My opening post mentioned Robert Page in passing as having programmed my May the Words on the last concert he conducted with the Temple University Concert Choir in May of 1975, before he left Philadelphia for a post at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Today, August 9, I learned of his passing on August 7. (So much for two-week spacing between posts here for now...)
I can honestly say that I would not be the musician/composer/conductor/educator I am today had I not sung in his Concert Choir in the '70s; and I may not have even gone to Temple for undergraduate school had I not also been a student in his High School Choral Workshop (sponsored by Temple) the summer between my junior & senior years in high school—where I first sang Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—with the Pennsylvania Ballet & Orchestra (the first of some two dozen performances as an undergrad), & Arthur Honegger's King David—in a staged performance with chamber orchestra, no less.
That was only the beginning of what would prove to be an unrivaled undergraduate choral experience. The repertoire we did completely warped my musical thinking (these are the highlights):
Ligeti: Requiem (in its entirety; the Kyrie movement is the “Obelisk” music heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey)
Bernstein: Chichester Psalms
Beethoven: Choral Fantasy
Rachmaninoff: The Bells & 3 Russian Peasant Songs w/the Philadelphia Orchestra & recorded on RCA Red Seal
Page: 3 Christmas Motets; two of which were for triple chorus; inspired by his work preparing the Temple choirs for Penderecki’s Utrenja, Part I (“The Entombment of Christ”), premiered with the Philadelphia Orchestra & recorded on RCA Red Seal the year before I arrived.
Ives: Psalms 54, 67 & 150
& that was just my freshman year!
Subsequently (& we may have done some of the following in my freshman year as well; I’d have to go back & look):
Penderecki: St. Luke Passion with the Philadelphia Orchestra—that was the Philadelphia premiere; Page himself conducted
Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust (concert version); Eve Queler, conductor
Bach: St. Matthew Passion (tour concerts w/chamber orchestra)
Ives: Psalm 150 (again); 3 Harvest Home Chorales, & the Holidays Symphony (also w/Philadelphia Orchestra & just the symphony recorded on RCA Red Seal)—though the Holidays Symphony involved exactly one page of unison singing at the end of the 4th movement…
Puccini: La Boheme (Concert Choir was drafted to be the chorus for that year’s opera production)
Rossini: The Turk in Italy (Concert Choir was drafted to be the chorus for that year’s opera production as well, but I had one of the lead roles in that one)
Karl Korte: Pale is This Good Prince; an oratorio; world premiere; recorded on a private label
Ariel Ramirez: Misa Criolla (on which I was one of the percussionists—that's for a separate post, perhaps…)
Max Reger: Vater Unser—imagine a work using the tonal language of Wagner’s Prelude & Liebestod from Tristan & Isolde—but in a setting of the Lord’s Prayer in German for triple chorus, a cappella…
Arthur Honegger: Cantique de Pacques (women’s chorus) & La Danse des Morts
Poulenc: Six Chansons, Un Soir de Neige & Mass in G
Ravel: Trois Chansons (Ravel’s sole contribution to the a cappella repertoire; all on his own texts, by the way)
Schönberg: De Profundis (a late, atonal setting of Psalm 130 in Hebrew)
Webern: Enflieht auf Leichten Känen (Op. 2; pre-atonality [but not by much...])
...over & above the standard historical (Renaissance through Romantic era) motets, folk songs, spirituals & show tunes that flesh out tour programs. Nor does this enumerate the additional, equally wide range of repertoire performed on graduate conductors’ recitals in which I sang and, occasionally, soloed.
RP, as many of us used to speak of him, never took no for an answer—that’s what made this dizzying array of professional level rep possible. To be honest, he carried a measure of contempt for “singers” as opposed to “musicians” (something I do not perpetuate in my own practice) which often led to sarcasm & abusiveness in rehearsals—it came off as funny if you weren’t the target of it; but certainly not if you were the target thereof. Once upon a time, that was the norm for working “effectively” with choirs; one can’t do that & get away with it any more (as Robert Shaw once learned the hard way—singers actually walked out of rehearsal after one particularly egregious fit of abuse).
But RP also brought a profound depth of study and background to everything he conducted, such that simply rehearsing and performing any given work was an education in itself.
While I was never a one-on-one student of his, nor did I ever take an academic class with him, singing with RP provided a wildly wide exposure to and education in choral literature, along with performance experiences like no other, all at an impressionable age. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Thank you, RP...please give Gregg Smith (1931–2016) my regards.
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