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In honor of our guest conductor Patrick Quigley, a New Orleans native, Dessoff will donate 10% of all ticket and CD sales from Tuesday, May 4 through Saturday evening’s concert to the Louisiana SPCA to help with the care of oiled wildlife in the area.
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Glories on Glories CD

Recorded live in performance in March 2009, Dessoff’s latest CD Glories on Glories features stirring American choral works by William Billings, Charles Ives, Horatio Parker, and Randall Thompson, featuring shape-note hymns, songs from the battlefield, and more. The recording is available for purchase via cdbaby.com, iTunes, and digstation.com as well as at Dessoff concerts and events.

This is the latest issue of D-NOTES, the e-newsletter of The Dessoff Choirs. To send us your comments, or to unsubscribe from the newsletter, follow this link. For Dessoff concert tickets, visit our website or call 212 831-8224.

Quigley Conducts   
The Roots of Bach   
and Beyond  
Saturday, May 8, 7:30 pm (note start)

Led by guest conductor Patrick Quigley, one of the hottest young conductors on the choral scene, this program looks back to the rich musical tradition from which Johann Sebastian Bach emerged, offering rarely performed works by Schütz, Kuhnau, Frescobaldi and Buxtehude, as well as two well-known motets — Singet dem Herrn and Jesu, meine Freude — by the master himself. Looking forward, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who was at the forefront of the Bach revival in the 19th century, is represented by his stirring Richte mich, Gott and the 20th century Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt contributes an aleatoric setting of Bach’s chorale Komm süsser Tod.

Many of the Dessoff singers will be featured in chamber choruses for the earlier works. Quigley’s verbal program notes will give an immediacy to his insight into Bach the master and explain his choice of the related works on the program. A reception follows the performance.

THE ROOTS OF BACH AND BEYOND
Saturday, May 8, 7:30 p.m. (note start)
Calvary St. George’s Church
East 16th Street/Rutherford Place
Tickets: $35 Preferred Seating, $25 General Admission $15 Senior/Student, 12 & under Free
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Dessoff Singing
Scholar Headed for Princeton

Soprano Allegra Wiprud is a senior at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. She joined Dessoff for the March 2010 concert as a participant in our Singing Scholars program, the choirs’ outreach initiative that gives talented New York City High School students the chance to sing with us. But last March’s concert was not the first time Allegra had performed with Dessoff. We didn’t know her at the time, but in June 2009 she shared the Avery Fisher Hall stage with us for the New York Philharmonic’s performances of Britten’s War Requiem and Mahler 8^th — as a member of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.  When Allegra “aged out” of BYC last year (at the advanced age of 17!), she chose Dessoff as her adult choir.

Allegra says that as a young child she tried many instruments, but “voice was the one that really stuck.” She studies voice and piano privately, and values choral singing for the chance to sing big works and the benefits of group interpretation and the communion that comes from singing together.

Allegra will be attending Princeton University in the fall, where she intends to study vocal performance and international relations. She has her eye on a career in opera. So what’s it like these days for a teenager with a passion for classical music?  Allegra says: “It makes me sad that few of my peers know about or care for classical music. Its offerings are rich beyond the three-minute snippets of symphonies most people hear in freshman music appreciation. I often can’t relate to them on music or any popular culture. I get the same high from Wagner that they do from The Jonas Brothers, or whatever it is now. New York’s institutions have worked hard to make classical music accessible and alive, and I do sometimes come across someone who wants to learn more about it.”

Read Allegra’s classical music reviews at Stuyvesant High School’s independent music blog: www.thestuymusic.com.

As a few friends put it, a big fucking deal, with emphasis on the big, fucking, and deal parts.

We sang from in front of the orchestra, four feet below the stage, where the first two rows of audience seats usually are, our backs to the conductor. (There were monitors for us on the side walls.) It was brilliant. “Beethoven’s spirit rang out with an explosive jubilance.”

That was exceptionality #1. Another exceptionality was that we had no friggin’ idea where we would sing from until the day of the concert. Our first rehearsal with the maestro was Friday, two days before the concert, with piano. From our perch on platforms across the back of the stage, Dessoff Symphonic’s 106 singers sang a few bars. Mr. Fischer said very little but seemed pleased enough. We sang a few more bars.

“Can the chorus platforms come up any higher?” the maestro asked. No, it turned out. “The chorus should be higher.” The Budapest Festival Orchestra, “my orchestra,” will be on risers, with string basses rear, center, and elevated. Singing through a rank of basses was out of the question.

