"Are We Together?" - thoughts from Oregon Bach Festival

Hi gang,

I just returned a few days ago from 3 weeks performing with the choir of the Oregon Bach Festival, held on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene. I had intended to post regularly during the festival to give you an ongoing view into the professional music world. However, the rehearsal and performing schedule ended up being so intense that I barely had time to check my e-mail! But now that I’m back, I’d like to share some of my festival experiences with you here.

This festival is ranked as the top summer classical music festival in the United States. Each summer 50 professional singers and an outstanding group of professional instrumentalists from all over the world are hired to perform major choral and orchestral works by Bach, Mozart, and other great classical composers. The artistic director is Helmuth Rilling, head of the International Bach Academy in Stuttgart, Germany, and the world’s leading authority on the choral music of J.S. Bach. The OBF choir received a Grammy a few years ago for the premiere of Penderecki’s Credo.

This summer’s schedule was rather brutal. For the first 5 days, we had 7½ hours of rehearsal per day–three 2½ hour sessions in the morning, afternoon, and evening–with barely enough time to eat. The first week was really tiring, but the schedule slacked off a bit towards the end. We performed an ENORMOUS amount of music! We performed three major works (1½ hours each)–Haydn’s Creation, Handel’s L’Allegro, and a Mendelssohn opera called Der Onkel aus Boston (“The Uncle from Boston”). That was the first time the Mendelssohn has been performed in North America, and we were only the second group to perform it since Mendelssohn wrote it in 1824, when he was only 14 years old. In addition, we performed six Bach cantatas (each about a half hour long) for a lecture-recital series led by Rilling and a conducting master class.

Helmuth Rilling is simply an amazing musician! When he rehearses, he only looks at his score to be able to give starting measure numbers. In performance, he conducts completely from memory. He had every player’s melodic line, articulation, and chord structure memorized for the ENTIRE vocal and instrumental ensemble! Yet he is a very humble, kind, and gentle man–going against the common notion that you have to be arrogant and condescending if you want to stay at the top of the musical ladder.

I can’t stress enough how important sightreading skills are in the professional life of a musician. To be able to sing that much music in 3 weeks, your skills have to be really sharp or you won’t keep up. The people with whom I perform have amazing musical skills and fantastic voices. To give you an example of the skill, click on the link below and listen to a recording session by the women of the OBF choir.

DREAMLAND - composed by Debra Sowerwine

The recording is of the second read-through of the piece! (It was written by a choir member in memory of another member who died of cancer this spring. Our women are going to do this piece this fall on our tour program.)

I went to a patron fundraising dinner at which they raised $77,000 for the Youth Choral Academy (high school choir camp associated with OBF). The theme of the fundraiser was “Are We Together?”–or as Helmuth would say, “Are vee togezer?” He spoke at length about how, even though the whole choir and orchestra knows the music at the first rehearsal, we still spend a lot of rehearsal time because we need to learn how to work together to pull off a good performance.

“Are We Together?” is going to be the theme for our choral year at Lambuth as well. We have a wonderfully large number of new students entering our program this fall, and they will need to learn how to fit their voices with the veterans and adjust to my style of conducting and teaching. And you veterans will need to rediscover how to sing with each other!

Being “together” implies more than just vocal technique. One of the things I noticed when the Alma College choir performed here was that they projected a sense of common purpose and goal. I think that we lose sight of that sometimes, and I want us all to work hard to keep that in the forefront all through the year. We need to make everything we do in our rehearsal time be focused towards the betterment of the ensemble.

I’m really pumped about this year! We didn’t graduate many people, and we have a large group of outstanding freshmen and transfers joining us. I have most of the fall tour program planned out (I’ll post a tentative program here soon), and I’m starting to work on concert venues. Block off November 11 through 15 on your calendar (Friday through Tuesday) for the tour. We’ll be going up to St. Louis, other parts of Missouri and Illinois, and back down to west Tennessee.

Stay well and keep your voices healthy! Chime in here and let me know what you all are up to this summer. See you soon!
RCB