Photograph by Paul Cressey

A chorister muses on music and mortality.

I’ve been a singer — around town and internationally — for a long time. Opera, operetta, musical theatre, variety — these were my stomping grounds. My talents, and the experience I brought to the table from local performing, took me far, both as a soloist and as a choralist. But from its height at the millennium, my career has steadily dwindled, in both scope and frequency, long before it might have been expected to do so due to age or debilitation. 

While it is true that I walked out on my international career in London at the millennium and returned to San Diego due to the age, illness, and impending mortality of family members, there was a time when I might have been nearly as gainfully and frequently employed in San Diego as anywhere else. Alas, no longer. 

The gigs simply are not there. San Diego Gilbert and Sullivan is long gone, as is its successor, Lyric Opera San Diego; San Diego Opera barely exists. Starlight is gone, and the Welk Musical Theatre is on life-support — not even using live musicians in the pit. Singing to canned music? Thank you, no. I was a part of the Bach Collegium for its first ten years, but I’m old hat: that organization moves on regularly to new personnel, and I don’t blame them. It’s one of two bright spots in San Diego concertizing that is worth paying attention to. The other is the Symphony.

Photograph by Paul Cressey

So, the opportunity to sing in the Mahler 2nd locally — as part of the Symphony’s grand entry into the newly renovated Jacobs Music Center — came as a bit of a shot in the arm. A revival, courtesy of the Resurrection Symphony. Eight days, Sunday to Sunday, of Mahler-making, a glorious end-of-summer festival of music and cultural optimism, and at a very high level — I hoped.

19 September

Hied myself to San Diego State for the first rehearsal in Rhapsody Hall. If ever there was a more mis-nomered space, I can’t imagine it. Rhapsody Hall is a horrid, ungainly, unattractive, utilitarian choir-room, with no acoustic whatsoever. Singing there is like singing in a phone-booth — I’m dating myself by saying so, but there it is. It would more appropriately be called Rough Sodomy Hall. Further, it’s always a bit unsettling going back to SDSU. I went back there in 2004 to finish a B.Mus. — I had dropped out in 1988. I went back with the intention of becoming a teacher, and stayed through the last semester of the credential program. But I soured on it to the point where I told them to place it in their lower intestine, and went back to acting and singing.

I was one of the first to arrive, and so I got to watch the room fill with faces I did not recognize. Chorus master Andrew Megill welcomed me cheerfully, and said he remembered my audition. I remembered him, too, through the fog of time, since this concert had been delayed by over a year by the ongoing renovations to Symphony Hall…sorry, Jacobs Music Center. (To me, it’s still the Fox Theatre. Some things sponsorship simply can’t erase.) I apologized for not having answered the email asking “what part you would like to sing,” and I told him that I could sing Bass 2, minus the B flat below Low C, so I supposed I should sing Bass 1, the baritone part. He said, “Sing Bass 2 whenever you can, and just jump up when you need to.” I was gratified by this concession, as I have always prided myself on my lower range, such as I have! Generally speaking, I’m good down to about E-flat these days. Not bad for a 61-year-old baritone, especially one who spends so much of his time vocally bludgeoning his amateur church choir into line and supplying its tenor parts. I do have more high notes than I ever used to…maybe I’ve just been lazy all these years.

There was no feeling of disorientation; this was not a vast sea of choristers. We were 40 in the men’s sections, which to my way of thinking was minimal, if not inadequate, for a work the scale of the Mahler 2. Not that the sound which emanated from the singers was anemic; it was certainly not. The brassy timbre which came forth forcefully on “Bereite dich!” (Prepare thyself!) was gripping; and the following reiteration of the words, with a beautifully – and uniformly – altered diminution in volume, promised much. I just wished there were three times as many of us. Still, the concert hall would help.

The author’s view from the Choral Terraces.

