The Festival program has been announced and we’ll be singing in three performances of Oedipus Rex and the Symphony of Psalms. The production is by Peter Sellars and originated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in April 2009. There are some interesting photographs of the LA production here.
I’m really excited. I really like both works and have done the Symphony of Psalms on several occasions. Oedipus Rex will certainly be a challenge, but it should be great fun too.
I’d recommend against inviting your mother to the performance. >_>
I just mentioned Oedipus Rex in my "I don’t like opera, but…"thread. The first time I heard it was at a live performance, when I was in college. (A friend of mine was a music major, so I ended up hearing all kinds of cool stuff I might not have been exposed to otherwise.)
I saw a production in Scotland about six or seven years ago. I never imagined that I might get a chance to sing it. And this production by Peter Sellars looks very interesting. I gather that we’ll be interspersed among the audience at various points, which should be fun.
Symphony of Psalms is Stravinsky’s best work in my opinion, and it is my favorite choral/symphony work from the 20’s and 30’s. I can still remember listening to the intro to the first movement for the first time. I was in ninth grade, I bought the album for another work (Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms*). It changed the way I listened to music. I ordered the sheet music that week and learned to pound out that haunting intro on the piano.
The photos in the link show a sort of performance for Symphony maybe? I mean it is obvious some of the pictures are of Oedipus, but others are labeled as Symphony. Have you heard any details on the nature of the performance? I’d be interested to see how it will put together.
*This was the CBS Masterworks compilation remastered by Sony for CD with the two works I mentioned above, plus Bernstein conducting Poulenc’s Gloria. The album was my first exposure to Gloria as well, and that has become an all-time favorite for me too. Sadly this album is out of print, but you can get the same recordings separately on other albums.
The photos that include both men and women choristers are from the Symphony of Psalms. When there are only male choristers, it’s Oedipus Rex.
My undertanding is that we’ll perform Oedipus Rex first. This will then be followed by the Symphony of Psalms, which acts as a sort of ‘redemption/funeral’ over the corpse of Oedipus, and ties the two works together. I have no idea yet how the whole thing will be staged. It’s unlikely that the LA production can be replicated exactly, since the Sydney Opera House is no doubt quite different from the venue in LA. We’ll find out all those sorts of details when we start staging rehearsals in January. In the meantime we have to memorise both of the works.
An update: having spent most of December memorising the two works, last night we had our first rehearsal with Peter Sellars. He very soon had us singing while crawling on our stomachs across the stage! It’s certainly going to be a very different experience from our normal performances.
We’re up to final rehearsals now: a couple more full dress run-throughs and then the performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. It’s been an intensive and exhausting month, but great fun too. Peter Sellars has got us doing a great deal of “sign language” throughout the performance, and we’ve all found it quite challenging to bring the words, music and actions together.
There are some photos here of the earlier rehearsals over the past few weeks.
A good friend of mine, Jackson, was performing in a Stravinsky festival back in the 1960s. He was one of two basses cast in the role of God for a performance of The Flood, and the composer himself was scheduled to be in attendance. He was understandably nervous about this – the atonality of Stravinsky’s music is challenging enough for the singer, but the dual role of God places a special burden on the bass soloists, who are, as it was described to me, vocalizing sine waves that are directly counter to one another.
Anyway, as the story goes, Jackson just happens to bump into the maestro himself in a hotel lobby. The scene was comic enough because Jackson is a tall, lanky scarecrow of a guy, and it’s kind of awkward to play the starstruck fan to someone a full foot shorter than you are. Nevertheless Jackson introduces himself to Stravinsky (who spoke very good English), heaps piles of praise upon the composition that he felt deeply honored to be performing, etc., then apologizes in advance because, as he put it, “the other bass and I are having a difficult time finding our notes from time to time and may not have all of it completely right in time for the concert.” The diminutive composer looks up at him through his owl glasses, pats him on the shoulder, and says gently, “My dear man…who will know?”