Reviews of Lance's Tanglewood Festival Chorus Performances

SHAW LEADS TRIBUTE TO BSO EX-MANAGER

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Date: TUESDAY, August 26, 1997

Page: E3

Section: Arts and Film

The program was fitting -- Samuel Barber's ``Prayers of Kierkegaard,'' a work commissioned by the orchestra during Perry's tenure, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. ``Prayers'' has been a neglected work of Barber's until relatively recently. The first recording, made by the Chicago Symphony a few years ago, won a Grammy Award. It demonstrates all of Barber's strengths: the sensitivity to language and its rhythms; the idiomatic and skillful writing for solo voice, chorus, and orchestra; the long, gracefully flowing musical line; the sense of musical shape. Nothing lasts too long. It also betrays one of Barber's faults -- the composer's heavy-metal loud music always sounds black-browed, overbearing, forced. Shaw conducted a noble, heartfelt, and persuasive performance. It was impossible to tell, though, what tongue his soprano soloist, Janice Chandler, was singing in. This part was conceived for the young Leontyne Price, who brought her whole being to devotional texts, and so did Sarah Reese in her radiant performance on the recording.

Shaw prepared choruses for the now-legendary performances of the Beethoven Ninth by Arturo Toscanini and George Szell. His own performance Sunday afternoon may well become legendary too. It had the clarity of vision of his two great mentors, but it also boasted Shaw's own mellower human qualities. Shaw's approach was leisurely and spacious. Intensity came not from speed, volume, and whiplash attack but instead from the accumulation of proportionate detail. Nearly everything about the performance was memorable, but the Adagio seemed particularly profound in the way the utmost simplicity can be -- the simplicity that can be arrived at only by the very wise and the very experienced. The tempo relationships in the last movement were superbly judged because they were stages in an emotional progression, too.

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang with glorious tonal freedom, which matched the fire and glow from the orchestra, but the solo quartet proved uneven. The bass, Nathan Berg, woofed and the soprano, Chandler again, unforgivably broke her great spiraling phrase to gasp for air before the high note. On the other hand, tenor Richard Clement, an alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, sang the tricky march section with a rhythmic spring and definition of tone that served him and the music far better than the volume and brute force we usually hear in this episode.

You could hear every note in this performance, but what made the experience of Shaw's performance so profoundly moving -- and so appropriate -- was that you could also hear the function of every note and its meaning.

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