When I came to Paris ten years ago, I met, through mutual friends, a young British composer living and working in town. Our bond was not only music, but faith. He impressed me as someone quite out of the ordinary with credentials as a world class organist and an experienced vocal and operatic coach and accompanist for some of the world’s great conductors. He impressed me even more as a Christian as I began to discover the intensity of his faith, the humility that characterizes everything he does and the enormous gifts that were being lost, I felt, on a poorly remunerated freelancing life in Paris. This man’s name is Peter Bannister.
Soon I discovered his compositional gifts. Taking a chance, I convinced my orchestra to commission him to write a symphonic poem, Clouds of Magellan. He conceived the piece while in the Polynesian Islands awaiting the first of his two adopted children, gazing out over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean and thinking about the irony of wars fought over an expanse called “Peace”. The work was a great success and was followed by another commission which was an even bigger success. A true test of new music is how the musicians in the orchestra, often cynical, respond. Without a doubt, Peter’s works have moved them more than any of those from the 30 living composers we have commissioned.
Clearly, at least for me, Peter, for all his performing skills, was first and foremost a composer. Composers generally do not live off the income produced by their compositions, and Peter was the last one capable of selling himself as a composer. A magnificent idea surfaced. With the great 20th century French composer Olivier Messiaen’s 100th birth anniversary occurring in 2008, the thought of commissioning Peter to write a work honoring this most religious and theologically inspired of composers seemed natural. Messiaen was also an organist and faithfully served his Paris church, Église de la Sainte-Trinité, for over 60 years. His enormous compositional output was filled with theological currents, making him the 20th century’s “French Bach.”
And so the SDG board enthusiastically agreed to commission Peter to write a major work for chorus, soloists and orchestra to be performed on the eve of Messiaen’s anniversary, December 9, in Messiaen’s church with L’Ensemble Orchestral de Paris under my direction. At this writing, Peter has sketched out the entire work, an oratorio in seven movements titled Et iterum venturus est, which comes from the Nicene Creed and is translated as “and he shall come again”. The piece was conceived as a work for the Advent season, using texts from the Old and New Testaments concerning the Incarnation and the Parousia (second coming) of Christ. I am looking forward to receiving the score in September.
This commission excites me as much as any because of my personal connection to Peter, because it will take place in my adopted city with my orchestra and because I have great hope that the passion of Peter’s faith mixed with his brilliant and profound compositional style will produce something special. Peter’s own words about the piece capture the essence of its importance: “For me one of the principal reasons for wanting to write Et iterum venturus est is the relative lack of musical literature dealing with God’s future for the world—a theme that is just as important in the Advent season as remembering the birth of Jesus at Christmas. The words ‘and he shall come again’ are ones which we recite every Sunday in our places of worship, yet I find myself asking whether we take them seriously in a way that shapes our lives in their light.”
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For most, the Berlioz Requiem is a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience. Not often do over 500 performers gather on stage. I once had the opportunity to conduct 1,200 musicians in this great work in Lyon, France, close to the composer’s birthplace. The occasion was a Berlioz Festival in Lyon and the two orchestras of the city, who were not on good terms with each other, were engaged along with 1,000 choristers to perform the Requiem in an old Roman amphitheater outside the city. Some nasty things had happened between the two orchestras so I was quite anxious about the agreed upon idea to have musicians from both sit side by side. The rehearsals passed without incident and the concert was such a triumph that I brought both concertmasters to the fore to shake hands and receive the tumultuous applause only forgetting completely to acknowledge the tenor soloist, the great Nicolai Gedda. He never let me forget that blunder.
Interestingly, the work was a commission from the French interior minister who intended to “restore sacred music to the prestige which it had long ago lost in France.” But Berlioz was not a religious person nor known for writing sacred music. His music was theatrical, shocking, highly original and overwhelming in orchestral effects. The Requiem is all of these things. There is nothing like it in the repertoire. For the believer there is a lot to appreciate. The vision of Judgment Day is astonishing with brass bands screaming from the four corners of the earth. But for all the bluster there is just as much quiet, mystical and penitential gentleness as when he sets the words “Recordare pie Jesus quod sum causa tuae viae” (remember, dear Jesus, that I am the cause of your journey).
How I look forward to conducting this masterpiece at Wheaton College (April 18 & 19, 2008) with the magnificent spirit and ability of its students and with the wonderful musicians from the Apollo Chorus, Northern Illinois University Concert Choir, and the Valparaiso University Chorale. It will be an eye-opener to a wonderful period of French history, to another religious tradition, and best of all, to the glorious truth that when we end our troubled, terrestrial journey we will enter into an unspeakably beautiful afterlife without tears.
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December 11th was a red letter night for my Paris orchestra. The program was all-American with Jay Gottlieb, a brilliant American pianist playing new works by Yehudi Wyner and John Adams and the orchestra playing Barber, Bernstein and Copland. The concert was under the patronage of the US Ambassador, Craig Stapleton, and attended by a good number of Americans in Paris. Two remarkable things happened: Jay improvised on American tunes supplied by the audience and in the style of composers suggested by the orchestra: Happy Birthday a la Stravinski, Summertime a la Debussy, etc. The audience went wild. The other surprising thing was how my French orchestra tore into Bernstein’s “On the Town” and the encore, Copland’s “Hoe Down” in which they all screamed “Whoopie!” with an American gusto that even shocked them. The result was a screaming and ryhthmic clapping audience. A great night.
