The second Sunday in December has become one of the longest, most tiring, and most inspiring days of the year for me. The morning is taken up with Holy Communion’s Christmas program – at both services – and that afternoon, just as our queen sized bed is calling my name, it’s time for me to head down to Kenosha and rehearse the orchestra for the Sing Along Messiah. I think if it were anything less than Handel’s Messiah ( Vivaldi’s Gloria or Bach’s Magnificat or – perish the thought – Jim Brickman’s Christmas Memories) I would say No Way. But Handel’s Messiah is one of those works that just feeds your soul in a way that very few works can. . . and for me it’s also a piece of music that connects me to my own past and my own musical legacy in a very powerful way. So I’m happy to do it; in fact, I’m privileged to do it. (And when my wife and Kate Barrow and several others from Holy Communion show up to sing in it, having had as long a day as I have, I realize anew that this work exerts an irresistible draw on a lot of people.) And in this 250th anniversary year of Handel’s death, I was especially determined to do this marathon again.
This year was especially taxing, however, because the good folks at First United Methodist Church who sponsor the Sing Along Messiah also asked me to sing the bass solos, because the fine bass who has participated in the past (who has some connection with the congregation) was unavailable this year. . . and they thought that as long as I was in the room, it made sense for me to do it. I could think of a couple of recent Carthage alumni who would have been worthy choices but they were involved in some kind of concert earlier that afternoon which made them unavailable for the one and only orchestral rehearsal, so I acquiesced to the request… excited at the chance to sing these arias with orchestra if a bit nervous at how it would feel to be conducting everything else. (It’s not like I would be sitting there, gathering my strength and my wits for each of the three arias. I would be hard at work making the rest of the performance happen.) What made me confident to accept the challenge was that at the time the question came up, I was feel exceptionally healthy and singing really well- and I was feeling like the Peyton Manning of baritones, ready for anything.
Well, unlike Peyton Manning and his Colts, who as of this writing are having another brilliant season, things went south for me about three weeks ago when I contracted a cold which has only gotten nastier as time has gone by. In fact, it got so bad earlier this week with my overnight coughing that Kathy woke up at 2:30 a.m. and was about to vacate our beloved bed for the quieter (if draftier) confines of our guest room. But I was not about to let her do that, and I willingly exiled myself instead, where I continued coughing but at least wasn’t keeping her up in the process. (I’ve been there the last two nights, in fact.) So as Messiah Sunday (game time) approached, I was feeling less like Peyton Manning and more like Barney Fife. But wonder of wonders, when I climbed on that podium to rehearse my first big recitative – “Thus Saith the Lord” – my voice just sailed like there was nothing wrong. I don’t know how much the Methodists are into miracle healing, but it was as though I’d just visited Lourdes and had my affliction erased. And with the other soloists (most of whom are former students of mine) in the room, I was relieved to be singing like something resembling my Old Self.
Part of the reason I could sing as well as I was is that for my solos I was surrendering leadership of the orchestra to the harpsichord player, who happened to also be my faculty colleague and good friend Dimitri Shapovalov. We had rehearsed together earlier in the week and I could just tell that he had worked diligently to learn this challenging score (he had never really played any of the arias before – just some of the choruses) and entrusting myself to his capable, sensitive hands and skills felt great. And even in a couple of cases where he got things rolling a little bit too slowly, he responded perfectly as I sought to move things ahead. I should also say that the orchestra was comprised of superbly talented and richly experienced players- most of whom are middle school, high school or college music teachers and conductors in the area. . . which means that even with a relatively bumble-headed conductor like yours truly on the podium, they were incapable of playing with anything less than sublime beauty and musicality. So between all of them and Dimitri, I was in good hands.
As it turns out, the performance itself was much more challenging than the rehearsal was, because try as I might I just couldn’t keep myself quiet and serene during the other pieces. The choruses especially found me flapping my arms like I wanted to take off (that’s just what you have to do when you’re conducting a sanctuary full of singers) and by the time we got to my solos, I felt like was trying to sing a challenging piece immediately after doing a gymnastic routine on the parallel bars. But again-wonder of wonders- I managed to get through in pretty good fashion. (I was just thrilled that I wouldn’t feel compelled to walk out of there in shame with a paper bag over my head.) As for the rest of the soloists- Sarah Gorke, Rita Gentile, Libbi Weisinger, Trevor Parker- they covered themselves in glory, as did Musici Amici, who sang two of the choruses as well as a brief choral prelude. And as we all finished out the night with the Hallelujah Chorus, I was smiling for all kinds of reasons- for the joy of music itself, for the privilege of conducting this masterpiece, for the delight of collaborating with such superb colleagues, and for the pleasure of making it possible for some “ordinary” folks to taste it with us.
One last thing- I sent an email to all of my voice students at Carthage plus a few other singers, inviting them to the Messiah and encouraging them to attend. . . and even remembered to send out a reminder. Well, we had a great crowd but as far as I could tell, there was not one single Carthage student there. I was too busy at the time to be much bothered by that, but as I was driving to campus that evening (for some rehearsals) I started thinking about that and I found my mood darkening considerably. I know that some of them surely had perfectly valid reasons why they couldn’t make it, but there’s no way that all of them were otherwise occupied by unbreakable obligations. And what made it a little bit worse was that there were just under a dozen UW-Parkside who were there, lending their fine voices to the proceedings. That made the absence of Carthage faces all the more bothersome to me. Just as I was pulling on campus, I was mentally writing a scathing email to my voice students in which I was going to call into question just how serious they were about music and singing if not a single one of them could manage to get to this performance. And then, almost like the last miracle of the day, the first two students I ran into after parking my car were two of my voice students – and without a word or prompting from me, Chris and Sam asked me how the Messiah had gone and expressed their regret at having to miss it. And in just that simple expression of interest and regret, my clouds of frustration vanished. And as if to reinforce the point, the first of my voice students I saw this morning, Michael, also asked me about the Messiah – and again without any prompting whatsoever. I wanted to go into these last two days of classes feeling good about my students, and I do. I feel good about a lot of things, in fact, and when the going gets tough, that’s something to be thankful for.
pictured above: in mid-rehearsal for this year’s Sing Along Messiah