Season Description
In 2011-2012 the New York Choral Society [NYCS] will celebrate John Daly Goodwin's 25th and final season as music director. After thirty-one years with the NYCS, the last twenty-five of them as music director, Maestro Goodwin has decided to step down in order to pursue new musical opportunities in Mexico, where he maintains a second home, as well as guest conducting and teaching opportunities.
The NYCS season begins on Sunday, September 11th at Saint Patrick's Cathedral with the seventh appearance of the NYCS with the September Concert Foundation, this year commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The September Concert Foundation is a global event whose aim is "to fill the skies with music every September 11th." This year the NYCS will perform excerpts from Dvorák's moving Stabat Mater and Harry Belafonte's uplifting Turn the World Around.
On Sunday, November 6th the NYCS returns for the eighteenth consecutive year as guest artists in the Richard Tucker Music Foundation Gala in Avery Fisher Hall. Angela Meade, soprano, is this year's recipient of the prestigious Richard Tucker Award, given every year to an American opera singer on the verge of a major international career. Ms. Meade first appeared with the NYCS in Carnegie Hall on May 1, 2011.
On Wednesday, December 14th the NYCS will return to Carnegie Hall for "A Joyful Noise", a delightful program that will include Haydn's ebullient Te Deum, Poulenc's spectacular Gloria, Verdi's masterpiece for double chorus, Te Deum, and the Kyrie and Gloria movements from Puccini's spirited Messa di Gloria.
The Haydn Te Deum, commissioned by Empress Marie Therese of Austria, was written near the end of Haydn's long and prolific career, after he had become an international celebrity with his music performed regularly throughout Europe. The Te Deum is brilliant and festive throughout, ending with an exhilarating fugue. This was the first piece conducted by Mr. Goodwin in Carnegie Hall with the NYCS, in 1985.
The Gloria, written in 1959, was one of Poulenc's last and most celebrated compositions. Poulenc's music displays a fine sensitivity to the human voice, a combination of brevity and freshness, lightness of touch, a sense of innocent wonder, luminous clarity, and above all sincere humility. All these characteristics infuse the Gloria, which is remarkable not only for its wide range of emotions, but also for the sheer amount of material found in its 25 minutes, effortlessly moving through moods of elation, wonder and contentment. Mr. Goodwin and the NYCS last performed the Poulenc Gloria in celebration of the French Bicentennial in 1989.
Primarily an opera composer, Verdi wrote very little that was not for the stage. Late in his life, after the production of his final opera Falstaff, he set to music the texts Ave Maria, Laudi alla Virgine (words from Dante's Paradiso), Stabat Mater and Te Deum. In these pieces, known collectively as Quattro Pezzi Sacri ( Four Sacred Pieces), Verdi abandoned the theatricality of the Requiem and wrote in more restrained manner in keeping with ecclesiastical traditions. The Te Deum, Verdi's last composition written when he was eighty-four, is scored for double chorus and orchestra. The piece is the longest, most dramatic and most varied of the Pezzi Sacri. This Te Deum is not just a triumphal work but one that portrays all facets of the text. The opening Te Deum Laudamus (You, God, we praise) is hushed, chant-like, and a capella. The Sanctus explodes in glory along with the full orchestra, and the text Tu Rex Gloriae, Christe (You, the King of glory, Christ) is a regal fanfare. Verdi ends the piece with a humble prayer sung by a single soprano voice chanting, "In you, Lord, I have trusted," and those words are repeated gloriously by the chorus before the orchestra concludes the work in hushed solemnity. The NYCS last performed the Verdi Te Deum in 2002 under Music Director Emeritus Robert De Cormier in celebration of his eightieth birthday.
Unlike the other three pieces on the program, all of which were late works, Puccini's Messa di Gloria is a youthful composition. Originally intending to follow in his family's multi-generational tradition of providing music for the church in his native Lucca, Puccini began his musical studies at the Instituto Musicale in Lucca. The Messa di Gloria was written as graduation thesis at the Instituto and it already contains glimpses of the mature Puccini in its lyricism, dramatic sensibility, and emotional range. In fact, Puccini later used melodies from the Messa di Gloria in his operas Manon Lescaut and Edgar. The NYCS sang the Kyrie from the Messa di Gloria in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris during a special service on July 4, 2004. A Joyful Noise will include the Kyrie and the delightful Gloria, from which the Messa di Gloria derives its name.
On January 29, 2012 the NYCS will again appear with the Opera Orchestra of New York [OONY] in a concert performance of Wagner's Rienzi to be conducted by OONY's founder and music director Eve Queler. Premiered in Dresden in 1842, Rienzi, Wagner's third completed opera was also his first success. Richard Wagner is known as one of the most innovative composers in the history of opera with a stated aim to create something called Gesamstkunstwerk, or "total work of art". The goal was to go beyond traditional opera to achieve a seamless blend of music, drama, literature, visual art and stagecraft and he undoubtedly created a style of musical theater that had never been heard before. In Rienzi Wagner embraced the world of French grand opéra, a form that typically featured five acts and as much spectacle as the stage could hold, including ballets, rousing processionals and huge choral sections. Wagner stated that Rienzi should "outdo all previous examples with sumptuous extravagance." And extravagant it is since it can only be staged in the world's largest theaters. This performance of Rienzi will be the tenth time that Mr. Goodwin has prepared the NYCS for an opera in concert with OONY.
