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Last night was the final performance ever of the Berkshire Choral International Festival in Sheffield. After 36 years, they will no longer perform at the Berkshire School. David was singing in the chorus for this performance and has had a busy week of preparation at the school.
For the final work. they decided to do the Verdi Requiem. Last week we heard the Mahler 8th Symphony. Both works are gigantic and require enormous resources, which the Institute can provide.
The Verdi was conducted by Tom Hall, who three years ago did the St. John Passion of Bach at the Festival. Last year I felt his Bach was not in what one thinks of as Baroque style. How can one do Bach with 300 singers? This year's choice made a little more sense, considering the large chorus that the Festival provides. The Springfield Symphony again provided the orchestral support.
Jennifer Check
The soloists were Jennifer Check, soprano, Ann McMahon Quintero, mezzo-soprano, John Bellemer, tenor, and Kevin Deas, bass-baritone. Unfortunately they did not prove to be a well balanced quartet for the many ensemble movements of the work.
The excellent lecturer again was Laura Stanfield Prichard.
Ann McMahon Quintero
Ms. Quintero had the voice that seemed most suited to Verdi; a robust, well focused sound with the necessary vocal range for the mezzo role.
Ms.Check, on the other hand, did not. The voice was too small and did not soar over the chorus as it should have. Of course, when one has Leontyne Price in one's ear, no one will ever satisfy.
John Bellemer
Mr. Bellemer's tenor voice was at times stentorian but lacked finesse and Mr. Deas, again, had a voice a bit too small for the work. A pleasant sound but too covered for my taste.
Kevin Deas
The chorus and orchestra performed well and Mr. Hall did a fairly good job of keeping everyone together. Last week's concert under Kent Tritle was much more convincing in terms of managing 400-some musicians and providing a fine musical experience.
I know the Institute will be missed in future years. Next year they will be in Saratoga Springs for a week with another week at Goucher College in Towson, MD.
To wind up our cultural week in the Berkshires, David and I heard Mahler's Symphony # 8 at the Berkshire Choral International Festival in Sheffield. This is apparently the final year it will be held in Sheffield after thirty six years there. This coming week David will be there participating in their final week, singing in the chorus for the Verdi Requiem'.
The concert was preceded by an excellent talk by Laura Stanfield Prichard. Her amazing knowledge of Mahler and of music in general opened my eyes and ears to be prepared to hear the first performance of this work I have ever heard. She compared Mahler's work to that of Verdi and of Charles Ives, both of whom were contemporaries of Mahler. Like Ives, Mahler used sound he had grown up with, band music, church music, and folk music in his compositions.
His Eighth Symphony is a massive, sometimes wandering work of enormous proportions. The original performance had a chorus of 800 singers and a huge orchestra. Last night's performance had to make do with a mere 300 singers and the enlarged Springfield Symphony Orchestra.
The excellent solo singers were Rachel Rosales, Kara Shay Thomson, Emily Misch, Sara Murphy, Mary Phillips, Jonathan Matthew Myers, Jesse Blumberg, and Adam Lau. The fine conductor, who managed to keep all these elements together with apparent ease, was Kent Tritle. The Connecticut Concert Children's Choir was conducted by Marc Singleton.
Kent Tritle
The work took up the entire concert, the first half being based on the Latin hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus, and the second half of the last part of Goethe's Faust.
Throughout the work the orchestra and chorus are divided into multiple sections making it an incredibly busy work to listen to, indeed.
It made for an exhausting musical evening!
I have never conducted the Dvořák Stabat Mater nor even heard it until tonight at the Berkshire Choral Festival's performance of the work. My first impression of the piece is that there is too much sameness throughout. Whether this is the fault of the composer or the interpretation of the conductor, Erin Freeman, I therefore cannot say. But until the final movement, everything was at the same moderato tempo. The last movement, 'Quando corpus morietur', suddenly bursts forth in an amazing, vibrant mood. But that is an hour and twenty-five minutes into the piece. Up to that point the text is morose, so I guess that's what you get. As my friend, the late Dorothy Fee would say, 'He was sunk on the text!' I would like to hear another interpretation of the work to compare.
Erin Freeman
The very large chorus did not sound as good as it did under Jane Glover two weeks ago, but, of course, it was composed of mostly different people, and Erin Freeman is not Jane Glover. Each week a new batch of singers arrives in Sheffield to prepare a different work under a different conductor. This week's sopranos had a hard time staying on the pitch in high registers and their entrances were what I call 'Split Infinitives' too often. Different ideas of what the pitch was supposed to be. The rest of the chorus, especially the men, sounded fine.
The soloists were Laura Strickling, soprano, Ann McMahon Quintero, mezzo-soprano, Theo Lebow, tenor, and Kevin Deas, bass-baritone. Mr. Deas had the best voice of the bunch and sang with good tone and musicianship. Ms. Quintero started a bit quietly on her first duet with Ms. Strickling, but came into her own in her solo 'Inflammatus et Accensus'. Ms. Strickling's rather light voice was at its best in the high range and Mr. Lebow sang with assurance with a thin sound.
Ms. Freeman seemed to know the piece very well and kept everything together.I would like to see a score to check the tempi for the first nine movements, all of which seemed pretty much the same. A more varied tempo approach to this whole section would liven it up considerably.
Not my favorite evening of choral music.
Tonight the Berkshire Choral Festival finally presented a program that works for a 230 voice choir. It was Sir Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius.
This is an ultra romantic piece based on an ultra Catholic poem by Cardinal John Henry Newman. It details the spiritual progress of a soul as it passes through Purgatory en route to Heaven. For a number of years Anglican churches in England either left out the overtly Catholic parts or refused to allow the work to be performed.
