As part of the 12 Nights of Electronic Music and Art presented by the FETA Foundation, Swedish composer Adrian Knight joins four University of Miami composition grad students, for an evening of guitars, violin, saxophone, narration and lots of electronics.

The Coral Gables Congregational Church’s Community Arts Program All-Star Jazz Ensemble is one of the 15 finalists, and one of only four community ensembles, in the 2013 Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival, taking place from May 10 to 12.  

The sound of “Echoes of Harlem” is unmistakably Ellington’s, without over-simplifications or apologies, regal and swinging — even if played in tank tops and flip-flops.

It’s just another rehearsal for the Coral Gables Congregational Church’s Community Arts Program All-Star Jazz Ensemble, but it’s a special one. There are just a handful of Thursday evenings left before the band plays in the finals of the 2013 Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival in New York City.

Of the 15 finalists, South Florida will be represented by three ensembles: The Dillard Center for the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale;  the New World School of the Arts, Miami, and this All-Star Jazz Ensemble, one of only four community bands chosen nationwide.

“This is awesome,” says Daniel Sagastume, 17, the band’s baritone sax and a student at Coral Reef High School. “I never really thought I would have the possibility of something like this. This is something special.”

Daniel Strange, the director of the Ensemble, says that when they found out that had reached the finals “we were overjoyed.”

“We rehearse just one night a week, two and half hours and this is the Superbowl of high school jazz band competitions,” says Strange, also an adjunct professor at University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. “For us to be one of the finalists it’s huge. These guys will never forget this experience.”

The event includes not only the competition, but also workshops, jam sessions, and other activities. As an added incentive, the three top finalists will get to perform with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, as guest soloist. Already trumpeter Marcus Printup, drummer Ali Jackson, and trombonist Elliot Mason, current members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, have visited Coral Gables to work with the band.

The All-Star Jazz Ensemble started with only 13 members, not enough for a big band, in 2009. According to CGCC literature, the Ensemble experience was “designed to sharpen sight reading, style, technique, improv, rhythm, recording studio skill, college prep and career development through the practical study and performance of jazz repertoire that spans the standards to newly-composed works.”

It was perhaps the most visible piece of an ambitious, evolving  program.

While the CGCC has had a Summer Concert Series since 1985, it instituted its Community Arts Program in 2002 with the arrival of Mark Hart, executive and artistic director. That same year, the church established the Conservatory for the Arts, an after-school program with the purpose to “make music education accessible to all kids,” explains Hart. “So even if they have financial difficulties, we make it possible for them to have a teacher and learn music. Our Saturday program is based on a sliding scale depending on what a parent can afford, it can go from full scale pay to nothing.”

The program includes several ensembles — including the Junior and Intermediate Orchestras, the Advance Chamber Ensemble, a Jazz Prep Band and the All-Star Ensemble — and its own recording label, CAP Records.

“When I started we had seven kids on a Tuesday evening,” recalls Hart. “Right now we have close to 125 kids in the program.”

Students must audition for the All-Star Jazz Ensemble, explains Strange, the director, “and we get the best players of each school. We’ve had good quality players from New World, Gulliver, Ransom Everglades, Coral Gables, Coral Reef, Felix Varela …. What’s interesting is that this is the best band we’ve ever had, yet this year we don’t have any players from the top fine arts schools.”

Sagastume, the bari sax player who next year will be attending New England Conservatory in Boston, didn’t have any experience in playing a large jazz ensemble.

“When I joined I had just got into high school and I wasn’t part of the band in my school,” he says. “We didn’t have a real jazz band, so when I got in here it was awesome. It’s been the best experience. We play such good literature. We play great classics from the Count Basie band or Glenn Miller. You don’t get this kind of exposure in a high school band because you get lower level [arrangements] Here we are playing the real deal.”

The Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ is located at 3010 De Soto Boulevard, (across from the Biltmore Hotel,  Coral Gables. For more information call 305-448-7421, ext. 120 or check CommunityArtsProgram.org.

At its 1853 premiere in Venice, Giuseppe Verdi’s beloved opera La Traviata was jeered. That may have been the fault of the singers, as the composer hinted in a letter to a friend. Since Verdi’s time, lush orchestrations, a string of aria hits, and a libretto about a libertine courtesan who finds love and dies have made La Traviata the most performed opera in the world. Indeed, the need to make such a familiar production fresh has lead to many outlandish and sometimes even absurd productions.

