Music, music

Often when I see the words 'Faculty Concert' I shudder. I have heard too many pedestrian presentations by well-meaning teachers.

Tonight, however, was a different story. In Sweeney Concert Hall at Smith College members of the faculty set the place on fire.

First, Karen Smith Emerson, with Judith Gordon at the piano, sang a beautiful set of songs in German by Edvard Grieg. Having been immersed in the Grieg 'Cello and Piano Sonata for the past few months, these were especially close to my heart. Karen sang with a beautiful sound, fine musicianship, and deep emotion. I would rave more but she studies with me and that would be embarrassing. Leave it at this;
Brava!

Then a piano trio of Franz Schubert, his Trio in B-flat major, Op.99 was played by Joel Pinchon, violinist, Volcy Pelletier, 'cellist, and Judith Gordon again as pianist. They gave us a brilliant rendition of the work filled with fire and drama.

Finally, Ms. Gordon returned with pianist Conor Hanick to play Hallelujah Junction of John Adams. This is a tour de force! It has all the usual Adams bag of tricks: loud sonorities, complicated rhythms, and the John Adams logo, 'Why do anything just once if you can do it 17 times?' You can hear Georg Frederik Handel trying to escape. It brought down the house.

This is a music faculty of a different stripe. Congratulations!

What to do 'til the baby comes.

This past weekend I did a huge concert with my friend Andrea; 'cello and piano. We performed works by Vivaldi, Fauré, Ginastera, and Grieg. The Ginastera and Grieg are both barn-burners! It's been a while since I have played a concert that taxing: technically and emotionally. Taxing but wonderful. Even my once-broken right hand behaved itself and performed well.

We performed in a church where I had been Director of Music and Fine Arts for twenty-one years thirty-three years ago to a packed house. Andrea had been a part of that church since childhood. We had an enthusiatic audience and got a standing ovation.

After the concert, the reception, and a lovely dinner with friends, I sat around the kitchen table with my friend Ellen, at whose home I was staying, and we talked until my Adrenalin level returned to somewhere near normal. It was after 1:00 a.m. when I finally went to bed following this 3:00 p.m. concert.

These are the lovely roses I was presented with at the end of the concert.

This is what always happens to me during and after a concert. I expend great amounts of energy, both physical and emotional, during a performance; then it takes a while for the Adrenalin to subside. At 82, your overall energy level is not what it was at 35. (hah!) At 35, I performed the complete organ works of Bach at St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University; fourteen recitals in fifteen weeks. Talk about energy! That was over three hundred works by the great Baroque master. It was a blast. There were one thousand people in attendance at each concert. Those were the days to be on the concert stage. I did sixty organ concerts a year back then.

I can remember performing in Carnegie Recital Hall in New York long ago several times with my long-time duo-piano partner, Eleanor Benoist. Almost at the end of one concert, I felt as if we had only been playing for twenty minutes. I thought, 'Did we leave something out???' We played an enormous program. Check the NY Times of that season or my website for our review. (www.hburtis.com )When you are totally involved in the music, time has a funny way of disappearing. You are momentarily out of yourself.

Eleanor was at my concert on Sunday! 

This is when I know that I have performed as well as I possibly can. I felt this same disappearance of time at this recent concert, thirty-seven years later. The mind is an amazing thing. It can lie to you about your age when you need the strength and energy to produce something beautiful.

Perhaps continuing to perform in public at my age is the Fountain of Youth. Poncé de Leon move over!

The hardest part of concert day is waiting around for the concert to begin. Different people have the need to do different things to get themselves into concert-mode. One friend I know needs to expend energy by the quart by vacuuming, washing windows, mowing the lawn, and so on. If I did this, I wouldn't be able to play the concert. Another friend of mine used to practice full tilt until just before curtain time. Exhausting!

I feel the need to take life very easy on concert day. I loll around, reading, watching television, vegging out. I barely touch the piano. I never listen to other music. My head is full of the program I am about to play. I don't want to disturb this train of thought. It's as though I plug myself into an electric outlet to charge my batteries. Then in the concert, all hell breaks loose when I release the energy. This has been my way of coping with pre-concert hours for many years. It still works.

My first organ teacher in New York City, Claire Coci, once told me, 'Always eat a chocolate bar before you play a recital'. I always did. This time, I ate it in the intermission, just before the Grieg! Sugar rush!! Just what you need to play that block-buster.

It's a little like a pregnancy; though I have obviously never given birth. Nine months or so before the new concert you make preparations: choose your program, begin to learn it, decide musically, technically, and emotionally how you plan to present it. This is the gestation period.

When you are performing with another instrumentalist or a singer, you work together many hours to share musical ideas, decide on tempi, dynamics and so on. The program is growing within your mind and body. Your musical fetus.

Then on performance day you deliver your baby. In this case it's name was Vivaldi Fauré Ginastera Grieg, and it was a lovely creation. It's parents, the 'cello and the piano, are very proud of it.

Pigs and flies

Tonight my friend Alice and I saw a play that was even scarier than last night's Presidential debate. It was Lord of the Flies, which was produced by Barrington Stage. Alice had read the book years ago and wanted to see the play; I had heard about the book and thought, 'Why not?'

