing is really about confidence.  Confidence and breathing, and the rest will follow.

That aphorism about confidence and breathing is what I plan to tell 300 high school kids this morning.  Thursday morning is an open rehearsal where we’ll run the piece for a small crowd, before opening night tonight.  The chorus manager asked a good friend from the chorus (Laura Sanscartier) and I to participate in a pre-rehearsal talk for those high school kids, a task which we happily agreed to.  What?  You want us stage-loving, no-shame, happy-go-lucky people to talk to a bunch of students about how much we love singing?  SOLD!  It was only after we agreed that we found out that Maestro Tovey will be on the panel with us as well.  We’re both pretty excited about the opportunity!  Though I suspect I won’t be able to keep up with Tovey’s jokes.

Maestro Tovey was every bit as wonderful as I had heard he would be at tonight’s rehearsal.  He immediately put us all at ease with a few jokes. “Well, it’s an unexpected pressure to conduct this piece with you,” he opened, given that he was only announced as the replacement conductor a few months ago.  Then, with a look around our cramped rehearsal room, he commented, “Only the best for you, I see.”  As our laughter subsided, he mentioned that it felt like this was one  of those tunnels the Americans dug to hide from the English.  ”Well, it didn’t work — I’m here.”

I was pleased to hear his initial comments on the piece, which echoed my earlier thoughts on the singular theme of this Symphony-Cantata.  This was a piece about praise, praising the Lord… and not really room for much else, he commented.  But rather than lament its focus, he pointed out that there was still some drama and some color to be found in its pages, such as in the mystery and dark of the 4th movement.  ”So let’s go through and see if we can’t pick up some of this color here and there and bring it to life.”

His conducting style is very animated yet very clear.  He urges us on in the fugal passages; he beckons us to stay with him through tempo changes; he winces and shushes us if we’re too loud.  He gives us some further adjustments to match his plans for ritards and other places where he takes some time.  Some conductors are more concerned about the orchestra, but I have little doubt he’ll be breathing with us and offering us our cues throughout the performance.

Most of all, he added personality to what was in danger of becoming a stomp-it-out sort of piece.  He directs us with words like “warmth” and “beautiful” and “prayerful.”  He tells us that our pianissimo should be “quiet enough that people could talk over it,” which I just love as a concrete direction to follow.  He apologized about “not wanting to get all religious on us,” and then went there anyways, asking us to internalize a reverence and a joy and a relief at being delivered from the hell alluded to by the soloist in movement 6.  He spends extra moments on some passages, urging us to swell dynamically just a bit on words like Trübsal (affliction), almost as if it hurt us to talk about it.  After all, he pointed out, if you’re going to tell someone about your being saved from an affliction, you’re not beaming as you relate the story.

Throughout all this great direction, he kept up the one-liners.  An aggressive /tzt/ at the end of setzt saw him pretend to wipe the spit from his eye, then commend us on our diligence in getting all the consonants out, but could we swallow that instinct?  ”Your individual contribution will be appreciated so much more.”  When the basses didn’t agree on a high note, he characterized our singing as “blend-free.”  Just a laugh a minute… with the effect of loosening us up, getting us to pay attention — no, more than that — getting us to want to help him out by following his directions and giving him what he asked for.  We were clearly on the same team, and suddenly I found myself as fiercely loyal and committed to the character he wants to invoke and the performance he wants us to collaborate on together.  It’s no wonder everyone raved about him for Porgy and Bess.  Who wouldn’t want to sing for this man?

Martin doesn’t have as much built-in authority as John when he’s up at the podium, which in the past has sometimes led to some unfortunate substitute teacher type rehearsals–people talking, people contradicting him, that sort of thing.  Plus, he can’t contribute the subtleties that a John can to bring out the sound we’re looking for as a chorus.  None of that mattered yesterday as our goal was not connecting the lines or making a beautiful sound, it was which entrance goes where?  When is the subito piano marking?  Is that cut-off on beat three or four?

