strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive

Adventures with an unreliable narrator.

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Nov 2 03: Hello, Dalí

So Paul and I had an extra rehearsal this evening with the JCU. We’re bearing down on our performance of Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony a week from tomorrow. It’s a monster of a piece, technically quite demanding. Bernstein wrote it in the 60s, apparently wrestling with a burning desire to be accepted by “serious” musical types, which at the time meant that he had to compose twelve-tone stuff. You can hear his enthusiasm for twelve-tone composition wax and wane throughout the piece—sometimes we’re hip-deep in chaotic atonality and other times we’re whanging out these crazy syncopated jazzy things that suggest West Side Story and the Chichester Psalms. Oh, and it’s in Hebrew and Aramaic, and it has a really overblown poetic narrator shouting at God (or rather G-d) in English, and it goes at about mach seven. It took us (the chorus) ages to even start to appreciate the thing, so I can’t imagine what it’s like to sit in an audience and hear it for the first time. I think you’d need to be an afficionado of either Bernstein or of late-20th-century musicology to really get much out of it. If you’re neither of these things you’d do better to start with the Chichester Psalms.

At the end of the Kaddish this evening we did some work on the music we’ll be doing in December. It’s at Lincoln Center again, this time as the backup chorus to übersoprano Deborah Voigt. Where the Kaddish is high-concept and difficult, this stuff is…well, the word ‘camp’ springs to mind. Big sweeping Hollywoody show-choir arrangements of all your holiday favorites. Many of them fused into an extended medley that uses “Carol of the Bells” as its thematic backbone. It has the obligatory “ding! dong! ding! dong!” passages plus these fabulous sweeping glissandi, up and down ooooOOOOOOoooooOOOOOOoooo…whoa. It is proving rather difficult to take the rehearsals seriously, which is bad because this is, you know, Deborah Voigt already and we can’t really allow ourselves to screw it up.

Of course, it would be easier if this little gem weren’t buried in our score:

from We Need a Little Christmas

For we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute,
Candles in the window,
Carol’s at the spinnet…

…Carol?

We in the tenor section find this rather amusing. While Mrs. Brady was raised as a contender, we agreed that really it could only be talking about Miss Channing. Every time it goes by the tenor section kind of goes to pieces, visions of big blond wigs and sequined dresses dancing in our heads. And who knew she could play? (Furthermore, they misspelled ‘spinet,’ but not everybody finds that sort of thing as noteworthy as I do.)

Anyway, that’s the news from New York. If I didn’t have rehearsals and things to break the craziness down into manageable bites I’d be completely freaked out by how quickly the year is passing. Wherever you are, I hope you’re doing fine.

filed under the avenging virgo

Commentary

I would contend that the “We Need a Little Christmas” included another mispelling and that it was actually referring to tv legend Carroll O’Connor.

posted by Sari, Nov 3 03 12:59 PM

Well, the problem there is that we know he wasn’t much of an instrumentalist, because he relied on Jean Stapleton to play the piano.

posted by Andrew, Nov 3 03 3:19 PM

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