Music as sacrament

Commonweal, Nov, 1998 by Keith C. Burris

The mastery of Robert Shaw

I am a Connecticut Yankee transplanted from the Midwest. I have never worshiped the sun, never sought the heat. But this past June ! headed due and deep south on a sort of personal pilgrimage, to hear and see the world's master of choral music, Robert Shaw. At eighty-two, Shaw is not only the grand old man of American classical music, he is also one of the most adventuresome conductors working anywhere.

Shaw has been a household name for fifty years. Millions of Americans remember the Robert Shaw Chorale of the 1950s and 1960s. They heard it on tour or bought the records. Still others remember his work on the radio and with Fred Waring. But even then Shaw was leading choruses for Toscanini, teaching at Juilliard, and founding the Collegiate Chorale. An intensely serious musician, he has always sought the most noble and difficult work. Thus, at the peak of his own chorale's popularity, he went to work with the Cleveland Orchestra, running its choral program so that he could learn from the legendary George Szell. In fact, Shaw tailored his chorale's tours around the Cleveland Orchestra's schedule.

In those years, Shaw was setting a new standard for vocal music in America - while popularizing it. He had a deep and widespread impact on two generations of community, high-school, and college choral direction. Working with Alice Parker, he created the now-enshrined arrangements of American Negro spirituals and Appalachian folk songs. The Robert Shaw Chorale recorded these, along with Irish folk songs, sea chanteys, Stephen Foster tunes, and Christmas music. These became the canon of popular American choral music. And because of the popularity of the chorale, Shaw was able to introduce middle America to something else the monumental works of choral music: the Mozart Requiem, Handel's Messiah, Bach's Passions, etc. He brought these to high school gyms in mid-size towns throughout America, alternating them with programs of spirituals and glee-club repertoire.

Shaw was the first to lead a professional performance of the Bach B Minor Mass in New York, and he made the first American recordings of it and the Brahms German Requiem. He toured the B Minor Mass with the chorale, which many thought was insane, but sold out the bookings even before leaving New York. And he took it to Russia for a historic performance that is said to have deeply affected the musical life of that country. Shaw was also the first in America to perform Benjamin Britten's War Requiem - a work he has continued to champion - and he commissioned Paul Hindemith's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed."

All this is an amazing legacy, but it constitutes only part of Shaw's life in music. For what is less well documented is Shaw's work since he disbanded the chorale thirty years ago and moved to Atlanta as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Not only did he build a good regional symphony into a world-class orchestra, but he:

* Championed modern classical music;

* continued to compile an incredible list of recordings (made up, in part, of near-definitive performances of great works, along with obscure choral works that otherwise might be lost to the recording world);

* changed the musical geography of the South, lifting standards but also integrating his programming and his orchestra;

* and in recent years, pursued a second - or third - career as a musical patriarch and rabbi.

In November of last year, I scheduled a business trip around a Shaw concert with the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus. Shaw is now its music director emeritus and conductor laureate. The maestro mounted an extraordinary program: Bela Bartok's "Cantata Profana," which Shaw premiered in New York some forty years before; Samuel Barber's "Prayers of Kierkegaard"; and Ralph Vaughan Williams's "Dona Nobis Pacem." These are modern pieces, and all are choral, making them doubly hard sells. But the Atlanta audience did not find the program obscure, high brow, or inaccessible. Instead, three performances were virtual sellouts and the audiences roared.

Afterward, Shaw recorded the pieces for Telarc (80479), causing more than one critic to admire the vocal product and the conductor's nerve. Many younger conductors wouldn't dare attempt such a program, and no other conductor in America has the clout to get such pieces onto disc - and then to sell them. This year Shaw won his fourteenth Grammy. I would not be surprised if this new recording brings him a fifteenth.

My June pilgrimage was to Greenville, South Carolina, where The Robert Shaw Choral Institute has relocated from southwestern France. The institute has had a number of sponsors over the years, including Emory, Ohio State, and Boston universities. It is now sponsored by Furman University, a physically beautiful school in Greenville with an outstanding music program. If Furman sticks with Shaw, it will be known worldwide.

The institute consists of two weeks of intensive score study and preparation with Shaw, culminating in two concerts. The two programs I heard in Greenville were even more extraordinary than what I had heard in Atlanta. The first program was held at Greenville's performing arts center. The second was at the First Baptist Church. Both were followed by encores of Shaw/Parker spirituals.