June 17 - 21, 2015: New York City

June 17 - 19, 2015, New York City: Ruth and I travelled to NYC to sing in a choir that merged with five others to perform Mozart's Requiem at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The pictures below show the electricity and busyness of New York City when we arrived. Our entire visit energized me almost to the point of wanting to move to NYC! 

Times Square

Times Square

Times Square Theater District

Times Square

Times Square - the city never sleeps!

We also visited the rebuilt World Trade Center and the nearby memorial sites for the victims of 9/11, a very somber experience.

World Trade Center

World Trade Center

World Trade Center Subway entrance

World Trade Center memorial

World Trade Center memorial

World Trade Center memorial

World Trade Center memorial

 A short distance away is Old Saint Patrick's Church.

Old Saint Patrick's Church, New York City

 

Old Saint Patrick's Church -- front door solid metal

A short distance from Old Saint Patrick's is Wall Street.

Wall Street Building

 

New York Stock Exchange

On two of the evenings, Ruth and I went to see two Broadway plays - "Skylight" starring Carie Mulligan and Bill Nighy. Of course it was excellently acted and quite dramatic. The play even introduced an additional sense not normally experienced by the audience -- Carie Mulligan cooked a dinner on stage and the smell permeated the theater. The next night we went to see "An American in Paris" which is really an excuse for ballet to be performed on stage. The dancing was spectacular (how do they DO that?) and the music quite well sung and played (music by Gershwin).

Of course we tried out a couple of fine restaurants which were different from the usual restaurants available in LA. 

But as mentioned earlier, the primary reason for visiting the City was to sing Mozart's Requiem in Carnegie Hall. Although Ruth and I had performed in Carnegie Hall twice before, this experience was one of the most educational music lessons I have ever received. The conductor was Joe Miller, a name that probably doesn't ring any bells, but he was one of the most enthusiastic, entertaining, and knowledgeable conductors I have had the pleasure of singing for. Each choir had rehearsed the Requiem before arriving in New York, but I'm certain that each choir had its strengths and weaknesses -- in particular, I didn't think that our choir had rehearsed enough since I had not yet internalized the music as I normally do before a concert. The first rehearsal began with him saying "Well, let's just start out and see what we have," and so we began. Let me tell you that the sound emanating from our ~200 voice choir was so glorious that tears came to my eyes it was so wonderful! There were many excellent voices contributing to the choir, many seated next to me. (The bass in front of me was blind, but was able to tell his neighboring singers where Joe wanted to begin singing at when they lost their places. I saw that he had a braille version of the music and during one of our rests, I asked him how music is written in braille. He told me that he uses one finger for reading the words, and the other finger on a line below the words for the notes he was to sing.) At first I was intimidated, but by the end of our rehearsals, not only had my voice adjusted to the choir where I internalized the music, I also discovered that I could actually sing the fast paced passages convincingly and my voice's range even increased. Joe's lessons not only instructed us on how to sing the Mass, but he also gave lessons on the history of Mozart and I learned so much about why the Mass was structured as it is. Joe would stop and ask "Why do you suppose Mozart wrote this passage as a fugue?" and he'd spend a good ten minutes answering this question after he had heard input from choir members. One funny thing occurred during the last rehearsal the day before our concert. It appeared that there were two versions of the Requiem -- two sections had different endings where one of them contained an extra few measures. Of course the version we had practiced from was the version that was shorter than the others, so Joe said "No problem. Write this down." as he explained what notes and words we were to sing for the measures that were missing. Even having the musical background that I have didn't make it easy to write this down as he explained it so I ended up resorting to arrows to indicate if the notes were going up or down because he was talking too fast for me to write it down correctly. The blind singer tried to explain it to all of us to what I thought was no avail. And here we would be performing the piece the next day! Fortunately, everything worked out, but I thought for sure this passage was doomed. 

After several days of rehearsals, the concert took place on June 20th. We were second on a program consisting of many youth ensembles. Although Joe seemed pleased with the results (He stood backstage as we walked off and shook each of our hands congratulating us), I felt that the choir had done better during the rehearsals. Nevertheless, our experience learning and performing Mozart's Requiem was rewarding. Note: you may have noticed that I'm posting this blog entry in 2017, two years after the events took place. Obviously I have probably forgotten many details of our trip, and in fact can't locate pictures of our performance at Carnegie Hall. Hopefully I'll locate them eventually and post them later.