Sample videos from our 2008 Jazz and Pops shows
Seargent Pepper at the City Club
June 15, 2008
Way Down in the Hole at the City Club
June 15, 2008
Tour de France at the Green Room
June 14, 2008
Look out for more as I dig through the archive footage.
-erawk
Welcome to the 2008-09 season. And a special welcome to our newest members! I am excited to get started on the music for this coming season.
We have:
October
Performances with Meredith Monk and her ensemble. The piece is Songs of Ascension. The stairs on a pyramid, the vaulted ceilings of a cathedral, the pilgrimage up a mountainside are all inspirations for this compelling new piece.
One performance will be at Stanford and the other set of benefit performances will be site-specific, at Ann Hamilton's Tower on the beautiful Oliver Ranch in Geyserville! One of the rehearsals will be recorded for a commercial film!
For more photos of the tower, follow this link: Tower at Oliver Ranch
December
We will be collaborating again with the Grammy-nominated Quartet San Francisco on works of Dave Brubeck. We will sing the entire triptych, Canticles, along with several other Brubeck choral works including 2 with texts by Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes.
January
We will record a CD of the Brubeck works.
March
We will produce our annual fundraiser in a new venue, with a new format. This is your opportunity to present a solo based on a theme (to be announced).
June
Our brilliant Annual Jazz and Pop concert set, 3 performances of the best singing anywhere! Intriguing arrangements, amazing voices.
These are the events on our calendar. As you know, recently we've had some great opportunities that pop up during the season. Perhaps something life-changing will appear!
In any case, we have a fulfilling season ahead of us.
I look forward to seeing you soon!
Lynne
One Sunday morning when I was seven, I told my mother I wanted to sing with the church choir, which was made up of men and boys in the English choral tradition. I've been singing ever since, although not in a ruffed collar. I wore green tights once, and an elaborate kimono for one production…
I've met many wonderful people and wonderful musicians. I met my wife Meredith in the Pomona College Glee Clubs. We sang together in several groups including the S.F. Symphony Chorus. Unfortunately there simply isn't enough time to do everything you want to do; Meredith eventually dropped out of choral singing.
Friends in various choruses encouraged her to start singing again but that didn't get anywhere until this summer, when the tipping point was Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem", the summer concert of the San Francisco Choral Society.
We love this piece! The first year we moved to San Francisco, we performed it with the Winifred Baker Chorale. We were blown away - the piece is incredible. Meredith couldn't resist the opportunity to sing it again.
Last month I learned Janet Corah sang in that performance too. It isn't surprising I hadn't realized that, because the Winifred Baker Chorale was somewhat schizophrenic. Half the chorus rehearsed in San Francisco and half rehearsed in Marin, coming together for performance week. Janet was in the Marin cohort.
Mer was anxious about the audition because she felt pretty rusty, so she worked with Kristin Womack to help knock the rust off the pipes. It worked - she passed the audition and we started rehearsing.
Benjamin Britten composed the War Requiem in 1962 for the re-consecration of Coventry Cathedral, which was bombed and destroyed during WWII. The text is a mash-up of the Latin mass for the dead, and poems of Wilfred Owen, the leading poet of WWI. Owen wrote poems about trench warfare and the slaughter of his generation. After treatment for shell shock, Owen chose to return to the front, where he died a week before the war ended.
Britten divides his forces in three.
The juxtapositions are heart wrenching. One example is in the offertory (the point in the service when the congregation offers gifts to the church). The children pray that the dead will be delivered from the inferno and the lion's mouth. The chorus prays that the dead will be brought into the light, as was promised to Abraham and his seed. Here is interpolated a poem that tells the story of Abraham and Isaac, the ultimate offering, but this version goes terribly wrong.
Britten rarely lets us sit back and listen to the pretty music (with the exception of the Recordare). His music does not sound especially dissonant, but he uses the harmonic ambiguity of whole tone scales, and a C-F# tritone that resolves in different ways, to keep us on edge.
The piece was first performed in 1962 with Britten as one of the conductors. He chose soloists from three countries ravaged by the war - Peter Pears (England), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Germany) and Galina Vishnevskaya (Russia). (The USSR prevented Vishnevskaya from traveling to the first performance but she sang on the first recording the next year.)
Andy Stewart notes "I heard the first performance of this, broadcast on BBC radio from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in May, 1962. It is an absolutely stunning work, if anything more relevant to the present-day US than it was to early 1960s Britain."
You need serious conducting chops to bring this off successfully and Bob Geary was up to the job. It helped that he did this piece before, with the SFCS in 1999. There was no anxiety about balancing with the orchestra - the chorus had more than 170 singers on stage. I take my hat off to SFCS - I really enjoyed singing with SFCS and working with Bob. You can read the review in SF Classical Voice here: Silencing the Guns of War. I talked up PME and maybe that will bear fruit. (The last time I sang with SFCS, Paul Keaton joined PME.)
Sometimes we don't get respect from those who know us best. Bob told us about the notes his wife gave him after the last dress rehearsal. He had become more and more animated in conducting the sections where the intensity peaks. His wife told him he was starting to resemble Cro-Magnon man and, although a great conductor might get away with it, he was a good conductor and it wouldn't work.
Bob was put to the test near the start of the first movement in the Friday performance. That all-important C-F# tritone is played on the tubular bells at several key moments and the chorus depends on it to get the pitch. The percussionist seemed to be having a little trouble counting to 4. One time Bob gave a big cue on the 4th beat of the measure and nothing happened. No problem - Bob smoothly added a 5th beat to the measure and gave the cue again!
