The adrenal effect of B Minor Mass

Sitting in a hotel room in Calgary this morning, after only 2-3 hours of fitful sleep, I am pondering the extraordinary adrenalin kick my body granted me after a 3 hour rehearsal on B Minor Mass with chorus and orchestra.  I have been on leave this year, and decided to also take a leave from my symphony chorus, so I've had much less conducting to do this year.  When the Calgary Bach Society came calling about this gig over a year ago, I eagerly accepted, thinking, "Who could be so lucky as to be asked to guest conduct this Everest of musical creations?"  I've had a couple of Saturday workshop rehearsals with the chorus this year, but this is the week to put it all together, and last night was our first joint rehearsal.  The orchestra is free lance, but made up of committed players, with strings using baroque bows, and all playing very well.  The chorus has done very well in recent weeks, and should be ready by Sunday's performance.  As for the conductor, I realize once again this morning how fortunate the conducting community is in being able to fit the process of making music on glorious rep such as this work into our fitness regimen!  Other mortals should be so lucky.

Co-commissioning

Although my symphonic choir in Edmonton, the Richard Eaton Singers, has commissioned a good number of works in the past 15 years, our two most recent commissions were unique in that they presented us with very exciting collaborative possibilities.  In 2002 we were contacted by Gillian Wilder, manager of the Vancouver Bach Choir (Bruce Pullan, conductor) to inquire about our interest in putting together a joint grant application to the Canada Council for the Arts' Commissioning Grant program, together with two other choirs from Ottawa and Montreal (see below).  My recollection is that the first submission, an application for a 30-minute choral/orchestral work by Toronto composer Christos Hatzis,  did not make the cut with the jury, but we were encouraged to reapply for the next round six months later.  The second application, again fronted by the Vancouver Bach Choir with the support of the other three choirs, was successful.  The Council jury awarded $10,000 toward the commissioning fee of ca. $16,000, meaning that each of the four choirs would only be required to contribute $1,500 from their individual resources to make up the difference, and of course, agree to absorb the costs of reproducing choral and orchestral scores and parts once Hatzis had completed them.

With a pair of choirs in western Canada and the other pair in the fairly close centers of Montreal (St. Lawrence Choir) and Ottawa (Ottawa Choral Society, both conducted by Iwan Edwards), the two pairs of choirs entered into a second level of collaboration by arranging an exchange visit, so that both choirs would have the benefit of two performances. In Vancouver and Edmonton, the two choirs paired Hatzis's new work, The Sepulcher of Life, with Vaughan Williams' A Sea Symphony, utilizing the Vancouver and Edmonton Symphony Orchestras in each city.  A similar plan was developed with the Ottawa and Montreal choirs (their choice of complimentary work was the Beethoven Mass in C.)  

The benefits of this joint commissioning project were many:

• In contrast with the normal "one and done" scenario that accompanies so many newly commissioned choral works (especially those involving larger instrumental scoring), the Hatzis cantata received four performances in the space of about six months in Canada.  Within two years of this project being realized, it had been performed over a dozen times, in Canada, the USA, and as far away as Finland.  
• The repeat performances gave the composer the opportunity to tweak and slightly revise passages from one performance to the next, in consultation with the conductors involved.
• The project brought with it a highly successful collaboration between the choirs, resulting in new and renewed friendships amongst singers, conductors and management, and an opportunity to visit one another's cities on a weekend.
• The high profile this project gained attracted the interest of the CBC, and the first performance in Vancouver was recorded for national broadcast.
• Cost-sharing made each project much more feasible economically, and permitted more resources to be put toward the cost of the exchange visits.

The success of this project spurred the Vancouver and Edmonton choirs to initiate another co-commissioning project several years later, in 2006.  For this application we selected Edmonton composer John Estacio, a talented and highly facile composer of mostly orchestral music who in recent years had had significant success in writing operas for the Calgary Opera Association and the Banff Centre for the Arts (Filomena and Frobisher).  Two other choirs from Ontario, the Grand Philharmonic Choir of Kitchener-Waterloo (Howard Dyck, conductor) and Chorus Niagara (Robert Cooper, conductor) agreed to support the co-commissioning application, which was also approved by Canada Council.