This Lobgesang has turned out to be surprisingly challenging to learn.  It’s not hard to sing while looking at the score — there are no difficult intervals, no challenging runs, no confusing entrances.  In fact, that’s the problem.  The text, the fugues, the entrances all sort of swirl together in your head.  Everything is mostly regular, except when it’s not, so you need to commit to memory that this rhythm is straight but that rhythm has the sixteenth syncopation, but it’s on an unstressed syllable so you can’t punch it, but this other one needs an accent or it won’t be heard at all… and we haven’t even made it to competing with the orchestra yet (that comes Wednesday!)  So I think many of us have gained an unfortunate new appreciation for the complexity that is the simplicity of Mendelssohn’s writing.

Tonight (Tuesday night) we’ll have a piano rehearsal with Maestro Tovey.  I did not have the opportunity to work with him for Porgy and Bess.  My wife did, and has been gushing to me about how great he is to work with — personable and musically knowledgeable and knows how to get the sound he wants from us.  I’m looking forward to it.  Holiday Pops is basically a factory assembly line with Keith Lockhart, given the number of concerts we do and the relative ease of the pieces.  Other conductors we’ve worked with recently have all been good, but I wouldn’t describe any of them in the glowing terms that I’ve heard for Maestro Tovey.  I hope he lives up to my now heightened expectations!

Lobgesang translates to “Hymn of Praise,” and boy is it ever.  It’s almost monotonous in its praise.  You know how a good story has exposition, and then plot complication, with a climax, dénouement , and subsequent resolution?  Yeah.  This, not so much.  We barely go into minor key, let alone say anything that’s not full of joy and praise.  How much Lob can you get in one sang ?  Apparently a lot.  Here are the English translations of the movements in which we get to sing:

• Movement 2: Praise ye the Lord O ye Spirit
• Movement 4: All ye that cried unto the Lord
• Movement 5: I waited for the Lord
• Movement 7: The Night is Departing
• Movement 8: Let all men praise the Lord
• Movement 10: Ye nations, offer to the Lord

On top of all this, as John Oliver pointed out to us at our rehearsal on Tuesday, is  that “the score is just ink.”  In true Mendelssohn style, it’s very heavily orchestrated, including lots of brass doubling of key themes, making it very hard for a chorus to be heard.  Nevertheless, we’re already putting some good tricks in place to be sure to come through, and even with the excessive praise theme, I’ve already warmed up well to what should be a fun piece to sing.

The first and most obvious lesson from rehearsal was a back to basics for German pronunciation.  Livia Racz and John coached us through things that “they know we know” but weren’t doing.  Doubling the L in words like alles.  Separating words like und and alles so that they were distinct.  Keeping the vowel dark and rolling the r’s in words like Herrn.  Getting the stresses on the right syllables–Mendelssohn did not seemingly write well for the text, given the number of downbeats that are on schwas and unaccented syllables.  (Funny Oliverism: John asked us to sing a certain way, and then held up the basses as an example, asking us to sing that passage again.  We did, and he said: “See, just like the basses… well, the ones who did it right.”)

The second technique we adopted is to combat the otherwise blocky writing of the music.  It’s really quite tempting to fall into a plodding rhythm, pounding each note like you would piano keys in a finger exercise, because of the way the piece is composed.  (Unfortunately, our practice recording seems to do just that, to the point where it positively destroys the chorale in movement 8.)  To fight this, John has already started emphasizing preserving the melodic line, as well as adding some texture by introducing slight diminuendos on long held notes.

Finally, there’s the question of being heard through the thick score.  As John reminded us, it’s “human orchestral nature” for the orchestra to get louder and louder if they hear us getting louder and louder.  We’ll have no trouble making forte sections loud, but can we keep the piano sections soft enough?  It reminds me of the screamfest that was Berlioz’s Te Deum, which we’ve sung within the last few years. Overall, as it was then, the goal is less about volume and power and more about color and tone.

Of course, I can rhapsodize about color and tone over volume and power all day, and none of it freakin’ matters if I don’t have the notes memorized.  After checking in with a few other chorus members, I found that many of us have been procrastinating all January on cracking open the score and really putting in the memorization work that one needs to get this down.  Partially this is because this January’s piece is so much more manageable than last year’s Oedipus Rex or the previous year’s St. John Passion from James MacMillan.  So we may be getting a little soft.  The upshot, however, is that I’m now down to 4 days before the first rehearsal, and I’ve only made it to the point where I can sing through all 6 movements with the music in front of me.  I may have movement 8 down and movement 7 is very close, but it’ll be a photo finish.  This is the first time that my new job’s long commute has been something to cherish rather than despise!