"American Reflections" is the title of the April 20th program, the finale of the 2011- 2012 NYCS season, which is also John Daly Goodwin's final concert as music director of the New York Choral Society. All five works on this program of American choral music have figured prominently in the history of the NYCS, in fact, three of them were commissioned and premiered by the NYCS: Stephen Paulus's Whitman's New York, Robert De Cormier's Legacy, and Morton Gould's Quotations. Morten Lauridsen's haunting Lux Aeterna and Charles Ives' masterpiece Psalm 90 complete the program. Mr. Goodwin and the NYCS are proud champions of the music of our time, especially American choral music, and it is fitting that Mr. Goodwin's twenty-five-year tenure at the helm of the NYCS should close with these "American Reflections."
"American Reflections" is the title of the April 20th program, the finale of the 2011- 2012 NYCS season, which is also John Daly Goodwin's final concert as Music Director of the New York Choral Society. All five works on this program of American choral music have figured prominently in the history of the NYCS, in fact, three of them were commissioned and premiered by the NYCS: Stephen Paulus's Whitman's New York, Robert De Cormier's Legacy, and Morton Gould's Quotations. Morten Lauridsen's haunting Lux Aeterna and Charles Ives' masterpiece Psalm 90 complete the program. Mr. Goodwin and the NYCS are proud champions of the music of our time, especially American choral music, and it is fitting that Mr. Goodwin's twenty-five-year tenure at the helm of the NYCS should close with these "American Reflections."
Whitman's New York, with texts drawn from the poems of Walt Whitman and music by Stephen Paulus, evokes many of the qualities of New York City that have been celebrated by the city's poets and people over the centuries. Commissioned and composed in 2008 to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the New York Choral Society, Whitman's New York is a jubilant paean to this "City of the World," this "proud and passionate city" that Whitman knew and loved so well. Stephen Paulus' setting for chorus and orchestra also captures the joy and wonder that Whitman found in New York City's stately splendor, the frolicsome crested waves of its rivers, and the drenching "gorgeous clouds of the sunset." The NYCS is proud to present the second performance of this thrilling musical tribute to its "mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!"
Morton Gould's autobiographical work Quotations was commissioned by the NYCS and premiered in 1983 in Carnegie Hall. The chorus performed Quotations a second time in 1988 and followed that performance with a commercial recording of the work. Mr. Gould, after thinking over the possible approaches to a choral work, found the idea of platitudes, common sayings, and poetic references challenging and stimulating. As Quotations evolved, he found that these sayings evoked nostalgic memories of his own childhood in Richmond Hill, NY, where he was reared on such aphorisms as "the early bird catches the worm," "a stitch in time saves nine," and "a bird in hand is worth two in the bush." The NYCS performed excerpts from Quotations during a Carnegie Hall memorial concert for Mr. Gould following his death in 1996.
NYCS Music Director Emeritus Robert De Cormier has written that "Legacy has very, very deep personal meaning for me. It was commissioned by the New York Choral Society the year after my son died in 1977 (at age 23). I chose four poems that his grandfather, my father-in-law (John M. Dobbs), had written. I love the poems. One of them is specifically about death ("Legacy," the last one); the rest of them are not. They are very meaningful to me and I think they would have been to Christopher. That's obviously a piece that is very close to my heart." The NYCS gave Legacy its premiere performance in Carnegie Hall in 1980 and recorded it three years later. Mr. De Cormier will celebrate his 90th birthday in 2012 and the NYCS performance of Legacy is a tribute to him and to his countless contributions to American choral music. The chorus is happy that Bob De Cormier plans to attend this special concert.
Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna. In speaking of Morten Lauridsen's sacred works in his book, Choral Music in the Twentieth Century, Nick Strimple describes Lauridsen as "the only American composer in history who can be called a mystic, [whose] probing, serene work contains an elusive and indefinable ingredient which leaves the impression that all the questions have been answered...From 1993 Lauridsen's music rapidly increased in international popularity, and by century's end he had eclipsed Randall Thompson as the most frequently performed American choral composer." In his preface to the score ofLux Aeterna, Lauridsen writes that "each of the five movements in this cycle contains references to Light assembled from various Latin texts." In a 2003 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Lauridsen offered that he "regards light as a symbol of hope and reassurance," and these qualities shine forth in the lush, even sensuous harmonies of Lux Aeterna. The NYCS has performed Lux Aeterna three times: at Riverside Church in May 2004, and twice more the following July while on tour in France at Chartres and in the eleventh-century basilica of Saint Remi in Reims.
Charles Ives’ Psalm 90. In the history of American music, there is perhaps no more idiosyncratic composer than Charles Ives. Always a free thinker, Ives quickly developed a reputation for eccentricity. He wrote polytonal and polymetrical works long before such techniques were understood, and his use of tone clusters was astonishing. For example, at one point in his setting of Psalm 90 Ives has the chorus begin a phrase on a unison middle C and then expand in both directions to a 22-note cluster spanning two and a half octaves, only to collapse back to the original unison. Psalm 90 is one of the few compositions that satisfied Ives, a work in which he believed his aims to be fully realized. The final section of this ten-minute work is possessed of a breathtaking serenity; in his final performance as Music Director of the NYCS, Mr. Goodwin has chosen to invite all alumni of the NYCS onto the Carnegie Hall stage to join in singing these transcendent final minutes of what is one of Ives' greatest masterpieces. The NYCS has performed Psalm 90 three times since 1976, once each in Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and Carnegie Hall.
On Saturday, May 12, at 7:30 p.m. the NYCS will appear in The Profile The Life And The Faith Across The Notes by Mario Jazzetti at Avery Fisher Hall. This symphonic poem written for piano, orchestra, and chorus is performed in six parts, representing the major phases of life as conceived by the composer. NYCS performs in the fifth movement, subtitled The Tragic Reality of Life. The soloist will be the famed Italian pianist Francesco Libetta. Matthew Gurewitsch, writing in the New York Times, has called Libetta “a poet-aristocrat of the keyboard with the profile and the carriage of a Renaissance prince.”