Singing with the RPO - again, and again, and again!

This has been a banner collaborative year for Concentus Women’s Chorus – a performance with the Rochester Oratorio Society this fall, our upcoming March concerts (that will be sung behind a screen projection of photography by P.J. Pennewell, Principal Dancer / Rehearsal Director at Garth Fagan Dance), and two RPO concerts – Debussy’s Nocturnes, which we just completed mid-January, and Holst’s The Planets, which will be presented in April.

Debussy’s Nocturnes

Although the Nocturnes choral movement, Sirènes, is only about 9 minutes, it still took hours of preparation. It also required more singers than Concentus currently has, and we were lucky to be joined by some excellent guest voices. Even with them, we were only about 25-strong, and the piece is usually performed with twice as many voices. Our quality made up for some lack of quantity, but strategically placed microphones didn’t hurt, either…

Marcelo Lehninger rehearsing the chorus

Our conductor, Gwen Gassler, rehearsed us studiously, but we had to remain flexible, so that we could adapt to the RPO guest conductor’s choices of tempo, stress placements, etc. Marcelo Lehninger was delightful, and although he did ask that most of our dynamics be a notch louder than Debussy’s markings, he wasn’t put off by our lack of numbers. And this was certainly a case where deviating from the piece as specified by the composer was warranted (we didn’t have the luxury of splitting into a double chorus). Lehninger masterfully juggled Debussy’s two orchestrations. Thankfully, he deferred to the chorus at the end of the movement, where he preferred the original score, but the singers preferred the revised, with the altos echoing the clarinet (in the original score, the altos sing the entire passage, and it’s very difficult to find our starting note). It didn’t hurt that one of our singers is married to the clarinetist, who could champion our cause!

Brahms’ Requiem

Alison and Honey chatting over my empty seat

This weekend, I attended the first Winter Sing with the RPO, because my niece Alison was in town and she guilted me into it. The Brahms Requiem isn’t what I’d normally choose to spend a Saturday afternoon with, but in the end, it was almost as much fun as it was challenging and exhausting to sight-read, and Dr. Weinert did an outstanding job conducting us. His best piece of advice: don’t look back!  I smartly sat between Alison (who’d sung the piece before) and Honey Meconi, a Concentus alumna and frequent Concentus guest singer and incredible musician, so that when I got lost, I had an anchor on both sides.

Dr. Weinert waiting for the orchestra to tune,
while Richard Decker looks on

Holst’s The Planets

Soon we will start rehearsing the Neptune, the Mystic movement, which many of the singers performed with the RPO three years ago. But we’ll have a different conductor – Hans Graf, instead of Michael Francis – who will most certainly have different insights into how the piece should be performed. One thing that will be the same – the singers will be offstage, and the door will slowly close on us as we perform the first-written musical fade out. While I’m not sad not to be on stage again, I am disappointed that we’ll miss seeing the visual part of the performance – projections of NASA pictures that will accompany the music. It should be an amazing performance!

Yes In My Back Yard, please!

When I first visited Rochester, about 20 years ago, it puzzled me that East Avenue in Brighton and Pittsford was four lanes, with not an inch of shoulder, and a hard curb to boot. If you are driving side-by-side with another car, there is no margin for missing a pothole, or random debris, or a biker, or a stupid walker or runner who refuses to use the sidewalk (yes, those people exist, and I’ve almost hit them!). There is also no room to peek out of a side street to see what’s coming, and sight lines are obscured by curves, or on my road, a stone wall that is sacrosanct. Of course, I voiced my opinion to my neighbors that what would make more sense is one lane in each direction, a turning lane in the middle, and shoulders/bike lanes on each side.

So imagine my delight when we got a notice recently from the New York State Department of Transportation that they intended to do just that, and were hosting an open meeting to learn more about their vision! One of my neighbors even called me to ask if I’d had anything to do with it, but I don’t have those kinds of connections…

Their proposed work includes resurfacing (which the stretch sorely needs, especially after this year’s batch of slush turtle hatchings – I tried googling that term but can’t any reference to the tales my dad told about this mythical cause of potholes); widening the remaining three lanes by a foot each, and providing 3.5’ shoulders; and repairing sidewalks to be ADA compliant. I would hope that part of this project includes creating more sidewalks, the lack of which is apparently the reason that kids on my street have to take a bus to a school that is half a mile away.