We worked quickly, thoroughly, accurately, and pleasantly. There was no straining; instructions were specific and well communicated. Chorus Master Megill teaches at Northwestern University, and is also the Chorus Master for the Montreal Symphony, where our Maestro, Rafael Payaré, is the director — hence Megill’s presence here. It looked to me like he ran a phonetically tight ship, which was not something I was used to. I’m always nervous when a chorus-master is too insistently familiar with the international phonetic alphabet; I find it an unnatural quest after perfection, which doesn’t exist even among native speakers. Too much perfection can turn a chorus into a church choir. There must remain some individuality among the voices, for the sake of texture — mustn’t there? But I didn’t think he was overly precious about it. His rehearsal technique seemed concentrated, efficient, and timely. I was impressed.

It turned out that there were three people out of the 40 whom I know, only one of whom was a San Diego Opera chorister. We both wondered why there were not more people from the opera chorus in this concert, and came up with two possibilities: either our concert was overlapping with rehearsals for SDO’s La Boheme, or the choristers were simply not the voices that our chorus-master wanted. (I could think of a third reason: this is not an AGMA gig. The American Guild of Musical Artists is a union which covers professional opera and concert choruses. This is, in principle, a very good thing, but in the San Diego of today, with the opera nearly extinct and no other choruses performing at a frequency which would earn us any benefits at all, there is little point in being an AGMA organization. Still, there are some old-timers at the opera who insist that running a union shop is an idea of merit, and they are helping to sink the opera for all they’re worth and won’t be told otherwise. They must do their work in order for something new to emerge. This chorus is one such something.)

Our rehearsal was only two hours, which was outside of my natural rehearsal rhythm of at least three hours — or perhaps even a two-session day of three hours each, as is typical in opera productions. But I remembered that I was not an old hand at symphony-concert rehearsal scheduling. In a lot of ways, I was a new kid on the block. On the way out, I stopped to talk to a group of four choristers whom I didn’t know, and asked them where they were from. One was from Georgia, one from Illinois, and two were holdovers from the old San Diego Master Chorale. The Master Chorale was for many years the choral supply mainstay for the San Diego Symphony. In the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s it was headed by Dr. Frank Almon, who was — so everyone I have ever known who worked with him has said — a terror in rehearsal, and not much more pleasant outside of it. He did get results, at least. But that was a long time ago, and the chorale had since simply aged out. In truth, our community, our region, our nation does not have the singing culture it once did, and the talent pool has thinned. Churches, now in modern-casual mode, no longer supply the training ground where singers can expect to perform music of significance and develop their voices in preparation for participation at higher levels. Sad, but true, and the days of the San Diego Master Chorale as a reliable choral institution of size are in the past. Hence this new thrust and new chorale. I went home tired but satisfied.

30 September

I went downtown, parked, and walked through the destitute streets towards the hall, reflecting on how different this all was in 1987 — how much cleaner, how much more filled with thriving businesses, how much more imbued with the downtown aura of serious purpose. There was an air then of genuine resurrection, of revivification: the downtown still thrived at the street-level. No longer. As I walked, I saw at least four people simply sitting on the street, right on the sidewalks — not camping, not surrounded by their worldly goods, just sitting, helplessly, forelornly, desparingly. I almost stepped in human excrement. The place smelled of stale urine. Irwin Jacobs is to be applauded for acting to keep the Symphony in this historic home, surrounded by decay though it is…at least for now. He might well have built a new concert hall almost anywhere else. I do think it’s important that the symphony stay downtown and thrive there, and in so doing help the core of the city to survive. It’s about more than music at this point. It’s a statement of faith: faith in our city, in our culture, in our civilization. Thank you, Irwin. Now I wish you would do the same for the California Theatre, and make it a downtown home for the San Diego Opera when the city demolishes the Civic Theatre complex. But apparently Mr. Jacobs does not like vocal music (although I hear his wife did).

Rafael Payaré conducts the orchestra in rehearsal.

