The first summer I sang with the Shaw Festival Singers, a number of singers—some of our best singers—showed up a day late. They had just completed a three–week stint singing with the Oregon Bach Festival, and that was how travel arrangements worked out. I was immediately aware of these singers as a group of particularly successful, involved participants. They were young, mostly recent graduates of DMA conducting programs, on the hunt for credentials, resume lines, good jobs. During meal breaks, and around beers at the end of the day, they talked a lot about the Oregon Bach Festival, about the group’s organization, repertoire, and artistic director, Helmuth Rilling. They argued, sometimes heatedly, about the many differences between Mr. Shaw and Mr. Rilling.
I have often noticed that loyalties to particular conductors, even amongst professional singers, can be a very important aspect of the choral experience. Conductors encourage loyalty, sometimes manipulating their singers shamelessly and trashing the competition, while singers eagerly take sides, sometimes expressing irrational opinions. Both Mr. Shaw and Mr. Rilling inspired such heated fealty, though to give them credit, I was not aware of either trying to do so. For myself: I was grateful, even overjoyed, to have been chosen to sing for Mr. Shaw; and I became intrigued at the possibility of singing for Mr. Rilling. I wanted to learn technique and repertoire. So when, the following winter, I read an audition announcement for the Oregon Bach Festival Chorus in the Choral Journal, I immediately responded, prepared my materials, and flew up to Minneapolis to sing an audition.
The Shaw Festival had a very simple design: rehearse, perform, record. We, the choir, were the focus. The Oregon Bach Festival was far more ambitious. Designed by Managing Director Royce Saltzman, who was on the University of Oregon faculty, and by Mr. Rilling, it included conducting master classes, a youth choir, an organ recital series, a conductors’ forum, concerts and presentations by guest ensembles, and a series of more or less popular concerts, for a broader, summer festival audience, in addition to the “main stage” performances of major choral/orchestral works, conducted by Mr. Rilling. The professional chorus was only one part of the overall offering, albeit an important one. We comprised the chorus for the major works and for the master class rehearsals and performances, and rarely had time off from cramming notes and pounding our voices. The singers had to look out for themselves, keep their voices in shape, remain healthy, while around them swirled a bewildering amount of activity.
Looming over the entire project was the quiet but powerful presence of Helmuth Rilling. Assistants organized the master classes, prepared the chorus, administered the large number of available offerings; but his influence informed everything. It was a family affair for him: even his wife and daughters participated, setting a tone which became a major theme of the festival—that we were all together in this venture, sharing in a common goal. Helmuth considered himself a bridge builder—even, jokingly, wearing a hard hat at some events. One striking aspect of the experience for the performers was, that singers and instrumentalists lived and ate together, and treated one another as peers-- something I had never before experienced. The normal barrier between the two groups simply did not exist. Social interactions included all of us, just as musical events did.
We had only a fraction of the rehearsal time that we had with Mr. Shaw; there was simply too much music to prepare. We spent six hours a day with Mr. Shaw; we were lucky to spend six hours total with Helmuth, per preparation. He did not have a particular system for seating us, a rehearsal “method,” or easily recognizable principles; he just wanted us to sing the music accurately, with good German diction, at impossibly fast tempos. A couple of times I had the opportunity to sing with his German choir, the Gächinger Kantorei, in Germany and in Israel, and saw the same procedure there—sing through the piece, fix problems, regularize ornaments, emphasize text. Yet he managed, through force of personality and clear vision, to get what he wanted from us.
The totality of the work at hand was of paramount importance to Helmuth-- the structure, pacing, and meaning of the Bach Passions, for instance, took clear precedence over the techniques we used to express them. He always sought to express this meaning, through his interpretation, his pacing, what he said to us, the expression on his face. Mr. Shaw often said, “Sing the sounds of language, not the language itself;” I cannot imagine Helmuth ever saying such a thing. I took every possible opportunity to participate in master class rehearsals and performances—at least twice as many as were required of me—and did see more discussion of techniques there, in what he said and demonstrated to the student conductors. Mostly, though, he was simply more confident, more efficient, more commanding than they were: he did things better, not differently.
During my years with Helmuth, I sang a king’s ransom of Bach: both Passions, the B Minor Mass, Magnificat, motets, a tremendous number of cantatas; Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Mozart’s Requiem and C minor Mass, the Brahms Requiem, several Haydn masses, the Britten War Requiem, works by Bruckner, Penderecki, Tan Dun, Duruflé,-- and these are just the ones I pull off the top of my memory as I sit here at my computer. Others will surface later. One night after a concert here in Chicago I went out for a drink with Helmuth and his wife, Martina, and they asked me, Why do you leave your family, summer after summer, and come to spend three weeks in Eugene, Oregon? I answered, Because of the repertoire. Where else would I have such a rich opportunity? But at least as much as the repertoire, I treasured being part of the Togetherness that Helmuth sought through his work; part of his family. He built bridges I still use and love.
