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An extra course from the chorus
A concert by male members of the Master Chorale is the cherry atop its regular season. The program is a lively, emotion-filled tribute to famous chorales of the past.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 18, 2002
TAMPA -- Later this month, the women of the Master Chorale are featured in the Florida Orchestra's performance of Mahler's Third Symphony, while the men of the chorus are not needed. So artistic director Richard Zielinski came up with the idea to have the men give a concert of their own.
"I tease the guys," Zielinski said. "Their season would have ended with the Verdi (Requiem). But I had to keep them out of trouble for at least another month, so I programmed this concert for them."
The concert, performed Sunday afternoon at Bayshore Baptist Church in Tampa, is a throwback to the 1940s and '50s when male choral singing experienced something of a golden age in the United States. The Robert Shaw Chorale, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians and the Roger Wagner Chorale put out popular LPs performed by men.
The program includes tributes to each choral director, including such favorites as Shaw's Drunken Sailor, Waring's Dry Bones and Wagner's Green Grow the Lilacs. There also is a set of hymns, Ron Jeffers' A Celtic Tryptych and other arrangements for first and second tenor, baritone and bass, about 70 voices in all.
"You put these guys on these four-part arrangements, and they can really rattle the roof," Zielinski said. "Something happens when you get a bunch of guys singing this kind of stuff."
Zielinski is not particularly fond of the modern-day model of a men's chorus, Chanticleer, which has a dozen voices and tends to take a connoisseur's approach. Instead, he favors a full-blooded sound, with wide dynamic ranges.
"This goes back to the old Robert Shaw, Fred Waring type of stuff," he said. "Those guys just sang the stew out of it. They really used their full voices. So we're going for a real active, very expressive sound. I think it's exciting."
The rehearsals have been enlivened by an element of male bonding, as when the group worked on Jeffers' setting for a Yeats poem, A Plea for Old Friends.
"It's all about losing friends, thinking about old friends," Zielinski said. "We all have good friends; we all came from a group of guys that we hung out with, probably. That evening was a memorable evening, because I have a good friend who's fighting a brain tumor. I thought, man, I'm going to lose this guy; he's got maybe six months to live.
"There's just a special bond when you get a group of guys together like this."
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PREVIEW: Men of the Master Chorale give a concert at 4 p.m. Sunday at Bayshore Baptist Church, 3111 W Morrison Ave., Tampa. Tickets: $9 and $12. Call (813) 258-9468 or see www.masterchorale.com.
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