The Vancouver Bach Choir also received a major grant from the Olympic Arts Festival Committee in Vancouver for this project, as part of that city's pre-Olympic celebrations which took place in February 2008.  The occasion provided the theme for Estacio and the choirs to agree on: a text which would focus on international cooperation and reconciliation in a time of conflict.  Rather than choosing from an already existing text, Estacio asked his long-time librettist partner John Murrell to write a text for this work, and the result, The Houses Stand Not Far Apart, is a powerful four-movement cantata, for soprano and baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra that focuses on the conflicts between two neighbouring communities on opposite sides of a river.  Again, the Edmonton and Vancouver choirs collaborated to have an exchange, first performing the work in Vancouver in March 2008, and three weeks later in Edmonton.  In these concerts the complimentary work was Welsh composer Karl Jenkins' very affecting work from 2000, The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace.  Again, the symphonies from each city were engaged, with the performances playing to excellent houses in both cities.  The Edmonton performance was recorded by CBC for broadcast, and if you are interested, it can be heard on the CBC's "Concerts on Demand" page (http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/concerts, and write "Estacio" in the search box).  The two Ontario choirs performed the cantata this past fall.  In Edmonton, the ESO has decided to present this cantata as part of its regular Master Series in 2009-10, paired with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (Jean-Marie Zeitouni, guest conductor).  Eaton Singers will thus benefit from a third opportunity to perform this moving new work.

As one might expect, these collaborative commissioning and performing projects were very exciting for each choral organization to be a part of.  I expect that we will do it again soon, and highly recommend it as an effective way of contributing to the creation of new works for your chorus.

Opportunities to sing, i.e., to communicate!

I am on leave from my university appointment this year, and one of the many pleasures this time away from my regular teaching and admin duties has afforded me has been to take on a number of interesting singing gigs.  In the Fall, my good friend Richard Sparks, music director of Pro Coro here in Edmonton, asked if I could join them as an extra singer for a concert of Haydn Harmoniemesse and Vaughan Williams Mass in G.  I also joined the choir for a repeat performance of the Rachmaninoff Vespers in Calgary in September, having sung it with them last Good Friday.  In October, it was a concert with Voicescapes, a wonderful collective of singers in Calgary, performing two of the double choir motets of Bach one-on-a-part (Singet dem Herrn, Fürchte dich nicht), as well as (for the first time) Buxtehude's very moving work Membra Jesu Nostri.  This past February I sang with a fine group of vocal and instrumental soloists here at the University, assembled and directed by my colleague Jolaine Kerley, in a program of madrigals selected from Monteverdi's Books V-VIII, under the title "Songs of Love and War".  Also in February, Richard Sparks called again about subbing for a bass in a concert Pro Coro was giving with British guest conductor Simon Carrington: the program which included the Byrd Mass for Four Voices, Britten's A.M.D.G., and a selection of sacred and folk-inspired works by Walton, Dove, McMillan and several others, was without doubt one of the most challenging and yet gratifying programs I've sung in years.  Last week, opportunity arose to sing the Fauré Requiem solos with another Edmonton choir, Chorale St. Jean, directed by former student and now colleague Prof. Laurier Fagnan.  Then, this morning, the solo quartet (Choir II) in Allegri's Miserere for a Palm Sunday service at Holy Trinity Anglican, where the music director is another former grad student, John Brough.  As I look to the remaining months of this sabbatical year, I am planning another ensemble concert for May, in which a group of 6-8 of us will perform repertoire from the English Renaissance, including works by Tallis, Mundy and Byrd. 

All of these opportunities have been wonderful gifts of music-making for me, and if there's a small tinge of regret associated with this activity, it is the knowledge that my focus on conducting and, more recently, the bottomless vortex of administrative duties had prevented me from considering more opportunities to sing.  It has reminded me anew of the extraordinary challenge that surrounds the discipline of singing: the personal responsibility to bring one's fullest vocal capabilities to any passage; to be constantly aware of lateral ensemble concerns (balance, tuning, phrase structure, unified sense of diction, et al); and perhaps, most of all, the imperative to communicate with your audience as a singer.  Perhaps no one has reinforced the importance of communication for me more than Simon Carrington during his Pro Coro rehearsals.  In one particularly difficult period in our rehearsal of the Britten, which is surely one of the most challenging works in the rep for singers, I remember well Carrington's comment...."as a singer, one needs to approach every rehearsal as though one is giving a performance in that rehearsal, and communicate accordingly".  

Learning to communicate with every phrase one sings - what a concept!  It might seem so basic as to be obvious, but I am sure we have all experienced the mundane as well as the refreshing and inspiring, both in our own singing and the singing we have heard from others, so we do recognize the difference immediately.  The powerful effect of such engaged and enlivened performances can shake one to the core if one is lucky enough to be present when it happens! This was most aptly demonstrated for me by a number of university choirs at this year's national convention of the American Choral Directors Association in Oklahoma City.  Many of the best performances were delivered for memory, enabling visual communication and highly refined ensemble awareness within the group, but there were also some groups whose use of music (the British Early Music group Alamire comes to mind) did not compromise their ability to communicate their passion for the music they were presenting.  The key in all of these performances was surely that the group, through the leadership provided from the podium, had considered the potential communicative impact of every line and phrase - a process that can take great amounts of time but can nevertheless be life-changing for our singers if we ourselves take the time to deliver the message in a cogent and well-thought out plan of attack.