Wednesday’s rehearsal was cancelled thanks to our solid rehearsal on Tuesday (with one grinning admonition from John after we fumbled our way through the last movement: “You should — wait — how should I word this — when you go to practice this before the next rehearsal, you should probably start with this one first.”)  Monday is our off-book rehearsal, Tuesday is our piano rehearsal with Maestro Bramwell Tovey, and then its an all day orchestra rehearsal on Wednesday, morning orchestra on Thursday, and performances Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday.

In Nanie, you’ll hear that the melodic lines are very difficult, with lots of sustained notes.  Notice how the chorus keeps renewing the vowel sound, with the sound constantly “spinning,” to make sure the tone doesn’t bottom out and get lazy, or the pronunciation of a vowel slip back into a schwa.

See how the character of the piece changes slightly when we switch to 4/4 from 6/8 time as we sing about all the daughters of the sea-goddess coming to the surface to sing a lament.  It’s a majestic moment that previews the moral of the story, revisited in the reprise of the opening hymn.  (Oh, and the oboe solo is delicious to listen to.)

There’s also a great moment where we sink to a barely audible pianissimo as we talk about even the perfect and beautiful dying.  It’s a great moment.

And, of course, there’s the great agogic accent toward the end, but I’ve written too much about that already.

In Schicksaslied, the contrast between the two sections is what makes the piece shine.  Here are the people in heaven, the gods, the souls that have ascended, living in a utopia.  As a chorus, we have to convey this beauty in our legato without getting lost in the music ourselves.  Meanwhile, the rest of us on earth suffer, water falling from rock to rock into the darkness below.  (Great word painting there as we fall vom Klippe zum Klippe).   We will spit out consonants and maintain a harsh rhythm, but we must still keep a legato line so that the whole piece has unity.

FdB pointed out that Brahms did something marvelous at the end, returning to the same heavenly utopian theme, but in the tonality of the second half, perhaps suggesting that there might be a way for us to transcend this earthen prison and make it up there.

Finally, in the Alto Rhapsody, prepare to be blown away by the wonder that is Stephanie Blythe.  In an earlier rehearsal she apologized for “marking,” or singing softer or down an octave from the actual music.  This was hilarious, because her idea of marking is still louder than many of us can sing.  This piece is for men’s chorus only, and originally we were creating a beautiful accompanying sound.  Now, we are forte right from the beginning, because, as John Oliver pointed out to us, it’s really a five note chord (bass 1, bass 2, tenor 1, tenor 2, and Stephanie) and she was blowing us away.  So we will try to keep up with her volume while still making a sumptuous, rich tone, rather than shouting or oversinging, or trying to hard to keep up.

I hope you enjoy the concert.  I believe it will be broadcast on the Internets around 2:30pm EDT from http://www.wgbh.org/995/index.cfm.

My favorite agogic accent has always been in the Wie lieblich fourth movement of the Brahms Requiem, right before the subito piano toward the end after the series of die loben phrases.  But alas, not every performance features it.  I find that that heartbeat of a delay is so powerful.  The entire choir takes a breath as the onset of the next note is moved off the beat enough to make eyebrows raise.  It makes the next note, word, or phrase have extra oomph and meaning.  In the Requiem, it’s the word immerdar (“forever”).

In the Nänie piece we’re performing tomorrow, we’re including an agogic accent right before the word Herrlich (“glorious”) and, again, it adds extra emphasis on the importance of the word.  At today’s rehearsal both John Oliver and Fruhbreck de Burgos insisted on it being there.  Now I can’t imagine the piece without it.   Unfortunately, others can.  The difference between plowing through that last section – the whole point of the piece – and this one, which observes that break.

As is often the case, by the time I was done studying it — no, immersed myself in it — it became my favorite of the three pieces.