Not so with Florida Grand Opera’s 2013 season closer. FGO plays La Traviata straight – and the singers would have made Verdi proud.

On April 20, María Alejandres was indisputably the best leading lady of the season, and one the best Violettas I’ve ever heard. Her voice projected powerfully, with a flawless technique and colorful musicality. It was deliciously decadent to hear Sempre libera, Violetta’s first act tour de force sung, not shrieked.

Ivan Magrì held his own as Alfredo, with a youthful lyric tenor in complete control and balancing neatly with Alejandres throughout. However, it took a couple of acts for dramatic chemistry to flare between the two, in the duet Parigi, o cara. It was worth the wait.

Giorgio Coaduro made a fine Germont, with a convincing paternal presence and vocal command. Although it took him a little while to warm up, he did so in time for a heartfelt Di Provenza il Mar, il Suol.

The cast as a whole seemed disconnected from each other in the first acts, finally coming together as an ensemble in Act III. Bliss Heberts’ staging did not help. It seemed static, perhaps because Allen Charles Klein’s majestic sets did not leave much room for anything or anybody else. This posed a particular challenge for the dancers in the Gypsy and Picador chorus. Fortunately, choreographer Rosa Mercedes made the most of the limited space.

Maestro Ramon Tebar brought out the best in the orchestra, taking a Bel Canto approach that highlighted the influence that style had on Verdi’s work. The contrast in tempi between the pathetic opening prelude and the adjacent party scene, and the unusually fast Brindisi were refreshing jolts.

Energized, the audience responded to FGO’s production of La Traviata with a standing ovation that lasted almost as long as the courtesan’s drawn-out death.

Argentinian Aslan reinterprets the master of jazz-tango fusion Astor Piazolla with his quintet, in the last performance of MDC Live Arts season.

Part of the 12 Nights of Electronic Music and Art, presented by the FETA Foundation, the Treble Girls feature Anne La Berge on flute and electronics, Diamanda La Berge Dramm on violin and vocals.

The MDC Live Arts series closes its 2012-13 season with the Brooklyn-based bassist and Argentinean bandleader Pablo Aslan and his quintet performing Piazzolla in Brooklyn this Saturday, April 20, at The Colony Theatre. Aslan’s work from his 2011 recording and follow-up to his Latin Grammy and Grammy-nominated Tango Grill, continues a tradition in fusion of jazz and tango first explored by Astor Piazzolla, tango composer and bandonéon virtuoso, the father of nuevo tango in the 1950s.

After World War II both jazz and tango moved out of the dance halls and ballrooms and into the popular clubs and concert halls, both becoming music to listen to with a much more diminished role for dancing. What saxophonist Charlie Parker and the other early beboppers were doing for jazz, Argentinean Piazzolla was doing for tango.

Piazzolla, while living in New York, was looking for commercial success in the United States, which led to his jazz/tango work Take Me Dancing, recorded in 1959. His nuevo tango introduced sax and electric guitar to tango, mixed electric and acoustic instruments, and fused harmonic and melodic structures.

Miami Herald, JazzTimes and Artburst contributor and critic Fernando González wrote in his 2013 Grammy-nominated liner notes for Piazzolla in Brooklyn that “the Piazzolla of Take Me Dancing was a musician desperately juggling artistic ambitions and subsistence needs. He was back in New York City, where he had spent most of his childhood, but now with a wife and two kids, and looking for a fresh new start for a sputtering career.

“The pearl of this work was supposed to be Take Me Dancing, a recording of both originals and jazz standards interpreted by his Jazz Tango Quintet, comprising electric guitar, vibes, piano, and bass, plus small percussion.”

The recording was anything but a commercial success, and as González recalls, even Piazzolla remarked how dreadful it was. However, his ideas about jazz-tango served to inspire Aslan to reevaluate the work and give it an open-minded listen. A master himself in the fusion of the languages of jazz and tango for the last 20 years, Aslan revisited Piazzolla’s pieces with the sensibility of jazz.

In his interview with González, Aslan says of Take Me Dancing that “the themes and the ideas were very strong and original, but some of them just went by too fast. I felt there were many places where the music could be opened up and developed further. That was the Eureka moment, when I realized that the material in this record had a potential that just needed to be unleashed.” González further says that the arrangements by Piazzolla for nine of those original 1959 pieces became the “road map” for Aslan’s Piazzolla in Brooklyn. Besides having the earlier work as a guide, one important element that Aslan had that Piazzolla didn’t was “an ensemble of musically bilingual players as knowledgeable and comfortable with the vocabulary, syntax, and rhythms of tango as they are with jazz.”