Lord of the Flies began life as a novel by Nobel Prize winner William Golding, published in 1954. It has been adapted twice into films in English and once into Filipino.

It is the frightening story of a group of boys marooned on an island after their plane went down. It takes place during an imagined nuclear war and details how this group of young men go from prim English school boys to a mob of savage cannibals in an attempt to cope with their problems. One group separates itself from the others, begins to deck itself in war paint and in the blood of a slaughtered pig who they think is a deity; hence the title. They wind up killing two of the other boys. The situation is saved when a British officer from a warship comes ashore to rescue them. One word from him and they shape up into solid citizens. The murders are ignored. Stiff upper lip, and all that!

Giovanna Sardelli, the director, brought this to the stage in startling fury and mayhem.The splendid cast, headed by Richard Dent (left) as Ralph, Chris Dwan as Simon, Matthew Minor as Piggy, and John Evans Reese as Jack, turn the stage of Barrington Main Stage into a jungle of emotion, violence and murder.
 Matthew Minor

The play, an allegory for mob rule, peer pressure, and probably the Nazi menace, is frightening in its fury. Not for the weak at heart.

Neither are Presidential debates.

Mother Courage

I paid a visit to my dear friend Phyllis this afternoon. She has often appeared in these pages as 'The Other Voice Teacher', but since many of you have divined her identity, we will stick to Phyllis.

She is at home again after what I have called 'The Winter of her Discontent.' Numerous hospital stays followed by days in rehab facilities. Nobody's fun and games.

Through it all she always comes up smiling and back to her bright, intense self.

Today, having briefly discussed her health problems, she wanted to get down to our usual business of talking about singers and singing.

One of my students, a young soprano, is preparing two senior recitals; one for this fall and one for the spring. We have been going over a variety of songs and arias that she may decide to program

Phyllis and I lamented the fact that these days, the Lieder recital has become as extinct as Tyrannosaurus Rex. Outside of a college campus, nobody sings this kind of program anymore. A young singer wishing to follow a career as a classical singer, has almost no other option than to go into it through the world of opera.


In the days of 'Community Concerts' (my youth), singers and every other sort of musician came to Battle Creek Michigan and performed at the Kellogg Auditorium. The cost of a season ticket was $5.00. Phyllis said in those days she would sing sixty song recitals a season, in addition to her appearances with various international opera companies.

When I came to New York City in 1950, every weekend I would get free passes for Town Hall concerts from the Music Office at Columbia University. I heard singers, pianists, violinists, you name it, sometime three concerts in a weekend. And the singers sang SONGS.

Well, Community Concerts and Town Hall have gone the way of the Dodo and, these days, a young singer has almost no place to sing the song repertoire.

With all of my serious young singers, I have them work on the song literature in various languages from various musical eras. But I also have them learn operatic arias.

If they expect to have a career in classical music, for better or worse, this is the route that is open to them.

We both lamented this is the way the world of music has gone, but determined that young singers need to be prepared to sing opera if they expect to have a career.

Sometimes, when they become famous, a few of them will do 'Song Recitals' and, because of their fame and reputation, actually get an audience to come hear them. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, while she was working with me, did song recitals here and in Europe. She had made her name in opera first. She always sang to a packed house. Several of her song recitals are available on CDs.

I will continue to give my students a varied diet of songs but will lace it with operatic arias. You need to do what you have to do. The important thing is to sing!

Come to the Cabarets- All of Them!

I have been wallowing in Cabaret music this month. It has been wonderful. A steady diet of hot fudge sundaes on peppermint ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry.  (I just put on ten pounds thinking about that!)

In spite of my training in classical music, or perhaps, because of it, I have always loved cabaret music, show tunes, you name it. When I was in Junior High School in Battle Creek, Michigan about a hundred years ago, it was normal for our friends and neighbors to come to our house of an evening, gather around the piano and sing all the popular songs of the day, so I got an early start in this musical genre.

The month began with my long-time friend and student, Peggy Noecker, and I performing two cabarets, which have already been noted in these pages.

Then, just last Tuesday, my friend and student, Karen Smith Emerson, who is the Elise Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music (Voice) at Smith College, sang a beautiful recital of songs by Francis Poulenc, who was one of Erik Satie's Les nouveaux jeunes. He was also one of Stravinsky's Les Six. Satie spent a lot of time playing piano in Parisian saloons and undoubtedly had an influence on Poulenc. When Karen and I were working on her program, I said, several times to her, 'Think Edith Piaf'. So much of Poulenc's Fiançailles pour rire, which was the main part of her program, evokes the smokey atmosphere of a Paris Boite. Karen was able to bring her high soprano voice right down below the passaggio to deliver this kind of sexy sound. It was a great recital.

To round out my indulgence in Musique de Cabaret, tonight my friend Sue and I heard Brel in the Berkshires presented by Barrington Stage Company. It was not held in their usual venue but rather upstairs at the Spice Dragon Restaurant in a great room for this kind of event.

