Repertoire for the Advent/Christmas Season

Were I to catalogue the many entries I have written for this blog over the past fifteen years, I am certain I would find that the majority of them concern repertoire.  The beauty and emotional power of what composers have written down for us has always been paramount in my own approach to performance, whether singing or conducting: I have wanted to sing well, to understand and pronounce languages well, to conduct well, in order to give authentic life to what composers give us. Proper conducting patterns, beauty of vocal production, singing higher and louder and faster, and many other aspects of the vocal art, have been supports, rather than points of arrival, in my quest to express the composers’ intent.

So my first order of business is, always, selecting a concert’s repertoire.  And this is problematic in selecting music for the Advent and Christmas season.  There are competing concerns to be addressed.  On the one hand, we acknowledge the explicitly Christian nature of these holidays, with the darker music and texts of Advent, as well as the joyful music of Christmas itself, sometimes grand and majestic, sometimes warm and intimate. This religiously-oriented music can be austere, demanding, thought-provoking, nudging Chorale in a direction which excludes some of our constituency.  On the other hand, we acknowledge the universal celebration of the passage from dark to light, Yuletide, celebrated with good food and drink, gifts and sometimes excessive merriment, and colored with nostalgia for home, family, and the past. We want all singers and listeners to feel welcome in our audiences, too, not just musically sophisticated Christians.  And I want to design a program that is balanced and satisfying, as well as a little surprising.

The net I spread in my search for Christmas music is fairly broad and forgiving.  If I sense anything even remotely Christmasy in a text, I call it fair game.  This has been particularly true in the current season— repertoire I am hungry to program, after the hiatus caused by the pandemic, I am just shoe-horning it into our program.  Most significant along these lines, this year, is our inclusion of three movements from J.S.Bach’s Mass in B minor.  Chorale was one week out from a performance of the St. John Passion when things closed down in March 2021, and I have been mourning that loss ever since.  Nothing from that particular work would fit into a Christmas concert; so I turned to another of Bach’s Big Three for texts suited to the season:   Glory to God in the highest/ and on earth peace to men of good will seemed made to order, as did Give us peace. This is music of the highest possible value and impact;  I’m thrilled we are able to include it in this concert.  I only wish we could do the entire Mass!

Another piece we are singing which might raise eyebrows on a Christmas concert:  the Ave Maria from Act II, scene 2, of Francis Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites.  Originally set for a women’s chorus in the opera, accompanied by orchestra, we are performing it with the orchestral parts sung by the tenors and basses.  The opera’s plot, based upon the execution by guillotine of a group of Carmelite nuns during the French Revolution, is hardly Christmasy in nature;  but the Ave Maria text, said or sung at many points in Roman Catholic liturgical practice,  is associated particularly with the Vespers for the 4th Sunday in Advent.  Poulenc’s setting is exquisitely beautiful and haunting, worthy of standing on its own as one of his most affecting choral compositions.   

I’ll write more about the repertoire for our coming concert next week.

Brave New World

The rubber has hit the road for choral groups this fall, as we meet after a year and a half’s hiatus, share space and air, plan concerts, wrestle with the possible and the impossible.  It’s a brave new world, as each ensemble tries various solutions to the problems that confront us all.

Chicago Chorale is fully masked, fully vaccinated, and halfway through its preparation period for our Christmas concerts, December 11 and 12.  We rehearse at Hyde Park Union Church, our home for the past several years, and I continue to be grateful for the acoustic properties of the church’s sanctuary, though we now tie ourselves in knots to utilize them. Venue, whether for rehearsal or performance, is a very special component of a choir’s sound— not only does it amplify and focus the choir’s sound for the listeners, but it is the space within which the conductor hears and evaluates the choir, and the singers hear themselves, and to which they respond when modifying their production to “fit into the sleeve of sound,” as Robert Shaw used to say.  I was privileged to watch my college conductor, Weston Noble, and Mr. Shaw himself, time after time, as they prepared their rehearsal spaces before rehearsal, adjusting the curtains just so, moving the chairs a quarter inch this way or that, building temporary platforms because a singer had to be located just there to make the proper contribution.  And with both conductors, it could be a frantic nightmare when doing a sound check in a new venue before a concert— adjusting an unfamiliar space so that it would enhance the choir’s sound appropriately.  On one particularly memorable occasion, in the chapel at Rocamadour, in France, I had the misfortune to be placed in front of a large wooden box, which amplified my voice to a degree that had Mr. Shaw tearing his hair out and yelling at me for my “immodest voice.” He was mollified only when the offending box was hidden behind several blankets, muting my offending voice. His stage manager and all-around factotum, Harry Keuper, often commented that Mr. Shaw was “toilet trained at the point of a gun,” as he helped in setting the chairs.

The Centers for Disease Control and the American Choral Directors’ Association, which issue guidelines about how choirs should sit and stand and breathe in these fraught times, were not around when Hyde Park Union Church was built, the chancel steps designed, the pews bolted to the floor, the railings fixed in place, the air exchange system installed. Spaces are too narrow or too broad, too straight or too abruptly curving— and totally inflexible.  Each Wednesday I spend two hours setting up, lugging chairs around, trying new configurations, eyeballing the 3-foot rule, trying to keep Chorale’s initial voice placement intact, making sure singers are not acoustically isolated or otherwise placed where they cannot function productively.  And during rehearsal, I keep my eye on the singers to be sure that they, like me, are not so irritated with their masks that they unconsciously pull them down.  And I keep my eye on the clock, so that active rehearsal periods are not too long, and breaks too short.  

All of this while breaking in sixteen new singers, trying to enable social rapport and cohesion, learning new music, motivating the group to enjoy and look forward to rehearsals, and working toward a polished performance.  

Through all of this, Chorale has, miraculously, been having a good time.  We have extraordinary new singers, who contribute beautifully to our sound and our morale.  Our repertoire is challenging, as always, but enjoyable to sing.  And we continue to ride a wave of relief and euphoria that we are able to do this, and that the Wednesday night Zoom meetings are a thing of the past. The Covid 19 pandemic is unforgettable, and not in a good way;  but we are excited about what lies ahead.  Music does make everything better.