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!