A while back I posted about being put through the vocal wringer by a bunch of young composers. The weekend I spent with them dredged up some memories about what Anthony Tommasini, music critic for the New York Times, termed "extreme artistic experiences." Of which I have had a couple!
From the Sublime to the Ridiculous
The Veil of the Temple
In 2004 I had the amazing experience of participating as both a soloist and chorister in the Lincoln Center Festival's production of John Tavener's The Veil of the Temple. For an adequate description of what that work is I refer you to Tommasini's review. Short version: performance began at 10:30 p.m. and ended at 5:30 a.m. the next day; it is a beautiful, hypnotic, mystical work.
Most of us choristers were not looking forward to this, but it turned out to be without a doubt one of the high points of my career. I was thrilled to be chosen to sing with a small ensemble of the Temple men (Temple Church in London was one of the participating choirs). We sang from various points from all over Avery Fisher Hall, eventually ending up in the back of the highest balcony. Our little song was one of my favorite parts of the whole event. It was a setting of the Pater Noster; it started as a fragment and then was repeated with additions throughout the night until it was a whole song toward the end. Which actually was the way most of the piece was constructed. Fragments of movements were introduced in the first section and then were gradually extended in the ensuing sections.
I forget how many sections there were--I think it was seven. We each had a humongous stack of scores we had to lug around for days, one for each section. The first segment was a thin score, but then they got thicker and thicker. The entire stack was almost a foot high.
So yeah, it was kind of amazing. Though you can see why we weren't looking forward to it all that much. If it hadn't been such a nice chunk of change we would have been distinctly irritable going in. But once rehearsals began, we warmed up to it right away. The music is riveting. If you ever, ever get a chance to experience this work in live performance, you should go.
It is an extreme artistic experience, performing all night long (or listening, for that matter; many in the audience were on the floor on cushions the whole night). Not that everyone was on stage the entire time; we took turns. Round about 3:30 a.m. I recall hitting the wall a bit, getting all dizzy and drab feeling. It's not that I've never been up that late before, but stimulating beverages were usually involved, and of course there weren't any on hand for the performers except for the beer the Temple men had thoughtfully smuggled in. I figured I'd better not drink any. I had one of the big chant solos toward the end, and I was down in the green room working a Times acrostic with a friend when I suddenly realized my cue was about to happen. We dropped everything and ran like hell. Which was good, because it perked me up just in time.
The Gaian Variations
If The Veil of the Temple was a high point of my career, Nathan Currier's The Gaian Variations was also right up there, but for radically different reasons. I wouldn't trade either experience for anything. (Oddly, both of these performances took place at the same venue--the same year.)
I am so freakin' proud to say that I performed in the "premiere" of this work. I was there! I put "premiere" in quotes, because there is some question about whether it was actually "performed." I'll call it an event instead. This event has entered into legend, not just in the New York City music world but globally. Which is ironic, because it's about the globe. It was very pompously billed in flyers and cards featuring the "blue marble" as "the most important event for the environment in the history of Lincoln Center." (That may not be an exact quote, but it's close. I haven't been able to find any of the original PR.)
So what was it? An unbelievably self-indulgent, dense, not exactly ugly oratorio set to scientific texts about ecology and astronomy and Gaian theory and stuff. And I'm here to tell you that the vocal writing was abusive. Just one example of many--in the last movement there were six pages of repeated high Ds for the first sopranos. With words, which we ignored.
And get this: you had a chorus of probably 80 or so, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, two guest pianists, a quartet of singers, a string quartet, a bluegrass band, a bunch of actors, a troupe of dancers, and a guy with an electronic machine that played a drip sound. I'm really not sure that even covers everything.
The piece was endless! We never, ever got to sing through the entire work in rehearsals. Rumor had it that the run time was two hours, but of that we were all incredulous. So anyway, we did our darnedest in the rehearsal time we had, and that had to be good enough.
By the time we shuffled on stage we were all thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing. Last minute firings and replacements of performers, rumors of behind-the-scenes ego trips, histrionics and threats of bodily harm did nothing to inspire confidence that this was going to be an edifying experience.
Boy, were we wrong.
So what happened, you're asking? It became obvious to us that the "event" was going to run a little long, and all of us were aware of when the overtime was going to kick in. Frantic cuts were instituted in the last "act," but as zero hour approached and we had just finished struggling lamely through a chorus movement I think we had read through maybe once, the gong sounded. Not literally--a distinguished-looking white-haired guy opened the stage door and stepped out in an ominous manner, and the conductor closed the score, turned to the audience and gestured to the soloists to bow. There was a stunned silence from the maybe 100 people left in the audience (Avery Fisher Hall holds something like 2500), then they timidly put their hands together for a few claps. The principals promptly left the stage, and the rest of the cast of thousands--and the audience--just looked at each other for a moment and then realized that they were free--free!!! And we had not gotten to the high D part yet!
It was schadenfreude on a massive scale. People in NYC are still talking--and guffawing--about it. Those of us involved were highly sought-after dinner party and reception conversationalists for months. It was big.
Just Google The Gaian Variations, and you'll come up with pages and pages of articles about this fiasco. Even just reading the titles of them is entertaining.
But to expedite things and also to be completely fair, here is a link to an article recommended by Nathan Currier's lawyer (yes, there is a lawsuit over the affair): Losing His Composure!
And in researching this, I was excited to come across a blog post from another performer who was there. (http://createquity.com/...) It's a very good description of what happened, though he doesn't seem to have been as ecstatic about it as most of the rest of us were. At least the professionals were--maybe it's different being a volunteer. Poor guy...at least I got paid for my pain.
But the icing on the cake--the chocolate truffle cognac-spiked buttercream--was the New York Times review by Allan Kozinn. I relish to this day his depiction of the end of the "event." The money quote:
I felt liberated. About half an hour earlier, during a disquisition on daisies, black-clad dancers gyrated down the aisles and onto the stage, and I wondered if I had died during the afternoon and this was hell.