But this time around, it was even more special. We performed the Requiem in the second week of October, soon after September 11, which gave a deeper resonance to the words that we were singing. In fact, we had a choral retreat on the first Saturday after 9/11, where we sang the Requiem all the way through for the first time as a group, and our conductor wisely kept his comments to a minimum, and let us sing, and bond together as a group with this phenomenal music. It helped.
With translated lyrics ranging from "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall have comfort" to "Behold, all flesh is as the grass, and all the goodliness of man is as the flower of grass" to "But the righteous souls are in the hand of God, nor pain, nor grief shall nigh them come" to the final ecstastic movement "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord", the Requiem acquired a more personal meaning in the days after 9/11. I am not a religious person, but the music itself transcends mere belief and goes straight to the soul.
By the time we got to the performances, we had really made the piece into our own tribute to 9/11, imbuing it with a fervor and an emotional intensity that was apparent to the audience. The San Francisco Chronicle reviewer commented "Once or twice every season, it becomes necessary simply to sit and marvel, in awe and gratitude, at the greatness of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus." It was an amazing experience of the power of music to help start the healing process.
Reviews:
Review: San Francisco Chronicle review
Reviews:
So because of my worship for Bach, the Christmas Oratorio was a blast.
Helmut Rilling, one of the foremost Bach interpreters in the world,
was the guest conductor and he was, as usual, amazing. He knows the
piece inside and out, to the point where he rehearses and conducts it
from memory. And he knows what kind of sound he's trying to achieve.
This concert had an open rehearsal which a couple of my friends
attended, and they commented to me afterwards that it was fun to watch
him work, because they could hear his suggestions, hear us incorporate
them, and then hear how it made the piece better. We agreed this is
why Rilling gets paid the big bucks :)
Review: San
Francisco Chronicle review
Reviews:
The music itself wasn't too exciting - we had to keep it pretty
straightforward for the high schoolers - but we did do the Bruckner
Mass in E Minor which was excellent (sung with high schoolers
interspersed throughout our chorus on the main stage). We also did
one of my favorite pieces, Byrd's Ave Verum Corpus, although it works
better for a chamber chorus than for a chorus of 200. Fun stuff, and
the kids really enjoyed it.
Review: San
Jose Mercury News review
We lived in terror of this piece for the last couple months, as there
is a lot of music to learn, with lots of random entrances by the
chorus that you have to stay awake for, and a ton of Russian to learn
to pronounce. The choral score is 342 pages long, and while a lot of
that is the soloists, it's still an enormous piece - concert time runs
to 2 hours and 45 minutes including a short intermission. But it
finally came together in concert week, as it always does, with the
help of 9 hours of rehearsal in the last couple days. And now it's
fun - the chorus gets to do a lot of characterization, ranging from
maidens weaving wreaths, to huntsmen in the forest, to peddlers in a
market, to demons of hell, to worshipful pagans at the high temple.
As we've gotten more comfortable with the music, we are doing a better
job of making our physical personae match up with the music, and doing
a little bit of acting. Fun stuff.
Entertaining MTT quotes from rehearsals of Mlada:
Eric Nehrlich's WWW home page / nehrlich@alum.mit.edu
Villa-Lobos Choros No. 10 (12/01)
This was a fun piece. Part of the Pan-American Mavericks concert,
Villa-Lobos was a Brazilian composer with many influences (MTT
introduced the piece each night with a comment that it was a cross
between Stravinsky and Esther Williams). From the program notes,
"this Choros is a twelve-minute explosion of unbridled physicality and
electrifying energy. You can think of it as a South American Carmina
Burana, only not so simpleminded and much, much shorter." In this
piece, he splits the chorus up into a percussion section which spits
out Indian names in a fast-paced patter (e.g. "Jakata kamaraja, Ti Tu
Ti To Ti Tu Kaya!"), and a soaring chorus with a beautiful melody. Bach Christmas Oratorio (12/01)
Bach is the man. He knew how to write music for choirs, and it
shows. His music is always characterized by a sense of rightness in
my mind - there seems to be no doubt as to where the next note is.
Even when he crosses you up and does something unexpected, after you
sing it, you begin to see why it had to be that way. It's a weird
experience. Or maybe I just sang too much Bach in college (in the MIT
Chamber Chorus, we did a Bach cantata or motet pretty much every
concert it seemed like). Liszt Faust Symphony (1/02)
This was a quick piece for the men in the chorus - we sit for most of
the symphony, stand up for five minutes at the end, sing, and leave.
Not much to say about the music. It was an interesting piece, with
each movement representing one of the major characters in Goethe's
Faust (Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles), and the chorus at the end
talks about how "Woman's divinity leads us on high".Festival of Choirs (3/02)
The Festival of Choirs brought together the San Francisco Symphony
Chorus with four local high school choirs in one huge concert. It was
a fun experience for both the symphony choristers, getting a chance to
see the exuberance of youth (I commented to one of the older folks in
the chorus that I now understood what they felt like around me), and
for the high schoolers, getting a chance to sing in Davies Symphony
Hall in front of 2000+ people and to see that singing is something you
can throughout your life, not just in school.Ravel Daphis et Chloe (5/02)
Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe was originally written as a ballet, although
it is often performed in concert format, as we did. The chorus sings
wordlessly through the piece, creating an atmospheric effect
appropriate to the action of each scene. I don't really have too much
to say about the piece itself, except that it is widely considered to
have the most amazing musical depiction of a sunrise ever written (I
actually preferred the one in Haydn's
Creation, but I'm definitely outvoted by the aficionados).Rimsky-Korsakov Mlada (6/02)
Mlada is a massive opera-ballet written by Rimsky-Korsakov. It is not
well-known, but it influenced an enormous number of modern composers,
from Stravinsky to Prokofiev to Ravel (MTT commented when we were
doing Daphnis et Chloe, that we were among the few
who understood that Ravel completely ripped off Rimsky-Korsakov in
writing that piece). Mlada has a huge orchestra, soloists, a large
chorus, and a ballet dancer. And that's with the minimum staging that
we did. At our first rehearsal, our conductor showed us a performance
by the Bolshoi, and there was dancing, and singing, and props,
and all sorts of craziness.
Reviews:
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