Piazzolla in Brooklyn should not be confused for a tribute album or a remake. Instead it is the culmination of an ongoing conversation between jazz and tango, over 50 years in the making.

As part of MDC Live Arts’ commitment to create meaningful educational experiences, two classes will be offered for MDC students, geared towards providing a musical and historical framework to this fusion of jazz and tango. In the first class, González leads a multimedia, curated listening session that will explore the music of Piazzolla within the history and evolution of tango. The second class is a live music clinic led by Aslan for NWSA music students that traces the innovations and techniques that popularized tango and jazz in the Americas. Both events offer students a unique opportunity to draw connections across cultures, nations, generations, and genres.

MDC Live presents Pablo Aslan Quintet on Sat., April 20 at 8:00 p.m., the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Rd.,, Miami Beach. Tickets are $25 for general public and $10 for MDC students; 305 237-3010; www.mdclivearts.org.

Space and sound are closely related, even if it often goes unnoticed. Over the course of two weeks, many of the performances at the Subtropics Festival in Miami Beach confronted this relationship.

Paula Matthusen, a former Miami resident, spent hours recording sounds in New York City’s historic engineered underground, including Old Croton Aqueduct, which was used in the 19th century to deliver water to the city. Her surround-sound composition prominently featured the acoustic hallmarks of water dripping in caves, even incorporating sounds of a tour guide at one point. But particularly striking were the shifts to a new space. The sonic difference between an underground tunnel and the outdoors is significant, and without a visual aid, the listener is struck by the contrast.

At one moment, we abruptly moved from the watery echo of the aqueduct to silence. The background sounds disappeared, replaced by a loud, violent metallic sound, like a hammer striking a metal pipe. In a soundscape composition, these are the equivalents of themes and melodies, and indeed Matthusen described her piece as a “theme and variations.”

Water was also prevalent in Dafna Naphtali’s performance. Naphtali is a New-York based vocalist who uses computer processing to significantly alter her voice during performance. In one piece called “Dripsodisiac,” she made sounds with her voice that recalled dripping water. The computer then took those sounds, repeated them, and spun them around the speakers that surrounded the audience, creating a wet, sonic space that falls somewhere between a natural environment and a digital one.

Ron Kuivila performed a piece from his laptop that incorporated dial tones, ring tones, and FAX machine sounds from different countries, combining them with actual analog telephones stationed around the room, the sort you will remember if you were alive in the 1970s. The dial tones and the ringing telephones with their bell gave a nostalgic quality to the piece, a reminder that sounds can go extinct like wild animals. Now we can hear them in a gallery, but how much longer will they be found in their natural habitat?

These performances took place at Audiotheque, a studio in the ArtCenter South Florida building at 924 Lincoln Rd. Gustavo Matamoros, the sound artist and director of Subtropics, has turned it into a performance space that seats around 40 people, surrounded by speakers. The intimate atmosphere complements the music, allowing the electronics to stay at a comfortable volume while still conveying subtle nuances. And the audience feels at home, enough to ask a lot of questions after the performance.

The festival included several performances at other locations, including Matamoros’s trio Frozen Music at the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens, also featuring David Dunn and Rene Barge. On a beautiful sunny day, children climbed around the many nooks of the garden, and speakers surrounding the open grassy lawn produced an urban collage of sounds. Chief among the mix was a six-hour recording of Dunn’s electronic automaton, which produces a never-repeating, chaos-driven stream of beeps and hums and bloops, sort of like Finnegan’s Wake performed by an Atari.

The sounds were reminiscent of mockingbirds, and much like Natali’s water drips, they produced a curious effect that sounded both natural and synthetic at the same time. The same can be said of the Botanical Gardens, a beautiful space that achieves much of its beauty through human manipulation of nature, and that can’t entirely escape the rumble of busses and traffic on the surrounding streets.

In a different context, these same sounds can kill. In a lecture the day before, Dunn had described his fascinating work recording the communicative sounds of bark beetles — a parasite that is devastating hardwood forests across North America. Before Dunn, no one realized how chatty the beetles were, as the sounds are very quiet and can only be picked up by special microphones embedded in the tree. Working with biologists, Dunn developed his electronic automaton in part to kill the beetles. By piping the sound into a tree, the beetles become disoriented, uncommunicative, and unable to reproduce.