Project Engineers were on hand at the meeting to answer questions about this project, which will stretch from the “can of worms” Rochester city line to St. John Fisher. Most of the intersections with lights will remain as they are, which won’t minimize the strategizing necessary when heading north at Allens Creek Road. And, at least initially, it may cause more rush-half-hour congestion on this stretch that parallels 490 and is used as an alternate when that highway is backed up. But it will ease making left turns out of side streets, as an engineer and I tried to explain to an elderly resident of the apartments of the Crossway Condos, since you could go halfway, to the turning lane, instead of waiting for 3-4 lanes to clear. She refused to see the logic, and both he and I ended up rolling our eyes and walking away.

Construction isn’t slated to begin till this summer, and that means that this spring’s pothole-patching will be haphazard, at best. And there will be some disruption (and night work! Oh no!). But I look forward to the results – a newly resurfaced road, better visibility turning left out of my street, and the ability to ride my bike on East Avenue with less fear of getting hit (because, let’s face it, there’s always the fear of some texting idiot hitting a biker…).

My dinner with… Steve Rosen

Decades ago, I was too timid to bid on a silent auction item (I don’t recall the charity now) I dearly coveted – dinner with Stephen Sondheim. It didn’t quite go for a song, but I could have afforded the splurge, and I regretted it. As an antiques dealer later admonished me, when trying unsuccessfully to negotiate the price of a Windsor chair, “You never regret an extravagance. You always regret an economy.” So, when the bidding got heated at Geva’s Summer Curtain Call fundraiser two years ago, I didn’t give up, and I “won” the opportunity to dine with Jen Cody, who starred in Geva’s hysterical production of Sylvia. Unfortunately, my dinner date was canceled at the last minute, because her dad was dying. I look forward to her starring in a future Geva production, so I can redeem by voucher. In the meantime…

There was another Summer Curtain Call auction last year for dinner with Steve Rosen that I couldn’t stop bidding on. Luckily, his parents, who live in Pittsford, are healthy, so Charlie and I had our “meet and eat” with him last week at Salena’s, in Village Gate. I was a little intimidated, and worried that we wouldn’t have enough to talk about for an entire dinner, but when he arrived, he put us completely at ease. First, although he did ask us a few questions about ourselves, he seemed perfectly happy to be grilled by me. Second, he turned out to be delightfully unassuming; he grew up in Pittsford, so we chatted about local stuff, like the weather, and how he felt about staying with his parents for the duration of the show, in his old bedroom with show posters and memorabilia from his childhood.

I tried to apologize to him for not letting him eat that much (he took most of his dinner home…) as I peppered him with questions. When he mentioned that he’d gone to summer camp in the Catskills, I asked if it was like Camp (the movie that got Anna Kendrick noticed, and had a cameo by Sondheim), and he said yes, but it wasn’t “that” camp, he went to the “other” camp – French Woods – where he met Zooey Deschanel and other now-famous actors, and formed lifelong friendships.

Since we were in Sondheim territory (he actually met the god when he worked as an audition reader for a production of The Frogs), I asked about The Other Josh Cohen, the show he wrote and is currently starring in at Geva: which came first, the words or the music? Interestingly, he said the music came first – he was in LA pitching TV ideas, and in a moment of distraction, wrote several songs as Neil Diamond riffs. The show started out as a vehicle for him and his writing partner, but has evolved into a full-fledged musical, with the multiple characters being played by any number of actors, from 3 to 30. This sounded extremely sensible for the long-term success of the show – it could just as easily be produced with a small cast, to contain costs, as it could be by a high school drama department. The cast, except for the “Josh” character, which Steve plays, are also the band, so the show requires some multitalented individuals, which many performing artists seem to be these days!

Steve talked a bit about an improv variety show he co-created at Joe’s Pub, and working with the Open Doors Program, initiated by the great Wendy Wasserstein. And about being burgled as a rite of passage in NYC. The evening ended too soon (it would have been impolite to impose further on his time), and I look forward to seeing his show later this month at Geva. And who knows, it might even make it to Broadway? If it does, it’ll be such fun to tell friends I saw it here first! 

For more information on The Other Josh Cohen visit: www.gevatheatre.org