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I’ve done relatively little opera in the ten years we’ve been in Paris, but the recent experience of conducting the magnificent Berlioz opera Les Troyens in Geneva, Switzerland, rekindled my love for the art and fortunately I am looking forward to numerous opera engagements in the future, including another Les Troyens in Amsterdam in 2010.
Rare is an opera engagement an unalloyed pleasure. I can count on one hand those that have been–a Beatrice and Benedict in St. Louis and an Alcina with Renee Fleming in Chicago are among them, but the Geneva experience takes the cake. The ambiance was positive throughout, the camaraderie of the singers magnificent, the rapport between the stage director and conductor beautiful, the total engagement of the huge orchestra and chorus most unusual and above all the indescribably inspired music of Berlioz lifted us all to heights we thought impossible. Thirty-three years ago I made my European debut conducting this opera in the same opera house. I trust this doesn’t represent the bookends to my career because there is so much more I wish to do! But were I to die tomorrow I would die a happy man. The sixteen main singers, the huge chorus, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the staging all combined to bring extraordinary fire to this five-hour opera.
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The Haydn Creation, a bit of which can be seen below, was a rather special occasion in that it celebrated Natalie Dessay’s return to singing after having serious vocal chord problems and an operation. This was the first time she had ever sung the work, and it shows her in fine vocal form. She is a very special artist with one of the most beautiful voices of our time, with superb musicianship and, best of all, with a love for her art that communicates effervescently to all. Her husband, by the way, is the bass soloist.
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It is a glorious, brisk autumn morning that has welcomed Anita and me back to our home in Paris after almost three months in Switzerland. Our lives are about to change at the end of this season as I will be leaving the music directorship of my Paris orchestra after ten years. Our lives will return to freelance conducting for the foreseeable future and we are looking forward to it. Administrative work is a huge part of directing an orchestra and robs me of what I love best - making music. So, one more year with this lovely orchestra (but I’ll continue with the Bach at Notre Dame) then it’s on to trains and airplanes.
Back to Switzerland. I wish to share briefly two experiences that occupied my time in that stunningly beautiful country. Two engagements took place there - nine weeks in Geneva preparing and performing Les Troyens, a five hour opera by Berlioz, and one week in Zurich with the Tonhalle Orchestra conducting Stravinski’s Symphony of Psalms and Orff’s Carmina Burana. Geneva was a homecoming in two ways. I made my debut in Europe 33 years ago with the same work in the same opera house. I was but a kid then and frightened like a deer in headlights doing this huge opera in a foreign country and foreign language. Now, what a difference! And there were still members in the chorus and orchestra that remembered 1974.
The cast this time was sublime and the performances electrifying. It was a homecoming also because Les Troyens was the work that I had the audacity to do at Carnegie Hall in 1972 with my New Jersey Chorus, a performance success that ’springboarded’ my career. A number of chorus members from the New York area that sang with me 35 years ago came to Geneva to celebrate, and we partied the following day on a gorgeous estate overlooking Lake Geneva. Experiences like these are worth a lifetime.
The Zurich experience was of a different kind. A mere five rehearsals, a new orchestra and chorus I’d never conducted and a program handed to me which I would not have chosen. Stravinski’s Symphony of Psalms, one of the glorious religious works in all the literature, juxtaposed with Orff’s banal and bawdy Carmina Burana was not my ideal program. What I said to both the orchestra and chorus prior to the first rehearsal was that I hoped they would play the Stravinski with such pureness of heart and beauty of sound that nobody would want to hear the Orff! But of course I knew, and they knew, that the audience would come to hear principally the bawdy. Well, the performers did what I asked and after each of the three nights’ Stravinski the audience was rapt in silence. “Alleluia, Praise Him” are the final words left on a clean C major chord in a mystery-full pianissimo. It was magic.
Then came the Carmina, which some of my friends question as a work not befitting a Christian interpreter. Sometimes I wonder myself. But I remind them and myself that there is a moral at the end of this debauchery:
“O Fortune, like the moon ever changing,
rising first then declining,
hateful life treats us badly
then with kindness
making sport with our desires
causing power and poverty to melt like ice…
weep ye all with me!”
I would have rather ended with the Stravinski than the Orff, but it just wouldn’t have worked.
Meanwhile, great creativity continues to brew at SDG. I’m happy to report that three major initiatives are projected along with a number of smaller ones for the years 2008, 2009 and 2010. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Olivier Messiaen (the 20th century’s greatest theologically-oriented composer) we are commissioning Peter Bannister to write a major work, which I will conduct here in Paris on December 9, 2008, the eve of Messiaen’s 100th anniversary. Peter is an extraordinarily gifted composer and we all expect this to be a very important international event.
Our work continues in other areas as well. It’s too early to define, but if all goes well SDG will sponsor a very, very special and unusual DVD recording of another monumental sacred masterpiece in 2009. As soon as we have this project assured I will let you all know. Then, in 2010, we hope to give birth to the largest and most influential of all our commissions to date. You will hear about all these projects in more detail in due course.
Before I close I wish to publicly congratulate and thank Chandler Branch and his office colleagues Debbie Sawicki and Irene Forte as well as the volunteers that further their magnificent work on behalf of SDG. While I’m off halfway around the world enjoying music-making, they are busy keeping this wonderful but precarious organization afloat.
Many thanks to all of you for your continued interest, support and prayers for spreading God’s beauty, inspiration and consolation through music.
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