Digital Analogue

Saturday night at the Orpheum

Over Spring break this year, the Knox College Choir, the Sandburg College Choir, and the Galesburg Community Choir went on tour to perform at Carnegie Hall. Tonight they reprised that performance at the Orpheum. When I got there the first floor was relatively full, but after I found a seat I noticed people up in the balcony, so I went up there. The seats themselves are much better, the sound is better, and the view is much better.

The pieces being performed were Francis Poulenc's Gloria and Ralph Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem. Aside from some bobbles when they first started, the orchestra sounded great, and the 130-voice combined choir sounded fantastic, except when they were interrupted by the soloist's yawling.

I suppose that's a slightly unfair characterisation. Within the genre of operatic soprano, she was fine, I guess; Laura Lane certainly seemed happy with her performance after the show. And when she was singing fairly quietly, she sounded okay, if not fantastic. But when her volume was anywhere north of mezzo-piano, the quality of her voice was such that it seemed as if she were trying very hard to swallow her own tongue. It's not a pretty sound, and it does nothing for the enunciation, either. Why do people actually like this sound? I feel a little bad panning her performance so badly, because it's clear she's worked very hard to achieve that style, and she's really succeeded. But, egh.

But the choir itself (and, for that matter, the baritone soloist) sounded great. The Gloria had two sections that sounded like they were pulled right out of a Broadway musical, but other than that they were your basic big choral works. The chorus sang them as if they were easy, well-blended and not fighting the orchestra for attention. I wonder how much more I would have liked it if they had just had a woman with a normal voice singing the solo....

"The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again." --George Miller