The Fredösphere

I'm listening to Aaron Copland:  A Centenary Tribute.  Hearing the Fanfare for the Common Man reminded me of choir tour during spring break one year back in my undergraduate days, when the brass ensemble with us would play that piece while the choir processed into the sanctuary du jour.  (It was a religious college choir giving concerts of sacred music in churches.)  We basses would take our natural, superior place on the topmost step of the risers as the trumpet soared and the gong roared and some terrified baby inevitably screamed its head off.  It was during one of those moments I concluded the piece would have been better titled Fanfare for the Common God.

I'm also enjoying a recording of Brahms' Liebeslieder-Walzer sung by an all-star quartet.  "Brahms needs the most mature voices."  You hear that said if you hang around choirs long enough.  There's a kind of old-school choral sound -- dark, rich tone with unbuttoned vibrato -- that is particularly suited to Brahms and which is produced naturally by older voices.  My undergraduate choral experience was dominated by a director who loved that sound and made it his single-minded mission to beat all that was youthful, thin, and shrill out of our voices.  (He would occasionally turn to the sopranos and say, "you are all 50 years old, you weigh 300 pounds, and you're Russian:  now sing!")  This was in the time before it was widely appreciated what can be achieved by smalls voices with straight tone in the right repertoire.  Thus, although he achieved much in the pursuit of the sound he wanted, the result suffered from one-dimensionality, and the whole enterprise had a quixotic air about it.

I suppose the ideal performance of these waltzes by Brahms would be by a mid sized choir of obese, 50 year old Russians, but this quartet is great nevertheless.  Of the four, I particularly admired Olaf Bär, who possesses one of the most exquisitely perfect bass names I've ever heard (and he sings real good too).