It was conducted with great energy and passion by Kent Tritle. The soloists were Sara Murphy, mezzo-soprano, John Bellemer, tenor, and Sidney Outlaw, baritone.
Ms. Murphy has a glorious voice that easily encompassed the wide-ranging role from below the passaggio to above the staff. She is a truly fine singer.
Mr. Bellemer has a splendid tenor voice, more in the British style than the Italian, but perfect for this role.
Mr. Outlaw has a fine baritone voice and sang his part very well.
The 230 voice chorus found the perfect work for itself, adding swaths of sound and orgastic climaxes where needed. After hearing similar groups last week and the week before in the Brahms Requiem, which was vastly under-sung, and Bach's St. John Passion, which wallowed around in an overly-romantic presentation, it was a pleasure to hear the right choir singing the right work under the right conductor.
Next season will open with Jane Glover conducting Britten's War Requiem. David has already signed up for that one.
Might I suggest a work like Walton's Belshazzar's Feast as a possible future concert?
(I apologize for the differing sizes of pictures but I have to take what I find on the net.)
One way to make a cup of coffee is to take one teaspoon of instant coffee, add boiling water, and drink it.
Or one can grind coffee beans, put them in some kind of coffee maker and allow it to brew slowly, before enjoying the result.
I don't like coffee and never drink it, so the following is from hearsay only: Instant coffee tastes like dish-water, brewed coffee is heavenly.
What does this have to do with Bach's St. John Passion you may ask.
Preparing a large oratorio takes time. At the Berkshire Choral Festival performance, which Alice and I attended last night, and in which David sang in the chorus, we got instant coffee. In coffee and in Bach you need to grind your beans!
It is almost impossible in one week's time, with a 230 voice choir of mostly amateurs, to put together a convincing performance of this great work, or, really, any large work. To begin with, a chorus of 230 singers is hardly the ideal Bach group. It is almost certain to be unwieldy in fast moving passages. While is it impressive to hear this many voices singing the chorales, so marvelously harmonized by the great master of the Baroque, it leaves much to be desired in the choruses which are often fast and dramatic.
Tom Hall, the guest conductor for this past week, took a romantic approach to the work. Having performed the work myself, having heard John Ferris's performances with the Harvard University Choir, and more recently, a performance by the great Jane Glover with Music of the Baroque in Chicago, to my ears, this was not the way to go.
The overall sound of this week's chorus was better than last week's, which did the Brahms Requiem, which is actually a Romantic choral work. But in the fast moving sections it sounded ponderous with lumpy runs and exaggerated dynamics.
The thing that bothered me the most was at final cadences, where there was a large pause between the penultimate note and the final chord. When studying Baroque music with Gustav Leonhardt, I learned that those two notes should go quickly without a pause between them: ta-da, not ta.............da! In this performance we often got the latter. This was just not an authentic performance using the information we have about the Baroque.
The soloists were Mary Wilson, soprano, who has a lovely voice and sang well, Krista River, mezzo-soprano, who came into her own in "Es ist vollbracht", Charles Blandy, tenor, who had trouble making music out of the admittedly difficult tenor solos, and Jesse Blumberg, baritone, who sang well.
The vocal star of the show was Kevin Deas, bass-baritone, who as Jesus sang with a rich, dark voice filled with emotion and drama.
Less successful was Mark Molomont, the Evangelist, who struggled vocally, often either pinching high notes or lapsing into falsetto for a note or two unconvincingly.
Sean Taylor, bass, as Pilate sang well if somewhat un-emotionally, and smaller roles were sung by Madelyn Ross, soprano, Matthew Swanson, tenor, and Robert Martin, baritone.
In my opinion the purpose of the Festival seems to be to give singers a chance to sing major works they love in the beautiful setting of the Berkshire School. Each week a different set of people, for the most part, spend the time preparing that week's work. For the singers it is, I'm sure, an exciting and wonderful experience.
But for those of us in the audience, considering last week's dull Brahms and this weeks Bach, it doesn't quite work.
Next Saturday David and I are scheduled to hear Elgar's Dream of Gerontius. We'll see how that fares.
Tonight Peggy, Sarah, Jim, David and I attended a performance of a rather lethargic presentation of Ein Deutches Requiem by Johannes Brahms at the Berkshire Choral Festival in Sheffield, MA.
Rollo Dilworth was the conductor of the large chorus which has spent the past week preparing the work. The overall effect was that everything was a bit too slow and too uninflected. The sopranos seemed to be the weakest section, shredding pitches on high notes and singing flat some of the time. The men's sections sang quite well. It is difficult to make this magnificent work boring but tonight Mr. Dilworth and company managed to do this.
At the Berkshire Choral Festival, each week a different conductor prepares a different oratorio with a different chorus. This makes the preparation of a major work difficult. It is hard to pull together a major choral work in a limited amount of time allowed with whomever shows up to sing.
Mr. Dilworth's conducting seemed to consist largely of beating time. He seemed to give very little emotional or dynamic inspiration to the chorus, resulting in a mono-chromatic presentation. Having conducted the work a few times myself, I felt cheated not hearing the passion that is Brahms.
Tyler Duncan was the excellent baritone soloist, singing with a beautiful sound, easy technique, and splendid diction. I look forward to hearing more from him.
Ilana Davidson was less successful in the soprano obbligato. The voice is just not large enough to be convincing in this lyrical, emotional role. One doesn't need to have Eileen Farrell, but it would be nice to have something more in this role from the singer.
I would say the whole endeavor, except for Mr. Duncan, who was splendid, lacked energy.
Next week the Festival is doing the Bach St. John Passion. David will be singing in the chorus. I hope for a better result musically and emotionally.
