As Utah Symphony music director Joseph Silverstein remembers it, it was he who first broached the idea of the Tanner Gift of Music bringing in Robert Shaw to conduct the Berlioz Requiem.
And that's ironic, because, although he is currently its chairman, Silverstein is the one member of the Tanner Gift committee who wasn't here to be bowled over more than a decade ago when Shaw first did the Berlioz with the Utah Symphony.That was in 1981, a performance of such clarity and impact - and stupendous sonic proportions - that I called it "Symphony Hall's finest hour." Next Friday's and Saturday's performances, by contrast, will be presented in the Salt Lake Tabernacle - itself the home of some pretty memorable performances of this work under Maurice Abravanel - and instead of the Utah Symphony Chorus will feature the Mormon Tabernacle Choir along with tenor soloist Stanford Olsen, originally from Utah but now with the Metropolitan Opera.
It was a combination Silverstein says he couldn't resist suggesting.
"I had, of course, played the work many times in Boston under Charles Munch and Seiji Ozawa and had heard Shaw's recording with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra," he explains. "And, given the acoustical properties of the Tabernacle, it seemed as though it would make a very special effect."
Whatever his reasoning, he didn't have much trouble persuading his colleagues. University of Utah music department chairman and Tanner Gift committee member Ed Thompson has particularly vivid memories of those 1981 performances of the Berlioz.
"I had asked Newell Weight for permission to join the Utah Chorale, as it was then known, just to have the experience of singing with Shaw," he recalls, "and we had an incredible experience. A very intense experience, because he was very demanding. No more of us than of himself, though, and I'll never forget walking out of the hall that evening and feeling grateful to have been involved not only as a listener but as a participant. It was absolutely mind-boggling."
Nor was he the only one to think so. A few years later that 1985 Atlanta recording managed to cop no fewer than four Grammy Awards, including Best Classical Album, Best Choral Performance Other Than Opera and Best Engineering.
As the subject of this week's concerts, it also proved to be a propitious choice. Because within months of its having been decided on, the Tabernacle Choir, which had never sung the piece before, was invited to Israel to perform the Berlioz Requiem with the Jerusalem Symphony under David Shallon.
Recalls Tabernacle Choir director Jerold Ottley, "Had we not worked with Shaw previously, at the 1987 Teton Music Festival" (where he led the choir in Mendelssohn's "Elijah") "I would have had great apprehension. We'd never really tackled anything like that. But once I knew Shaw was interested, and knowing his personal love for the work, we decided we'd give it a try. Especially since the edition he had done of it gives the altos something to do, something not true of the original."
One gathers, moreover, that that Teton Festival "Elijah" proved an unexpectedly happy collaboration. Tabernacle Choir members still treasure a letter the conductor took the trouble to write following those performances.
"I cannot remember another instance in which so much religious devotion was geared to such intellectual understanding and technical mastery," he declared. "It was a rare and wonderful experience for me, and I thank you all deeply."
Even today Shaw recalls being impressed with the choir he found waiting for him at their first rehearsals in the Salt Lake Tabernacle.
"I remember thinking that under Ottley it had become a lot more refined and disciplined, and I admired him enormously for it," he says. At the same time he remembers thinking that, in that acoustic, "the choir was massive in sound and a little bit diffuse, so that it was difficult to get the particularization one wanted. But I think a lot of that has been fixed over the years."
For one thing, the choir itself has received some intensive exposure to the Berlioz Requiem, or, to give it its official title, the "Grande Messe des Morts." Not only did they perform it in Israel in 1992 but the following year they took it to the Teton Festival for a pair of performances under conductor Ling Tung.
"It's still a very stressful piece to sing," Ottley acknowledges, citing the long lines and high tessitura. "And except for the tenor solos in the `Sanctus,' the choir is on all night long, so it takes a lot of vocal stamina. But now they love it, and love to sing it."
Part of that is due to the nature of the piece - as associate Tabernacle Choir director Donald Ripplinger characterizes it, "a musical drama with a liturgical text." A drama on a vast scale, moreover, as in addition to the aforementioned orchestra, chorus and soloist the score calls for four brass bands, to be deployed antiphonally around the hall.
Shaw himself recalls a performance he almost had a chance to conduct at the site of the work's 1837 premiere, Paris' Dome des Invalides, where it was mounted as a memorial to the French soldiers who had died in the seige of Constantine. That, however, was torpedoed by yet another North African military assault.
"The Atlanta Symphony was scheduled to do four concerts in Paris that week," he says regretfully, "and they were all knocked out when Reagan overflew Libya and everybody in the world got scared about air travel."
Other than that, among the 30-odd performances of the Berlioz he has conducted Shaw speaks with fondness of one at Pottsdam State Teachers College in upstate New York, "where we performed in a hockey arena, a shape not unlike the Tabernacle. We had arranged to have performers from every high school in the state, so we had something like six or seven hundred singers, two or three hundred in the orchestra and, in the brass bands, each part doubled twice.
"I remember thinking that acoustically it must have been the same sort of situation we may experience in this hall. If we can keep the brass bands together and seat them as far apart as possible, the audience should be almost surrounded by those wonderful fanfares in the `Dies irae.' "
As it happens, this week's performances will also be something of a memorial, to businessman and philanthropist Obert C. Tanner, who with his wife Grace established the Tanner Gift of Music in 1982. Despite his death last fall, the funding that makes these collaborative concerts between the Utah Symphony and Tabernacle Choir possible will continue, according to committee secretary Herold L. Gregory.
"We don't foresee any changes," Gregory says, adding that the committee's charge is to use whatever earnings the $1-million endowment is able to yield. "Of course with declining interest rates, we have less money to work with now than we did even five years ago. But we have no intention of invading the principal. We'll just go on and present what programs we can within the budget, even if we need to spread them out. But so far we haven't needed to."
As for Shaw, he likewise shows few signs of cutting back. Though he stepped down six years ago after 21 years as music director of the Atlanta Symphony, he still conducts there four to five weeks a season and continues to record with them as well as with his own Robert Shaw Festival Singers.
"If anything, it's gotten more intense and solid," he says of his "retirement" years. Generally regarded as the dean of American choral conductors, he still teaches and lectures widely and a few years ago helped found the Robert Shaw Institute to foster excellence in musicmaking, particularly the choral arts.
Upcoming projects include a Mahler Eighth Symphony with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, Cincinnati May Festival Chorus and Atlanta Symphony Chorus, which will then be taken to Carnegie Hall; a recording of "Elijah" with the Atlanta Symphony, for Telarc; and a book on choral conducting, to include "what kind of exercises prepare a choir for what kind of repertoire" - all this from a man who next week celebrates his 78th birthday.
"Maybe I shouldn't even venture this," he says after some thought, "but I think art itself is worship. Anything that is creative and makes man a nobler human being is already worship, and it seems to me that in our time most governmental and religious institutions have essentially invalidated their capacity to lead man's intellectual and moral greatness. So I'm very happy to find in any performance of a Mozart or Berlioz requiem a cathedral for what being human should mean. I think they create their own sanctuary."
At present free tickets for the April 22-23 concerts are still available at the Utah Symphony box office in Abravanel Hall, to a maximum of four per person. For information call 533-NOTE.
Starting time each evening is 7:30 p.m., with reserved seats to be held until 7:15. After that, unoccupied seats will be given to standby patrons lined up outside the Tabernacle. Children under 8 will not be admitted.