From The Music Director

As we settle into the holiday season and recover from our collective food comas, it is time for The Collegiate Chorale, The American Symphony Orchestra, and a collection of world-class singers to assemble and prepare and perform one of Rossini’s operatic  masterpieces, Moïse et Pharaon, premiered in Paris in 1827.  I understand that this work has not been heard in New York in complete performance since the 1930s, although it has enjoyed considerable recent success in Europe. 

The question has to be why, since this is such glorious music, has there been such a delay in New York City for a legitimate hearing.  In a recent lecture by Philip Gossett, sponsored by The Collegiate Chorale, he speculated that one reason might be that this opera is not a star vehicle, but rather an ensemble piece---there is certainly a considerable amount of chorus here.  This particular operatic approach was fairly common in the early nineteenth century, with Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836) being a prime example.  Another might be the difficultly of staging the parting of the Red Sea!  It seems almost impossible to visualize this without thinking about Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacular visual effects in The Ten Commandments.  Regardless of the visual impact, Rossini’s beautiful orchestral representation of this Biblical miracle is something to behold, and is essentially a tone poem with some of the finest purely orchestral music that he wrote.

In a few hours I will meet the soloists and begin working on this grand endeavor, and we at The Collegiate Chorale hope that you will join us at Carnegie Hall on November 30 for what might be the launching of a new career for an under-heard opera!

One of the great experiences of participating in the Verbier Music Festival this summer was getting to know our wonderful Side-by Side students. The Side-by-Side program, which is The Collegiate Chorale’s signature education outreach program, allows high school students the opportunity to sing regularly with The Chorale during the season. The young singers are assigned mentors who literally sit “side by side," to help and support these less experienced musicians through the rehearsal and performance process. For the Verbier Festival we took a number of our high school singers, and also some of our Side-by-Side alumnae, some of whom are in college and graduate school studying music. This wonderful combination not only enhanced the sound, but contributed a certain freshness and excitement to the event.

Talking with these talented young musicians reminded me of my first experience singing in Europe. I had just finished high school in rural Alabama and was invited to sing with a group called America’s Youth in Concert. We started in New York singing in Carnegie Hall, then visited Italy, France and England over a month long period. Simply put, it changed my life and certainly assured me of the power of choral music. Standing in some of the most beautiful concert spaces and singing the works of Bach and Tallis and seeing and hearing the audience reaction was almost overwhelming. As I was talking to our students I could see that same sense of awe that I had felt years ago. When I think about the caliber of singers and conductors that the Side-by-Side students worked with, it gives me an enormous amount of pride in The Collegiate Chorale’s commitment to music education and the enrichment of the lives of young people.

As you explore our website, I encourage you to click on the education section of the site and learn more about the offerings for students.

Welcome to the new Collegiate Chorale website!  This has been months in the making and we are confident that you will enjoy browsing through the considerable content that we are now able to offer you.  In all of the exciting material that this website has, I hope that you will take a moment to read about the history of the Collegiate Chorale. Jennifer Collins, our amazing Executive Director, has sorted through a great deal of papers, programs, and other materials (some of it covered in dust), and has compiled a compelling timeline of our organization as we approach our seventieth season.  

This blog is the first of what will serve as a forum to think about, among other things, choral music, and the arts and culture in the past, present and the future. We here at The Collegiate Chorale are proud of our past heritage and optimistic and enthusiastic about the present and the future.  For seventy seasons, we have offered New York the finest in choral music, in addition to both opera-in-concert and, very recently, music theatre-in-concert.  Our recording of Kurt Weill’s Knickerbocker Holiday, which became available on June 28th, reflects our ongoing commitment to underserved repertoire, as this is the first complete recording of this distinguished and clever work.  Our upcoming season promises to be equally exciting, and embraces an enormous scope of vocal music.  

We all look forward to your thoughts and reflections on our new website, and I look forward to being able to write about a number of topics that relate to our mission to bring you the best of the vocal arts in New York. Here’s wishing you a healthy and happy rest of the summer.

The Collegiate Chorale has now begun rehearsals for our upcoming appearances at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.  We will be serving as the chorus for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Puccini’s Tosca, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah.  All three are monumental works, but the winner for the sheer amount of choral music is, of course, Elijah.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) composed Elijah under the musical influence of Bach and Handel, the two towering powerhouses of the Baroque period.  Mendelssohn was directly responsible for the Bach revival in the nineteenth century, having conducted the first performance since the death of Bach of St. Matthew Passion in 1829.  Mendelssohn also prepared scholarly editions of some of Handel’s oratorios for performances in London.  So when in 1846 the Birmingham England Music Festival commissioned a large choral work, Mendelssohn drew on his considerable knowledge of earlier music to create one of the great oratorios in the nineteenth century.  The work was begun earlier, though, and in was conceived originally in German, which is how we will perform at Verbier.  The actual premiere, though, was in English.  Elijah, like its predecessors, which include Messiah, and the St. Matthew Passion, remain staples in the choral repertory all over the world.

In many ways, Mendelssohn set the stage for what I will describe as historical composition.  These are works that consciously derive musical material from the past.  In the case of Mendelssohn, he uses hymn-like chorales that reflect on the plot/action of the work.  Chorales (which is really the German word for hymns) were used extensively in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and in the St. John Passion, and are indicative in the German Lutheran tradition.  Moreover, the chorale might be seen as a cultural marker, in other words, it is not so much about religiosity, but about national identity.

Mendelssohn is an interesting case for what might be considered an early victim of German nationalism.  He was born into a prominent Jewish family—his grandfather was Moses Mendelssohn, a noted Jewish philosopher—but was reared initially without religion.  Later Mendelssohn was baptized in the Lutheran church, adopting the surname Bartholdy.  During his lifetime he was popular, both as a composer and a conductor.  After his death, though, he was the subject of harsh derision, due in part to jealousy and mostly to anti-Semitism that was rapidly growing in the mid-nineteenth century. Richard Wagner was especially nasty in his criticisms of Mendelssohn, which started nearly a century of an effort to degrade him as a composer.  By the time of the Nazi regime, Mendelssohn’s music had been banned in Germany and the monument of him erected in Leipzig was removed by the Nazis and was not replace until 2008.

Certainly those ideological perceptions of Mendelssohn have changed in the second half of the twentieth century, and his music is considered some of the best of the nineteenth century.  Elijah remains his most popular choral work and presents the composer as a forward thinking innovator while giving a constant nod to the past.  In my next entry, I will consider the music of Henry Purcell and the musical culture in England during the seventeenth century.