It turns out John Oliver agrees.  When we sat down for our first piano rehearsal with him Thursday, he was unusually exuberant in his conducting. The 71-year-old founder of our chorus stepped off the stand and moved around the rehearsal hall, practically leaping across from sopranos to altos, evoking with dramatic hand and body gestures the sound he wanted from each of us.  Initially I attributed it to the fact that he had already been through the earlier concert cycle with Stephanie Blythe that Wednesday.  But later today, he confessed how much he loves this piece and has conducted it many, many times in his career — even as far back as putting it in his senior recital in Jordan Hall back when he was in his 20′s.

So what’s to love about this seemingly drab piece?  I first realized what I wasn’t understanding about it when I saw a comment in the previous performance’s program notes, where a contemporary of Brahms lamented that it felt wrong to perform such an intimate piece in a large concert hall.  And that’s what this is — a very intimate, personal, exposed piece.  It wasn’t until I fully understood the translation that I could match the mood to the subject matter.  Once those meshed, I was once again in awe of Brahms and his ability to convey such heady concepts as coping with death in his music.

What’s so deep about this text?  It professes that “all beauty must die,” and gives three examples from classical mythology of Death triumphing.  Its message is that rather than try to defeat Death, the glory — the “Herrlich”, literally “Herr” (Lord / God) + “lich” (-ly, or -like) — can be found in the song that honors and laments their passing.  This powerful concept is born out through the music, which evokes the dying beauty, the attempts by even the gods to stop death, and then the one dramatic portion of the piece (one of the few forte moments, coupled with a switch of  time signature to 4/4 from 6/8) as we describe all the Daughters of the sea-goddess Thetis rising from the sea to sing a lament for her fallen son Achilles.   The conclusion, again coupled by the same beautiful oboe solo that introduces Auch das Schöne muß sterben (“But Beauty must die”) line at the beginning, states that “Auch ein Klagelied zu sein im Mund der Geliebten ist herrlich” (“But a lament-song on the lips of a beloved one is glorious”), and this line repeats again, with emphasis on the glorious word Herrlich, so that the last line of the poem (roughly, “only the undeserving go down to the underworld without a song”) is offset by the glory of a funeral song to honor our loved ones after death.

Now if I can just keep all the small words straight and not get distracted by the difficulty of the piece, I can hopefully convey this very powerful concept – a precursor to themes from the Brahms Requiem – to an audience who has never heard the piece before.  Hopefully they won’t drift like I did when I first heard it!

That said, I think I win, because as far as I’m concerned, I’m singing for the best of the 3 concerts: the all-Brahms concert on August 14th.  (Okay, the Berlioz was pretty darn good too; please humor my sour grapes approach to my wife’s singing out there.)  We’re singing three shorter pieces: Shicksalslied (Song of Fate), the Alto Rhapsody, and Nänie.

We had one short all-men’s rehearsal for the Alto Rhapsody just before the July 4th holiday.  Literally, about 15 minutes total time — for the small handful of us who are not in the series of Stephanie Blythe concerts earlier in the week and are just doing the back half of the residency, it’s inconvenient but understandable that we would have to drive into Boston for this.  John’s advice to us was straightforward, as we sounded pretty good.   “Don’t sing behind the beat” was his primary advice, as we tend to fall in love with the Brahmsian harmonies and linger too long through the cadences.  He reminded us that there is very thick orchestration that we’ll have to sing through, and one way to do that was to keep our vowels more closed and focused.

We’ll polish that one up tonight with another early rehearsal before we dig into the other two. I’ve got the Rhapsody memorized at this point and I’m halfway through memorizing the Shicksalslied.  I’ve sung it once before, almost 9 years ago with Lexington’s Masterworks Chorale under Allen Lannom, but I don’t remember falling in love with it so much back then.  (Maybe because Allen Lannom, for all his musicality, was rather a bully of a chorus director!)  This time, I’m loving the German Requiem-like turns of phrase, the perfect stereotypically Brahms cadences, the interplay between the orchestra and the chorus, the word painting, and the transition in singing character from the Elysium of the gods to the gloom and doom of us mortals who have no such retreat from fate.  We’ll see what else is said tonight as we clean these up, but as far as I’m concerned… yay Brahms!