The Subtropics festival will return in two years, and while at times it may be challenging and provocative, it will absolutely not affect your reproductive abilities.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to catch more music and sound art along these lines, check out Phill Niblock’s piece Aomoni Water playing at the 24/7 outdoor Listening Gallery (underneath the awning) at 800 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach. On Sat., April 20, you can check out The Treble Girls at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, 2000 Convention Ctr. Dr., Miami Beach ,at 5:00 p.m. –  a mother-daughter duo featuring flute, violin, voice, and electronics. Part of the 12 Nights of Electronic Music and Art, a production of The Feta Foundation; 12nights.org; $7.

Image: Dafna Naphtali

Traditions are kept alive by constant change. The roots music of the 21^st century is being created as much with electric guitars, sequencers and laptops as with drums and flutes.

That’s one of the ideas behind The Rhythm Foundation’s Heineken TransAtlantic Festival, coming this weekend, which this year features as headliners the Argentine-Uruguayan electro-tango group Bajofondo and the Colombian electro-tropical Bomba Estéreo, as well as the duo Zuzuka Poderosa & Kush Arora, Miami’s own trio The Hongs, Krisp, Beat Machines, the neo-funk boogie big band Psychic Mirrors and DJ Mr Pauer.

“Simón [Mejía] started the group with the idea of mixing roots music and electronic music before I joined,” says Liliana “Li” Saumet, Bomba Estéreo singer and lyricist, speaking from the band´s bus on route to a show in San Francisco. Saumet was born in Santa Marta, on the Atlantic coast of Colombia, a place with deep African traditions. “It’s not that I bring the folklore to Bomba Estéreo, the idea was there. It’s just that when I sing, you can hear la costa because that’s what comes natural to me. That sound is what I grew up with.”

In fact, Saumet says her singing approach refers to that of the cantadoras, the troubadour women in Afro-Colombian culture who, in their singing, preserve and pass on the stories of their people. “They are my reference, especially La Niña Emilia [1932-1993],” says Saumet. “And they have a distinct way of singing, very deep but also without a musical training, and that’s what came out when I started singing. It’s the singing of my roots. That and rap are my main references.”

Now, in her work with Bomba Estéreo, Saumet might be also updating and keeping alive the cantadora tradition.

Bomba Estéreo was founded by Mejía, a visual artist turned full time bassist, programmer and producer, and released its first recording in 2006. It drew from traditional music, most obviously cumbia, but also DJ culture, electronic and hip hop. The result was both substantive and danceable, fun. Since then, the group became a hit at festivals — and SXSW and has just released Elegancia Tropical, its  third recording.

They are textbook headliners for the TransAtlantic Festival, which The Rhythm Foundation started in 2003 as a way to connect with new audiences as well as celebrate the traditional.

It was an “interesting time in Miami,” says Laura Quinlan, director of The Rhythm Foundation.  “It was the time of the Internet boom and new media and there were all these really cool people moving in from Latin America, interesting, creative people who were setting up companies, business and art galleries. It was a real revitalization in the city. But our audiences were not reflecting that. As an organization we were not connecting with this renaissance.

“And there was also this new sound I personally loved, which was the mix of electronica and World Music,” says Quinlan. “Now this sound has become kind of standard but I remember the first time I heard [the Tijuana-based] Nortec Collective, the birth of Latin-tronica, I couldn’t believe it. Now it’s not so shocking, you hear it in car commercials — but I still love it.”

Since its first edition, the TransAtlantic Festival has featured artists and groups such as Seu Jorge, DJ Da Lua, Bossacucanova, Chambao, Juana Molina, Ojos de Brujo, Aterciopelados, Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, Seun Kuti and Egypt 80, and Nortec Collective.

“When you are programming and running a cultural organization you have to keep your circle open, you have to stay open to new sounds, new collaborators, new partners or your impact in the community starts to shrink,” says Quinlan. “That openness has always been central to TransAtlantic.”

Meanwhile, Saumet sees the work, and success, of Bomba Estéreo as part of a larger picture.

