Very belatedly, the Hunter College Choir Concert
For those of you who missed it, there was a concert given by the Hunter College Choir and Orchestra on December 5th, with a repertoire of American music. My impressions are as follows:
The primary impression I got after the concert was, actually, of just how important the acoustics of a stage are to the quality of a performance. Last spring, I sang with my high school chorus on that stage, along with quite a few other school choruses as part of a chorus festival. I’m not sure if it was the curtains blocking the sound, or just the acoustics of the room, but the sound quality was rather atrocious. I could tell that some of the singers were producing quite a bit of sound, but that sound just wasn’t being projected. The same thing happened at this choir concert. The problem wasn’t quite as bad, considering the size of the chorus and of the orchestra, but it definitely detracted from the soloists–especially the one, Max, who apparently was sick during the show. Personally, I felt that such a huge detractor to not only choral performances, but probably any performance on that stage, should have been remedied ages ago. But I have no real say in how Hunter spends its money, so oh well.
In terms of the repertoire itself, I found it interesting how it was very clearly divided into three sections: songs composed to religious/spiritual lyrics, traditional folk songs, and West Side Story. I interpreted this selection to delineate three distinct aspects of the eponymous America–its religious founding, its folk culture that developed completely separately as a part of a new country, not Europe, and the urban melting-pot and conflicts resulting from the resulting mesh of international cultures. The choice to only include the works of three composers was a bit odd, as I’m sure there were at least more composers of religiously-toned music than Randall Thompson and Leonard Bernstein, but I digress.
Although the West Side Story section rounded out the transition from traditional to folk to modern, I don’t really think that it was such a good idea to have lyrics originally meant to be sung by one person at a time be sung by a chorus. Much of the time, the emotional intent of the lyrics were muddled. When they sang “America”, some of the back-and-forth between male and female roles was confused, and the sarcastic replies to lyrics such as “Ev’rything free in America!” came off as just a reply, albeit in a lower register. In a piece that leans so much on the clarity of individual expression coming through, having a chorus sing it, even with everyone only slightly off from each other, dims the effect.