We entered the hall through the side entrances to the choral-terraces. The rehearsal which followed was with piano, and with Mo. Payaré — who, it must be said, bears a passing resemblance to Gustav Mahler. Wiry of frame, he has a rather flat face with a fairly massive jaw. He also wears little spectacles not unlike Mahler’s, and his hair, while several times the volume of Mahler’s, is similarly undisciplined. It is not an unpleasant or inappropriate resemblance. He spoke English very well, and communicated his desires effectively. He tended to conduct from a crouching position, generally, and affected an upward surge on most beats. In this, he was the polar opposite of the ever-erect Sir Adrian Boult, who did all with his baton, and nothing from the spine. Nothing interrupted his posture. Payaré was an athletic conductor, lunging, bobbing, darting, occasionally standing upright and affecting a majestic attitude. Whatever works. He also exhaled rather loudly on emphatic passages, leading one to think of someone letting air out of a tire. I hoped he wouldn’t do that during the performance! Better than Toscanini humming loudly, though…or is it?

We sang through the cues a couple of times each, the maestro pronounced himself well satisfied, and that was that. I was back out into the destitute night-streets by 8:30 pm. The walk back to my car felt lonely.

1 October

Last night and tonight both, we began our rehearsal with notes and warm-up in the north, rounded-walled portion of the coffer-ceilinged downstairs lobby. There was some acoustic there, but there was also the piquant odor of peppermint-flavored toilet-bowl cleaner wafting out from the downstairs men’s room nearby. It was not entirely unpleasant, but it did burn my throat a little. I did not complain, however. Such are the sacrifices we artists make.

Eventually, we filed in and took our places. The orchestra began their rehearsal with the fourth movement, which was fascinating to watch. I think one can learn as much about orchestration by watching an orchestra up close while they play as from looking at the score. The way Mahler combines his woodwinds to both the instruments together, and then to make them stand out starkly at other times, is fascinating. To me, anyway.

I have had a number of compositions in my head for quite some time which are in need of orchestration. I suppose I could go down to the library and check out miniature scores to see how one technically achieves “an opera-comique overture,” “an English idyll,” “a Viennese polka,” “a Mozartean allegro,” and in time I probably shall. But watching Mahler’s orchestra at work was equally illuminating. The Second Movement of his Second Symphony is much like what I would aim for in my Viennese pizzicato polka movement. (The sequence of pieces I have mentioned is in fact an orchestral suite called “Around Theatres,” which I composed 30 years ago and have never written down. I enjoy playing it for friends. I suppose I’m saving it for my old age…but will there still be orchestras to play it by then?)

We sang straight through the finale, then Mo. Payaré said, “Let’s get some coffee,” and we broke with the orchestra. When we returned, we sang through the end once more, stopping now and again to detail a cue and, once again, that was that. It’s a funny business, this “symphony chorus” type of gig. I mean, this music is not for the untrained, but having been an opera-chorister for so long, with multiple acts of music to get through in an evening, to me it feels like a guilty pleasure. All that attention spent sitting in silence in anticipation of such a short, albeit glorious, burst. I feel like I’m getting away with something. Perhaps if we were singing Mahler’s Eighth, the “Symphony of a Thousand,” I’d feel as if I were putting in an honest evening’s work. But how they’re going to ever do that work here, with “choral-terrace” seating for 80, I don’t know. Perhaps they never will.

Home, and straight to bed. It was a long day.

3 October

The only variation in tonight’s proceedings was that the orchestra was playing the entire symphony. Also, there was a small audience of patrons in attendance. We entered after the first movement, so we didn’t get to hear that. But sitting through movements 2-5 was still about an hour. It was a long sit, but fortunately, the music was scintillating.

Payaré — it must be said, bears a passing resemblance to Gustav Mahler.

Photograph by Moritz Nähr

Tonight, I became aware of just how often the first three, or the first four notes of the “Dies Irae” are woven into the motivic material of this symphony, sometimes in minor, sometimes in the major mode. I had never thought about it before, but of course it was; it had to be. The whole symphony is about life’s struggles, leading to death and then triumphant rebirth: resurrection. The big chorale theme in the fourth movement camouflages the four-note motive by putting it in a major mode. But it’s there…and everywhere, once you start looking for it.

I mean, the “Dies Irae” is probably the most famous musical motif in western music. It’s less commonly heard today, since the destruction of the Catholic liturgy in the late 1960’s, but it’s still there. So is death; the great equalizer. But then, the traditional Requiem Mass is a great equalizer as well. For 1500 years, the “Mass of Rest” employed the same text at every funeral Mass. Peasant or king, everybody got the same treatment, the only difference being the scale and style of the music. But the “Dies Irae” would have been sung the same for everybody.