“It’s something that’s happening not only in Colombia but México, Perú, Venezuela, Argentina, all throughout Latin America,” she says. “We are looking to our roots, to our culture not just rock and we coming to what is ours. And I think the perspective has changed too. We used to look North, to the Anglo world. Now I think the Anglo world is also looking at us.”

The 11th annual Heineken TransAtlantic Festival features Bajofondo, with an opening set by The Hongs, on Friday at 7:00 p.m. Bomba Estéreo, Zuzuka Poderosa & Kush Arora, and an opening set by Krisp, take the stage on Saturday at 7:00 p.m. At the North Beach Bandshell, 7275 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach; tickets cost $23 for each night, or $35 for the weekend (there will also be a launch and a wrap pert, free); 305-672-5202 ; transAtlanticfestival.com.

This preview also appears in the Miami New Times.

Celebrated dance critic Margaret Putnam once wrote: “Tango is the Everest of social dance. Impossible. Demanding. Intricate. And therefore irresistible.” Astor Piazzolla must have believed this to be true as well, as he poured every one of those adjectives into every musical note of his life’s work, also adding a few more like violent, sad and secretive. María de Buenos Aires, his “Tango Operita,” was part of a double bill last Thursday evening along with american composer Robert Xavier Rodriguez’ Tango presented on Florida Grand Opera’s “Unexpected Operas in Unexpected Places” program. The venue, Design District’s The Stage, was not all that an “Unexpected Place,” since it regularly hosts live music, film, and theater — but this was a first venture into nightlife for FGO.

The doors opened at eight o’clock, a good time to arrive since seating and standing room was limited. Furthermore, guests were informed that the performance would take place throughout the entire space, both indoors stage-side and the outdoor patio. Sharply at nine o’clock the pre-show started with FGO Young Artist Lyndon Meyer announcing the evening’s proceedings with the piano, moving on to  exquisitely soulful renditions of Alberto Ginastera’s Canción al Árbol del Olvido (Song to the Tree of Forgetfulness) and Kurt Weill’s Youkali by fellow FGO Young Artists Rebecca Henriques and Carla Jablonski. Meyer’s colorful and extremely sensitive playing was the musical heartbeat of the evening, in more ways than one.

First on the bill was Rodriguez’ Tango, with a text based on newspaper articles about the the tango craze about a century ago, was brilliantly executed by tenor Matthew Newlin, also an FGO Young Artist. Although mostly recited with the occasional chant and recitativo-like passages, Newlin managed to bring life and coherence to what seems more like a comedy sketch than an opera. Also, this seems like the perfect moment to start lauding, with a full brass orchestra, the highly virtuosic and achingly passionate dancing of Jeremías Massera and Mariela Barufaldi, indisputably the soul of the entire performance.

After a brief intermission for cocktails, guests were instructed to take their seats to welcome Catalina Cuervo as María de Buenos Aires. The music, unmistakably by Piazzolla since the first bars, was excitingly delivered by a small band formed by FGO Orchestra members who, much to my pleasant surprise, did not sound like a bunch of classical musicians playing some other type of music. A source for their inspiration must have been bandoneón player David Alsina, of whom Piazzolla himself would have been proud.

Less inspiring, unfortunately, was  Cuervo’s performance. Whether because of opening night jitters or embarrassingly noticeable technical difficulties with the sound system (her mike didn’t work at all for her opening number), she failed to convince me about who María is and who or what she later becomes. Cuervo, strikingly beautiful, is endowed with a deep, raspy voice much like that of the great Amelita Baltar. Gorgeous, yes, but there is not enough pain in her voice for this role.

Distractingly, Luis Sosa, a Venezuelan actor who played the poet-narrator El Duende, did not even try to speak in an Argentine accent, making his treatment of tango slang lunfardo annoying at best.

Thankfully, velvet-voiced Luis Alejandro Orozco, with his skip-a-beat good looks, tied it all together as El Cantor (here, a singer delivering décimas, usually improvised 10-line poems). The Mexican baritone appeared to be the only cast member who understood what Piazzolla’s opera is about.

José María Condemi’s staging worked beautifully. With creative and precise use of the space, Mr. Condemi is a natural theatrician. He even joined the action at times, sidling up to the women of the chorus at the bar.

Maestro Ramón Tebar looked like he was having the time of his life conducting the band, as always, displaying command and comfort. I must also give a final Bravo! for dancers Massera and Barufaldi, who supplied the evening’s sustenance, breath, sex, torment…in short, the tango.