The two exceptional singers were Amanda McBroom and George Ball, accompanied by the fine pianist, Michele Brourman. I have heard Amanda several times and am blown away every time I hear her by the emotional strength and communication of her performance. She grabs you by the collar and won't let you go until she leaves the stage. She is about the most intense cabaret singer I know of. She has the kind of voice that seems able to do absolutely anything she wants it to. She is simply wonderful!

Her husband, George Ball, is equally good and together, with Michele, they brought an exciting evening to Pittsfield.

Jacques Brel was a Belgian singer-songwriter-actor who created  a new type of chanson that became an international sensation. His musical, Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris, has been performed throughout the world for many years. Both Amanda and George have appeared in this show many times.

Amanda is a talented song writer in her own right, having penned 'The Rose' which was made famous by Bette Midler some time ago. She sang this as an encore.

This was a great evening. Let's have more of this from Barrington Stage!

A Tale of Two Cabarets

My friend Peggy Noecker and I have recently performed two cabarets. We have been doing cabarets, as well as classical vocal recitals, together for about thirty years. We announced last night that we are going to keep doing them until we get it right.

Well, it's going pretty right as it is. We did the first one a week ago at my home in Massachusetts and the second last night at her home in New Jersey.


This is the obvious ambiance for an intimate concert like a cabaret. The performers have the audience literally in their laps. This makes our communication with them, and with each other, very compelling. The audience becomes a part of the show.

I have seen a lot of cabaret performances in my lifetime. Two of my favorites were Nancy Ford performing at the Firebird Restaurant on west 47th street several times, and Lena Horne doing her one woman show a number of years ago on Broadway. I worked with Nancy on the preparation of this performance. She got rave reviews in the New York Times. Lena did her own thing- as only she could do it!


Cabarets need to seem as if the performer is making it up as he or she goes along, while really having a very clear plan in mind of the direction the show needs to take. Off-hand remarks while performing need to be tested to see if they work and should be kept in the act. This may vary from performance to performance, but usually you can tell pretty quickly if something is going to sell. I saw Lena's show twice. Each time her apparent off-hand remarks and stage business was the same. She made it look as if she had just made it up. That's acting!

Whether one is performing in a private home, a café, or on a Broadway stage, the feeling of spontaneity is necessary. I guess this is true of any performance, but when singing Schubert, you can't do too much ad libbing or you'll be arrested for murder.

Not every classical singer can be convincing in both classical repertoire and show tunes. (See Renée Fleming and Barbra Streisand). Eileen Farrell could do it just fine. Lorraine was able to swing on both sides of the pendulum, stylistically speaking.

Once when we were Los Angeles to hear her sing Xerxes at the LA Opera, after the matinée we all went to dinner together and then, because it was still early, went on to a hotel lounge for an after dinner drink. Someone was playing background  piano music. One of Lorraine's friends spoke to him, suggesting he ask her to sing. After some coaxing, she got up and sang a couple of 'pop' numbers in great style, musically and vocally. The friend then told the pianist that she had just finished singing the title role in Xerxes at the Opera House just down the street. He was delighted; and so were we! It was a great evening.

Neither Peggy nor I is in our first blush of youth, but somehow we can still do it. Good luck or good genes! And lots of working together. To quote a line from the 1954 musical comedy, The Boy Friend, which introduced Julie Andrews to Broadway, 'Many a good tune's been played on an old violin'.

Think of Peggy and me as Stradivari. Priceless!

Autumn music

This is going to be a busy fall for me, performance-wise. Beginning on September 8th, I begin a two concert series with my long-time friend and student, Peggy Noecker. Peggy and I have done classical concerts which have included Berio's 'Sequanza III and Turino's 'Semana Santa á Sevilla'.

We have also done a number of Cabarets from time to time. This fall we are doing two of these. September 8th at Rood Hill Farm at 7:30 p.m.(roodhill@verizon.net for reservations) and in Middletown, NJ on September 15, 7:30 in the evening. (pfnoecker@verizon.net for reservations). Seating will be limited at both venues. We will be singing songs from Sondheim to Coward; a melange of show tunes from the 40's to the present day.

Then in October and November I will switch hats and play three classical concerts with 'cellist Andrea Spencer-Linzie. We will perform works by Vivaldi, Fauré, Ginasteria, and Grieg. We will be at Rood Hill Farm on Sunday afternoon, October 7th at 4:00 p.m.
(roodhill@verizon.net for reservations), then at The Methodist Church in Red Bank, NJ on Sunday afternoon, October 14th at 3:30 p.m., and finally at the Cherry Hill NJ Unitarian Church on Sunday, November 4th, at 3:30 p.m. For reservations: andreasl@aol.com .

I have also been asked to speak at the GLAD 'Spirit of Justice' benefit dinner at the Marriott Copley Hotel in Boston on Friday, October 26th. I will speak for the plaintiffs in the suit GLAD is bringing against DOMA. We have won at the Federal District Court level and at the Federal Appeals Court level. Our case will undoubtedly go to the US Supreme Court next year. I am proud to have been asked to speak on behalf of the seventeen plaintiffs in this case.