Mahler only uses a little bit of it, but it is constantly there. Given the work’s culmination in such a memorable explosion of eternal life, I wondered how many supposedly learned critics had realized its presence here. (Everyone likes the idea of eternal life, but nobody wants to suffer to get it. Really, the title of this work should be “Life, Death, and Resurrection.”) The “Dies Irae” is the simplest of thematic illustrations, and therefore easy to overlook. So is death, for that matter — until it happens, which is inevitable. Why not spare a thought for it in advance?

4 October

Entering the theater from the Seventh Avenue side, and proceeding into the north reception room, I managed to find a seat in a room that clearly wasn’t meant for a chorus of 80. There, I had a chummy talk with a soprano who informed me that the only other opera company in the area producing anything like grand opera had suffered setbacks and been booted from the small opera house at the Escondido Center. Sad, but the vacancy did make more room for my own thoughts of Gilbert and Sullivan production.

We warmed up very quietly, detailed some cues, then lined up and made our way to the off-stage corridors, awaiting our entrance. Once seated, I was all ears. I’m afraid I did catch a couple of muffed moments. Mo. Payeré gave two very inexact (overly delicate) cues for the pizzicato strings at the end of the second movement, and the horns made a ragged entrance in the third movement. Ah well, perhaps it wasn’t noticeable beyond the stage.

Right away, I saw Holly Jones, the foundress of the original San Diego Gilbert and Sullivan Repertory Company and widow of San Diego’s great critic Welton Jones, sitting in the third row. I had spoken to her earlier in the afternoon, and knew that she would be there, along with two friends.

We sang relatively well, I think, especially considering that we do not stand until two thirds of the way through our music. My voice felt well pointed, even if most of my cues were meant to be sung softly. We don’t blaze up until the end. I did not have much satisfaction in our two female soloists, alas. I know Anna Larson has sung this piece for decades now, and all over the world, but…she sounded tired and rather congested.

The audience response was very enthusiastic, even though I really didn’t believe that Mo. Payeré was making enough out of the crescendo on the final chord. It felt…perfunctory; not in keeping with the scale of the piece, or the subject matter. I’ve heard final crescendos in this piece that go on for twenty or thirty seconds. After all, it’s the end of time, and the beginning of eternity! The crescendo should assume gargantuan proportions, build until it becomes intolerable, until the listener simply can’t imagine that it can go on any longer, and then explode in an ecstatic, rushing super-nova of sound. It is the sheer joy of ultimate fusion with the God-head, in climactic love. That was not happening here. This was just a modest ecstasy, perhaps in keeping with the tight and pragmatic over-all vision of the conductor, and the decidedly modest choral forces employed in this complex equation. Perhaps the percussionists were afraid of breaking a drum-head; perhaps the strings were afraid of popping strings, or bowing right through their horse-hair; perhaps the triangle-ist was afraid of being left behind. Whatever the case, the ending was not as I would have it.

Chorus in the 7th Ave reception room waiting to go on.

Afterwards, I met with friends in the outer lobby. They agreed that more was wanted, or at least distinctly possible. Specifically, they felt that the ending was perfunctory, and that the off-stage brass were too soft. Need to open some doors a bit. They really did feel that a chorus of 80, for this piece, was simply not enough. It needs to be 180, or 280, more like.

I walked them to their car, which was parked just in front of the former Eighth Ave. Books. In fact, Charlie had worked there in the latter-stages of the business. It used to be one of my favorite haunts: a long, tall space, with skylights which illuminated the stacks, the length of which required periodic passage-ways between aisles, the shelves continuing above the head of the shopper. I received the single greatest piece of book-store philosophy in my experience there. I had stopped in with a friend and inquired as to whether they had the book They All Played Ragtime by Rudi Blesh. The guy behind the counter searched his memory pensively, pursed his lips, shook his head and said, “No…nope, haven’t seen that one in a while.” Then he added, “It’ll find you.” I thanked him.