“Let me try something.”

“Something” was having us sing from further forward, across the center of the stage and well in front of the raised platforms. Then another something, singing from the very front of the stage. For each of his somethings, we sang full out like we would do on Sunday. You don’t become a Hungarian musical genius guessing what a choir’s tutta forza sounds like when you can ask for and listen to the real thing.

We sounded “three times better” from the front. Not that we sounded bad from the back, Maestro added. As we had marched forward and forwarder, someone made a joke about lemmings.

“Try singing from down there.” Mr. Fischer was pointing at the first rows of audience seats. Only the stagehands prevented us from actually leaping off the lip of the stage to get there. We sang again, and we sounded spectacular (especially when we turned to face the audience). This was where we were destined to be on Sunday.

Except for a couple of details. The maestro had ordered a stage extension, but it was too small to free up enough seats for us. Only two rows, comprising 72 seats, were unsold because of the extension. There was also the issue of us singing with our backs to the conductor.

More somethings. Men back on stage and all against the stage left wall. Sing. Women move center, men stay put. Sing. Tenors stage right, basses and women stay put. Sing.

Then, “Thank you.” No friggin’ idea where we’d sing from on the day of the concert. We weren’t even sure we’d be able to see a conductor. As it turned out, when we arrived for the Sunday morning dress rehearsal, the 72 unsold cushy seats in rows A and B of the orchestra had been removed, and 106 folding chairs were squeezed into their place without compromising fire regulations. We were all able to fit in front of the stage where we had sounded so spectacular on Friday. And we could see Maestro Fischer, thanks to monitors that had been installed practically overnight on the side walls of the hall. On Friday, Maestro had asked for ecstatic singing in a few places; given what had transpired to accommodate us between Friday and Sunday, together with the fact that we all had front row seats for the Ninth’s first three movements, ecstatic was a piece of cake.

Chorus master James Bagwell later mentioned that a chorus-in-front setup wasn’t without historic precedent. Donna M. Di Grazia, Professor of Music and choir conductor at Pomona College (my alma mater) documents the practice in her 1998 article “Rejected Traditions: Ensemble Placement in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” and passionately laments its disappearance. She was “aware of only a few instances where placement issues have been considered for performances of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music regardless of the presence or absence of a chorus.” I sent her email to tell her there’s been one more, and that it rocked.

There are plenty more things to share about this Ninth, and if I can, I’ll post updates.

Top: Budapest Festival Orchestra (on the stage) and Dessoff Symphonic Choir (in front of the stage), after performing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at Avery Fisher Hall on March 28, 2010.

Bottom: A seating plan for orchestra and chorus in nineteenth century France, chorus in front of the orchestra. [Di Grazia, 1998, p. 197, with callouts replacing legend]

Ives Psalm 90 is to die for, and the rest of it is damn good, too. You can download DRM-free mp3 files from digstation here. It’s also available on iTunes and some other sites. It will be available as a CD at dessoff.org. An uncommon, fully rewarding look at American choral music.

You can see all the tenors in this photograph from a superb collection posted to SmugMug by Arnie Goodman of Bluestormmusic.com and Elmore Magazine:

Tenors, L to R: Jeff Lunden, Andrew Willett, Daniel O’Brien, Steve Brautigam, Erol Tamerman, Tansal Arnas, Douglas Riccardi, Steve Kass

And here’s a YouTube clip of us singing. Friday’s concert was recorded for radio broadcast in early December. Stay tuned for details.

It was a fantastic gig. Ray, the band, and the sound and stage crew were all as nice as could be, and David Temple, the choir director was brilliant. Also brilliant was Dessoff soprano Christine Hoffman, without whom we couldn’t have done this. She prepared us superbly in the weeks before the concerts. Best of all was the crowd, who were wildly appreciative of the choir both during and after the show.

Finally, Dessoff would be happy to meet fans, friends, or supporters at our upcoming CD Release party:

I’d love to see my friends come hear me in either or both Dessoff gigs I’m part of this month:

• November 12: Our 2009-2010 concert series begins, with Ernest Bloch’s Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service) at Congregation Rodeph Sholom on the Upper West Side.
• November 19 and 20: We back up Ray Davies at Town Hall on November 19 and 20.

If you can’t make it to one of our shows, you’re not off the hook:

• November 18th: Dessoff appears on The Late Show with David Letterman. A small group of Dessoff singers (not including me) will back up Ray Davies, who’ll be Dave’s guest that day.