Day Two - Cincinnati May Festival 2008

We started at 2:00 pm with the usual warmup. James Conlon arrived and began his annual retelling of whatever opera we’re doing.

James is the Music Director of the Los Angeles Opera and former principal conductor of the Paris Opera, former Music Director of the Cologne Opera – AND the man who has conducted the third highest number of operas at the Metropolitan Opera (after Cincinnatian James Levine and former Cincinnati Symphony Music Director Thomas Schippers). Therefore, it is a given that he is mad about opera. He even thinks the stories aren’t dumb. I would like to take him aside and enlighten him, but that’s another story.

He explained that this particular opera has some sort of bad luck associated with it, and that in opera circles, saying the title of La Forza del Destino is bad luck. If you do say it, you have to make gesture with your right hand that looks like a U. of Texas “hook ‘em horns” gesture (with index and little fingers extended and the two middle fingers folded down) and touch your private parts as you say it. There’s another name for the opera that you can say instead which does not require gesturing and touching, but I don’t remember what that is.

This gesture apparently originated with Franco Corelli, the Italian tenor, who supposedly held on to his nether regions while singing in it. Wikipedia reports that an Italian director would shout obscenities if anyone even whistled anything from the work.

And the opera has had some bad luck. In 1960 at the Met in New York, Leonard Warren, a “stupendous” baritone (according to Renata Tibaldi) had completed singing a section of Act III which begins, “Morir, tremenda cosa,” (“to die, a marvelous thing”), then opened a wallet as the next stop in the action. He sang the next bit, “Gioia, o gioia,” (“Joy, oh joy!”) and then collapsed, unconscious and still. He had had a massive heart attack and was declared dead backstage.

So, I guess I won’t speak the name of the opera this week. I’m not fond of obscene gestures, anyway. I think perhaps it is dangerous to even peform the damned thing…

We worked our way through the opera, however, once James had told the ridiculous story. We were pretty much finished with it by the 5:00 pm break.

At the break, we headed upstairs to our supper in the Corbett Tower. The afternoon Pops concert was just letting up, so we were had to snake our way through the upper regions of the backstage to find our way to the second floor to get an escalator up to the third floor. Of course, the concert patrons were all coming down, so our procession had definite salmon-esque characteristics.

After supper, we were back in the rehearsal room, and finished up a couple of bits of the the Verdi and then started on the Zeisl Requiem Ebraico. The piece is lovely. The composer, Erich Zeisl, was a refugee from Austria in the 1930’s who joined many composers in southern California writing movie scores, including those for Lassie, Come Home, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man.

The Requiem was composed after World War II to commemorate his father’s death in a Nazi concentration camp. The text is that of Psalm 92:

It is good to praise the LORD and make music to your name, O Most High, to proclaim your love in the morning and your faithfulness at night, to the music of the ten-stringed lyre and the melody of the harp.

For you make me glad by your deeds, O LORD; I sing for joy at the works of your hands.

How great are your works, O LORD, how profound your thoughts!

The senseless man does not know, fools do not understand, that though the wicked spring up like grass and all evildoers flourish, they will be forever destroyed.

But you, O LORD, are exalted forever.

For surely your enemies, O LORD, surely your enemies will perish; all evildoers will be scattered.

You have exalted my horn like that of a wild ox; fine oils have been poured upon me.

My eyes have seen the defeat of my adversaries; my ears have heard the rout of my wicked foes.

The righteous will flourish like a palm tree, they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon;
planted in the house of the LORD, they will flourish in the courts of our God.

They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green,
proclaiming, "The LORD is upright; he is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in him."

The final fugue is fast and joyous, and quite difficult, as the exquisitely beautiful modal harmonies seem foreign to our ears. The hopefulness of the text, although incongruous considering that this is a requiem for Nazi victims, is infectious.

Once we completed the Zeisl, we went to work on the final chorus of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony. Conlon’s interpretation is the standard march-along staccato that, from my point of view, negates the joy. It sounds to me as if jack-booted Nazi soldiers were goose-stepping along the Champs Elysee, taking away joy, instead of singing an ode to it.

The performances of the Ninth we did with Paavo Jarvi a couple of years ago, as well as earlier ones with Jesus Lopez-Cobos were quite different and much more to my taste. They featured long legato lines instead of the heavy, marcato singing that we’re being instructed to do. When Paavo conducted the piece in Sptember of 2005, I felt I had never heard it before. Not only was the final choral movement truly joyous, but he produced a transparent interpretation instead of the usual dense and heavy texture that is most often the way Beethoven is conducted.

Oh, well. I’m here to follow orders and sing, letting the maestro make the artistic decisions. It’s impossible to like everything he does. Sometimes, for me, it’s impossible to like anything he does. I feel that often Conlon’s conducting is less about the composer and the music than it is about Conlon. Just my opinion.

We finished rehearsing at 9:00 pm.

_____________________________________________

One of the problems we have in learning to sing in other languages is that American English has a lot of dipthongs. For example, if we say the word, “say,” we really are saying two vowel sounds after the letter “s.” First the long “a” sound, followed by a subtle, yet definite, “eee” at the end. Sometimes we can say/sing many more than two vowel sounds when there’s only one vowel in a word. (I think southerners are best at this, although the west side of Cincinnati can give the southerners a run for their money.)

Other languages have more pure vowels, without the multiplicity of vowel sounds that Americans use. It drives Bob Porco crazy that we do this, referring to our attempts on Saturday morning to sing the Faure Requiem as being sung in “Kentucky Latin.”

So, when we arrived at rehearsal on Saturday morning, we found a galvanized bucket behind the podium. In the bucket was a pole with a sign affixed to it:

When we arrived at rehearsal on Sunday afternoon, another wag had added a sign on the wall nearby:
Tonight we have more rehearsing to do. It appears that the chamber choir will be staying later than the rest of the clan to work on the Rachmaninoff Vespers. Russian vowels are an entirely different thing. Even their consonants are different. Wish us luck.