Yesterday was stuffed to the gills with music. It started with two services at Holy Communion in the morning for which I played organ . . . and ended at 10:10 with my last jury rehearsal at Carthage . . . and in between was Carthage’s honors recital, the senior recital of one of my voice students, and a band concert at St. Joseph’s High School for which I served as guest accompanist. All in all, it was a most amazing day… and each chapter had its own particular delights.
I have to begin with Carthage’s Honors Recital, which in so many ways in the culmination of all we’ve done in the music department all year long. It’s a celebration of the exciting new excellence which our department has achieved over the last several years. And in a very real way, it embodies why all of us on this music faculty have chosen to pour our heart and soul and sometimes our tears into these young musicians who have been entrusted to us.
The honors recital use to take shape somewhat capriciously, with musicians gaining a place on the program simply by being nominated by their teacher- but for the last three years, a stringent gauntlet of auditions has been in place which has helped make each spot on the honors recital a coveted prize. Maybe even more important than that, each honors recital has been exciting and – dare I use the word? – entertaining.
This year, twelve of our finest musicians were selected for the honors recital. . . and I was really in the thick of it since I was the accompanist for seven of the twelve. In some ways, it was a little too much fun for one person to enjoy 🙂 but on the other hand I wouldn’t have traded away any of those collaborations. I played for a fine clarinetist, a fine trombonist, and five singers- each of whom did a really wonderful job. Rounding out the concert was a tuba player, a pianist, an organist, a flutist, and a marimba player…. each one contributing their own bit of excellence to the proceedings. And for as fun as Saturday night’s “Kenosha’s Got Talent” program was, our Honors Recital was twenty times better for me because it wasn’t just a celebration of talent- or of guts- or of dreams- but also a celebration of the kind of excellence that only comes from intense diligence. And to be there was not just a matter of paying an entrance fee. . . but rather earning their place fair and square.
I really enjoyed every moment of the recital, but especially . . .
. . . I enjoyed listening to Taylor Weinstock’s performance of the Tuba Sonata by Paul Hindemith not only because of his fine playing but because my friend and colleague Dimitri got to deal with that fun piano accompaniment rather than me. . .
. . . I enjoyed the moment when I sat down at the grand piano to play for one of the singers, opened up the music they had just handed me offstage, and found a huge wad of green chewing gum stuck between the first page and the inside cover of the binder. . .
. . . I enjoyed watching my colleague Jane LIvingston, head of piano studies, playing side by side with her student Rachel Wolf, in the opening movement of the Grieg Piano Concerto, and trying to figure out which of those two was having more fun. . .
. . . I enjoyed Mark Paiser, the organist on the program, waiting nervously backstage for his over-sleeping registrant to show up (a registrant- I think that’s the proper term- is a person who stands next to the organist and pulls stops so the organist can focus on playing the music) and managing somehow to keep his cool and ultimately playing beautifully . . .
. . . I enjoyed an interesting moment offstage when one of the recitalists walked backstage and started to cry, evidently upset with how they had played (they had a couple of memory slips) – and as the person walked away, one of their colleagues who’d been sitting in the audience came running up, evidently knowing that they might be upset and wanting to be there. . . a neat moment of collegiality between two musicians that really put a lump in my throat. . .
. . . I maybe enjoyed most of all the performance of tenor Dan Ermel because he’s a voice student of mine. Dan is someone whose first love is musical theater – and for which he is tremendously gifted – and as a matter of fact, he was on last year’s honors recital singing musical theater. But this year, it was Dan’s own idea to audition for honors with something “classical” – and I came up with the idea of him singing the first seven songs of Robert Schumann’s song cycle “Dichterliebe.” I sang these seven songs on my junior recital and I knew that they formed a wonderful storyline of falling deeply in and then painfully out of love, and Dan – music to his credit – took hold of these songs with a vengeance and sang them every bit as expressively as anything I’ve ever seen him do in musical theater. What was impressive about that is how he could do that – take hold of these songs and make them seem so real, so his own -even though they were in another language (German) and written 170 years ago. For all I’ve seen and heard Dan do over the years, I am proudest of this achievement and thrilled to have been part of his journey of discovery.
And as the participants in this year’s honors recital took their final bow (minus one of the twelve, who was too under the weather to perform) and I suspect that all of my colleagues in the audience were feeling as grateful as I was that we have the privilege of working with such wonderful young musicians.
pictured above: the musicians of this year’s Honors Recital take a final group bow. At the far left is Dan Ermel.