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Stepping out
The Tanglewood Festival Chorus on its own, plus Ben Zander’s last Mahler and Claudia Huckle
BY DAVID WEININGER

Although its primary responsibility is to perform choral works with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, over its 30-plus years of existence the Tanglewood Festival Chorus has established an identity of its own. Indeed, with its meticulous balance, lucid diction, and insistence on performing from memory, the TFC has become one of the very best groups of its kind in the world. Opportunities to perform without the orchestra are rare, usually confined to one concert at Tanglewood per summer. So it will mark a milestone of sorts when the TFC offers an a cappella concert next Sunday, the ensemble’s first in Jordan Hall.

According to founder and conductor John Oliver, this is a chance to reprise in an intimate setting some of the many works the TFC has prepared for summer concerts and occasional tour performances. "It’s that we’ve had a very stable and very fine group for quite a number of years now. We’ve built up a kind of repertoire that people would love to do more than one time."

Since that repertoire has become sizable, how did Oliver choose the music for this concert? "Oh, well," he laughs, "that’s always a very good question. It’s really a very big challenge to make a good program." In the end, he chose works by six composers: sacred music by Anton Bruckner, Thomas Tallis, and Frank Martin for the first half, secular works by Arnold Bax, Benjamin Britten, and Edward Elgar for the second.

The concert’s centerpiece is Spem in alium, Tallis’s famous 40-part motet. "I think it’s a very difficult piece; you’ve got to have 40 voices, all of which are equal, and that takes some doing." The Chorus has performed the work a number of times at Tanglewood, and that has allowed the conductor to experiment with various ways of positioning the singers, including one novel arrangement in the Koussevitzky Music Shed. "We had choruses 1 and 2 down in the colonnades, choruses 3 to 6 on the stage, and choruses 7 and 8 over in the other colonnades, in a great vast horseshoe. And everyone would think it wouldn’t work, but it worked like a charm."

Back on the subject of the Chorus’s BSO duties, Oliver says, "We’re all very excited, because the Chorus, as you can see from next season [James Levine’s first in Boston], will take a very big part. And of course the repertoire will shift slightly from many of the pieces we’ve done over and over again, which is always welcome to musicians. And we have a great conductor, so we’re all looking forward to it."

But is there anything different about preparing a concert for himself as opposed to the hundreds he’s prepared for other conductors at the BSO? "I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why. I had a very active performing career for 30 years — at MIT and with the John Oliver Chorale, outside gigs as well — and I did all the big pieces: the B-minor Mass, the Missa Solemnis, all that kind of thing. And Colin Davis gave me some advice, way back in the early 1970s. He said, ‘You know, when you prepare for me, prepare the way you feel most deeply about the piece.’ And I’ve never looked back. I just prepare it the way I like it."

John Oliver conducts the Tanglewood Festival Chorus next Sunday, May 2, at 3 p.m. at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street in Boston. Tickets are $17 to $30; call (617) 266-1200.

ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS: Ben Zander and the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conclude this season’s "Mahler Journey" with the crazy-quilt modernism of the Seventh Symphony. If a terrific performance by these same forces back in 1995 is anything to go by, this could be the highlight of the season. Also on the bill is mezzo-soprano Jane Struss performing "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I Am Lost to the World"), Mahler’s most sublime song. Performances are April 29 at 7:30 p.m. and May 2 at 3 p.m. at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre (45 Quincy Street in Harvard Square) and May 1 at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall. Tickets are $15 to $63; call (617) 236-0999. And Claudia Huckle seems to be on the brink of a promising career: last month the British mezzo (who’s studying at New England Conservatory) was one of three winners of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. She’s on the program of NEC’s First Monday concert on May 3, singing Bach’s Cantata No. 54. The always-busy Borromeo Quartet is part of the ensemble for the cantata, and it will also perform Bartók’s Fourth Quartet and the Brahms Piano Quintet with Veronica Jochum. That’s at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall, and it’s free; call (617) 585-1100.


Issue Date: April 23 - 29, 2004
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