]]> http://artburstmiami.com/2013/03/24/it-takes-fgo-to-tango/feed/ 0 http://artburstmiami.com/2013/03/16/the-cleveland-orchestras-ode-to-joy-and-other-dances/ http://artburstmiami.com/2013/03/16/the-cleveland-orchestras-ode-to-joy-and-other-dances/#comments Sat, 16 Mar 2013 15:02:46 +0000 Fernando Landeros http://artburstmiami.com/?p=3383

After patiently waiting for an audience member to silence his/her phone, Maestro Giancarlo Guerrero gave the downbeat to a performance full of color and dance. The Cleveland Orchestra, being the extremely fine-tuned instrument which it is, responded gracefully and lavishly to the Maestro’s controlled but immensely exciting and sometimes dance-like conducting throughout the evening.

The first work of the program, Neruda Songs for Mezzo-soprano and Orchestra by Peter Lieberson, was a sensuous treat. Lieberson selected these five sonnets out of the Cien Sonetos de Amor (One Hundred Love Sonnets) by beloved Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda, and set them to music specifically for his wife, the great late Mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. In the composer’s own words, “each of the five poems that I set to music seemed to me to reflect a different face in love’s mirror.” Anyone familiar with Hunt Lieberson’s incomparable artistry, with her natural gift for phrasing melodic lines and dynamic shaping, would understand the enormity of the shoes Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong had to fill for this performance. With a deep but tender, powerful but soothing voice, and a vast palette of musical colors, DeShong more than did both Mr. and Mrs. Lieberson justice. It was an intimate rendition, becoming apparent that Ms. DeShong understands that Neruda Songs are filled with a sort of delicate passion and peace made with the loss of a loved one. Maestro Guerrero accompanied Ms. DeShong very sensitively, also bringing out of the orchestra the vast array of sound colors in Mr. Lieberson’s score, especially pleasingly in Amor, amor, las nubes a la torre del cielo (Love, love, the clouds went up to tower of the sky) with the winds ascending to a climactic chord, and in Ya eres mía. Reposa con tu sueño en mi sueño (And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream), with its repeating sensual bossa-nova rhythm. In the last song, Amor mío, si muero y tú no mueres (My love, if I die and you don’t), DeShong’s diminuendo on her final Amor made me believe that peace is in fact attainable.

Expecting to be bombarded by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the main course on the evenings menu, I was very pleasantly surprised by Maestro Guerrero’s relaxed but nevertheless intense interpretation. Despite the endless debate over Beethoven’s tempo and metronome markings, Maestro Guerrero chose to obey the Master’s wishes and for the first time in my life was able to hear the written articulation in the second violins and cellos in the opening of the first movement. I was also able to hear the different instrument sections’ interaction and famous Beethoven crescendi boil to a simmer, making me break a sweat. The second movement made Maestro Guerrero dance on the podium. His precise and subtle conducting filled the movement with an elegant drama, as opposed to a nervous one. The third movement made ME dance. At a slightly slower tempo than that in Beethoven’s marking, the enhanced heartbeat-like pizzicati in the double basses and cellos created a great groove which made the graceful melodic line dance. The Finale, that symphony within a symphony, shined with the presence of roughly 200 members of the combined forces of the Master Chorale of South Florida, Alec Schumacker, director, and the Master Chorale of Tampa Bay, James K. Bass, director. After the series of beautifully shaped recitatives in the cellos and double basses, and the exposition of the “Ode to Joy” theme, came the commanding presence and voice of bass Raymond Aceto, triumphant and virtuosically stating his own recitative. While the balance between orchestra and chorus was perfect throughout the movement, the same thing cannot be said about the four soloists as they sang together. Ms. DeShong, after having thrilled us earlier in the evening, disappeared into oblivion, making it seem as if she did not know her part well and was afraid of being found out. Soprano Nicole Cabell had some intonation issues, but displayed great command of her part, a very difficult one. Tenor Garrett Sorenson, with a lovely lyric voice, sang his solo majestically, and was in perfect balance with Mr. Aceto at all times. The massive choir maintained a well-shaped sound throughout, and got the most bravo shouts in the four curtain calls at the end.

Maestro Guerrero looked exhausted but blissful, and I’m sure he had a tremendous night sleep after such a fabulous performance, probably ecstatic at the thought of doing it all over again the next evening, AND the next.

 

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