My friend and I left, then stopped on the sidewalk outside and said to each other, ”Did you hear that?!? That was AMAZING!!!” Bear in mind that this was in the ‘90s, before Amazon or any other online book-search. Patient resignation and the awareness of possible failure was required in the search for just about anything. But the combination of optimism and kismet embodied in that response has remained with me to this day. In fact, I almost prefer it that way; it’s the romantic in me.

Walking back up Fifth Avenue to my own car, I felt relatively happy, yet unsatisfied, and full of ennui for the downtown I once knew.

5 October

Something happened tonight which made me feel a lot better about myself professionally: the maestro threw us a false-cue! When we arrived at the choral-cue “Was entstanden,” the first two syllables of which are to be sung detached and slightly accented, I looked at my music, and then up at the maestro for his cue, and found him with his arms raised, with no-place to go. After a millisecond’s indecision, half of the chorus miraculously came in together, the other half (myself included) laying out for the sake of musical discretion, lending the cue a muted quality that was in keeping with the music.

The maestro continued on, as did the music, without missing a beat. But he looked up at me with a wide-eyed, mildly amused look on his face as if to say, “What was that?” I’m sure the expression on my own face answered back, “I haven’t the slightest, but we got away with it!”

Shortly thereafter, I had the curious experience of feeling that I had splattered the top G all over the lower-brass, except that I literally couldn’t hear my own vocal regurgitation, so tight was the acoustic, and such was the volume of the singers around me. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good sign for the overall acoustic qualities of the choral terrace, but at least, in this case, it seemed to do no harm. Outside of those instances, which were unnoticeable, the second night was as great a triumph as the first. Everyone went out whistling the tunes.

6 October

Today, nothing went wrong, and everything went right. Not that anything that had happened so far had in any way compromised a performance, but today was special, a triumph. I heard my G today, loud and clear. There were no miscues. Payaré conducted like a demon…or perhaps, shall we say, a frenzied angel. And the orchestra surpassed themselves. You’re not going to get a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” a whole lot better than that. Bigger, perhaps, but not better.

As we swelled with the phrase “Mit flügeln” I actually wondered if I was going to be able to control my emotions. It was a moment, but I bore down and sang with an apocalyptic fortitude. The San Diego Symphony is taking flight once again, I have a new side-line as a symphony chorister, and the nature of the piece makes you think of all the loved ones who have gone before you…and you hope that they are soaring, too. I thought of my dad, two years gone. He would have been there to hear it. Maybe he was.

I had lent a CD of Sir John Barbirolli conducting the Mahler 2 to one of my attending choristers, and told her, “When you hear the ending, you’ll hope that when the time comes for you, it will happen just that way.” And it’s true — and just as true from the inside singing out, as from the outside listening in. Probably even truer. I don’t just mean the glory, but also the softly unexpected beginning, the motherly voices in your ear smiling and whispering, “Auferstehen, ja, auferstehen!” (Get up…yes…stand up!), and raising you from the sleep of death to a joy so unimaginable that it can hardly be spoken out loud. No one likes to be rudely awakened from deep sleep, and despite post-Romantic gargantuan expectations, Mahler would never be so gauche as to shout heavenly glory into the ears of one fast asleep.

The thought crossed my mind the other night, that each performance of Resurrection is like saving souls, but one at a time. The symphony, with its depictions of life’s struggles, intimate moments, death, and awakening to new life, is like living a single life’s drama with each telling. It’s exhausting work, but is always rewarding. I guess God never gets tired of it. At least I hope He doesn’t, or we’re all in trouble.

On my way home, I picked up a Wendy’s chicken sandwich for mum, now in her late nineties. (I was sure I’d end up eating half of it later, and I did.) Then I made my way across the flood control channel through deepening gloom towards Pacific Beach. Fog was enveloping the causeway bridges, and it comfortingly obscured the ugliness of mundane, everyday life and the wreckage of its human tragedies. The week had been full of morning and evening fogs, ‘twas the season. But sometimes, the sun gets behind the fog, and the resulting aura provides a glimpse of something beyond the bald plainness of this mortal coil, a transformative, glowing, Mahlerian, light-filled hyperion of suffused beauty. A place of coolness, rest, and peace.