One thing I particularly love about singing with PME is the wide variety of music we perform. As Jim Hale observed, if you aren't in PME you don't understand how many different things we do. That said, there is a special thrill in performing a big symphonic work. We experienced some of that this year when we did Beethoven's 9th with NVS; I was delighted to get another fix this summer. It was wonderful to perform with Meredith again, and it was wonderful to sing the Britten again.
-Jeff Watts
Update Aug 8th 2PM:
We are having trouble with the comment section on the blog. If you would like to comment send me (eric) and email and I'll post it like so:
Comment from Nette:
Thanks for this Jeff. The one time I've done the War Requiem was with the SF Symphony, Kurt Masur conducting. The most incredible moment came in the first rehearsal with chorus and orchestra. We weren't bringing the intensity of emotion that Maestro Masur wanted for the piece, so after several pointed remarks, he put his baton down and spoke quietly of war. He was drafted into the German army as a young teen (I seem to recall he was only 15), toward the very end of WWII. Only 24 members of his company, all of whom were under 20, lived through the end of the war. THAT is what war meant to him, that is what the War Requiem should portray, and Davies Symphony Hall was utterly silent as he finished. He picked his baton up, gave the downbeat, and we made real music. What a humbling experience...
Well, I am singing a bit of Hildegard-- involved in a production of "Ordo Virtutum" with S.F. Renaissance Voices that goes up the first three weekends of August, at venues around the Bay Area. What I can say right now is this: for being an Abbess, and therefore, a righteous sister, Hildegard was a mother of a composer! Memorization is really difficult because, unlike the "Play of Daniel", where there was thematically different music for each set of characters, rhyming text and enough movement through a vaguely familiar story line to get cues, "Ordo Virtutum" is a unique work based on visions of Hildegard. These visions were first sketched in her monumental work "Scivias", then developed into an "opera-like" piece, which, if it was ever performed, would have been heard at the dedication of the convent she founded at Rupertsburg.
The piece is textually highly rhetorical, musically quite modal, and very little physical movement is called for (although we are trying to create some for this presentation). Each of the virtues explains, to a soul about to be tempted, who and what they are and how they can help the soul remain free within sanctity. The Devil tempts and the Soul succumbs to the Devil's temptations, but turns back with repentance and allows the virtues to help her. The Virtues bind the Devil, to break his hold on the Soul, then guide the Soul back to the light.
The music is replete with little motives (some of these are described in the literature about Hildegard's music as being "typically Hildegardian motives". There is one motive in particular that is "Hildegard's signature": a four note motive of tonic rising to the perfect fifth, rising to the octave, declining to the minor seventh). These motives, either helpfully or unhelpfully, recur all over the place and I have painstakingly marked them all in my score, whenever I run across them, with a red pencil. (Someone should do a study on all the motives alone, to see if there is some sort of system there. A diverting search on the net revealed no such study...) Where these motives are applied, they are embellished and altered frequently. That is to say, there are no sequences to be seen in the tropes. It is almost like doing an hour-or-so-long song that resembles through-composed recitative, but without any helpfully jangling harpsichord cues!
Okay, all that having been said, I am confessing that it is quite a difficult task to memorize the parts of this music that need to be memorized [as some other PME women can attest to, as we sang a few Hildegard chants back in '94 and '95 (if I am recalling correctly)]. But, ladies, that was only 4 to 5 minutes of chanting at most, maybe less… "Ordo Virtutum" is just shy of an hour and a half in length, and though we don't need to have the entire piece memorized, each of the ten ladies involved needs to have a chunk memorized.
As you might be able to see in the adjacent photo, my score is scribbled over with English text, yellow highlights, red pencil markings over the recurring motivic bits, and other markings that show the necessary specifics of German Latin pronunciation. Voted "most likely to succeed with office products" in high school, I have been as inventive as possible, creating a card deck with the text of each number, marked with the pauses and signifiers over each word where there is a melisma. Wherever Hildegard's signature motive occurs in my portions of the music, I have marked a tilde (for Hilde…) over the portion of the text where it occurs. I have my tuning fork by my side, and am employing some 21st century technology in the form of an iPod Nano with a voice memo recorder attached.
I wake up in the middle of the night with random bits and pieces running through my head, but not full chants and not in any kind of recognizable order, from one to the next.
Add to my dilemma that this is summer, the twins need diversions (or, at least, to be taxied to and from their diversions…), my part-time job is still in full-swing, the husband is in and out of town, I have other projects, not to mention social obligations, pulling at me, and, whew (!), I have a lot weighing on my mind.
Nevertheless, I am having fun! It is a wonderful challenge to work on a piece like this, which is so seldom performed. It is great to be working with a new set of singers. The rehearsal process has been oddly soothing and low-key (perhaps a bit too low-key…). The amazing thing is that, in the church where we have been practicing, we have been able to keep the pitch center fairly constant as we move through the sung passages. Slaving over a hot score in the good ole summertime is, perhaps, not so much fun... But, I have been enjoying the challenge.
And this group speaks "singer-eater"! The Hildegyrlz, as we have been dubbed, went on an expedition together last weekend, first for lunch at Udupi Palace on University, then down the street to procure costumes, with the help of our choreographer (yes, there are some dance numbers, but this ain't Ziegfelds' Folly!), culminating in a casual rehearsal, fueled by glasses of fine wine. To the right of yours truly (in brilliant blue) you see Purnima Jha, our choreographer; she is known internationally for Jaipur style Kathak dancing.
If you are around in August, I hope you'll check out our show!
-Elisabeth Eliassen
July 2008