This is one of my favorite choral works. I've had the opportunity to sing it once
It's one of my favorites, too, and one of the lasting regrets of my choal-singing career is that I never got a chance to perform it.
I've been to two live performances of it in my life. The first was at New York's Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall in the fall of 1963; this was a repeat of what I believe to have been the US premiere at Tanglewood that summer. My brother was in the Tanglewood chorus that year, so he was a participant in that performance. Having (or course) never heard the piece before, I was completely blown away.
I went to hear it again when the Boston Symphony Orchestra did it a couple of years ago, with Thomas Quasthoff and Ben Heppner. Wow. The only thing that marred it was the idiot whose watch (or something) started beeping during "Strange Meeting". He wasn't near enough for me to silently snatch his watch and smash it, since he (I'm assuming he, perhaps unjustly) didn't seem to know how to silence it.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2008-08-03 04:15 pm (UTC)It's one of my favorites, too, and one of the lasting regrets of my choal-singing career is that I never got a chance to perform it.
I've been to two live performances of it in my life. The first was at New York's Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall in the fall of 1963; this was a repeat of what I believe to have been the US premiere at Tanglewood that summer. My brother was in the Tanglewood chorus that year, so he was a participant in that performance. Having (or course) never heard the piece before, I was completely blown away.
I went to hear it again when the Boston Symphony Orchestra did it a couple of years ago, with Thomas Quasthoff and Ben Heppner. Wow. The only thing that marred it was the idiot whose watch (or something) started beeping during "Strange Meeting". He wasn't near enough for me to silently snatch his watch and smash it, since he (I'm assuming he, perhaps unjustly) didn't seem to know how to silence it.