Untitled Document

17 May 2004

Diva

I was startled by the power of the Te Deum, the praise to God. There was plenty to be concerned about this day but I let it go. Cyber-hackers and global terrorists could take the afternoon off. Being as close as I was to the stage, and center, I felt I was sitting with the first chair violins. I could see the interaction of their eyes and hear subtleties in the music I have never heard before.

First Chair was a slim man of elegant bearing. His hair was the color and texture of steel wool, jutting out behind his ears. He signaled the orchestra for the tuning chord before the Music Director emerged from the wings and took the podium.

Second Chair was a striking woman with honey hair, an ironic look and masterful fingers. Her bow was taut and her fingering as voluptuous as her bosom. Third chair was a large man with curiously delicate hands. He looked like Zero Mostel and I bet he was a handful in rehearsal. He probably had a propensity to perspire and he placed a handkerchief on the cheek-piece of his instrument. I felt I could almost read the music along with them.

I'm not much for public culture here in Washington. The parking is too hard, or the program istoo late and I rise too early. Add the recent aversion to crowded public places and the result is the classical music on the radio, interspersed with dire reports from overseas. That has been my window on the world since the airliners began to fall like kestrels upon prey.

I was here at this concert because a friend was singing. I looked him up in the program. He is a tenor, and a fine one, and still taking lessons to improve even at our advanced age. Normally his chorus hangs out at the Kennedy Center, located conveniently next to the Saudi Embassy, and my propensity is to lose my car in the vast multi-level garage there.

So when my friend told me they were to perform a Saturday matinee in Alexandria I decided it was the best of all worlds, the chance to see his art without the baggage of the imperial city.

I parked in the garage of the Community College off Beauregard Street and when I left it an Asian-American cop yelled at me for wandering outside the cross-walk. The police are looking very young these days.

The auditorium is a multi-story modern complex named for the benefactor, Rachel M. Schlesinger. It is a gem, and the college must be very grateful to her. The wood is rich and the acoustics superb.

But in the Community College environment, High culture is very much like a continuation of the High School Band Boosters. Volunteers, spouses, children were everywhere, handling the Ushering and Will Call ticket duties. This is very much a labor of love.

A volunteer who might have been a Deputy Assistant Secretary somewhere in town, handed me the program as I entered the auditorium. A tall and dignified apparatchik who might have been a lawyer from Commerce or State examined my ticket, turned it both ways, and allowed me to pass.

My friend had taken good care of me. My seat was smack in the middle of the first row. I scanned the program they were to sing on this marvelous summer day

It was eclectic, to say the least and the audience around me reflected it. Old and young, but mostly old, black and white but mostly white.

I looked at the program. The concert was to start with Giuseppi Verde's Te Deum, conducted by Norman Scribner. He has been the Music Director since 1965, and conducted before Presidents and Kings.

Scribner would be followed by a program of "Songs of Ragtime and Reminiscence," directed by John Adams and featuring soprano Audra McDonald. Then the intermission and Adams would return to lead us in the three-part Harmonium, based on texts from John Donne and Emily Dickenson.

I stretched out and read the notes for each one. It was an excellent program, full of material to read while I waited. Verdi apparently wanted a copy of the work buried with him. It is a powerful work of great joy, complex and holy.

The First Chair tuned the orchestra and Scribner emerged to take the podium, The music began with a wave of voices, velvet soft. The piece played to the strength of the 190 singers on the stage behind the orchestra. In structure there were two equal four part choruses in call-and-response that moved through and eight-part counterpoint and back again.

The subtlety of the sopranos and the strings hypnotized me. This close to the stage, I jumped in my seat when the whole chorus entered, "exulting with a single cry." The power of it forced me back in my seat, and when the rolling chorus and ancient reverence were done I found my eyes moist.

There was sustained applause, and the Music Director got a call to return to the podium to acknowledge it.

There was a pause in the action as a music stand was brought out from the wings, and a slim black-clad John Adams emerged from the wings. I was a little puzzled by the notes on this portion of the program. Some old favorites of the turn of the century were listed, tin-pan ally stuff we sang as children, antique even them. The notes recalled the virulent racism of the time, and revealed the subtext to the lyrics that went with the melody.

I had never considered Vaudeville, the fundamental driving engine to early television as an instrument of social reflection, but it was. Subtle as a hammer.

Then the door opened and The Diva emerged. She floated to center stage.

I was introduced to Ms. Audra McDonald with everyone else, but I may as well have had a private audience with her. I had to suck in my breath at the rich pruple dress. Her hair was a wild tangle of black curls and her skin was the color of caramel. She had a beauty that radiated from her dark eyes and flowed down the elegant lines of the dress that showed off her toned arms and flattered her bust and caressed her thighs and sang to me on a thoroughly primordial level.

She was astonishingly pretty, but that was not point. The liner notes said she had been compared to the young Barbra Streisand, or Judy Garland. I don't know about that and never saw either. This woman was singing to me, fifteen feet away.

She was totally in command and I was captivated. This t was a dramatic shift in gears from the lofty Verdi work. Instead it was Tin-Pan alley, and the reflection of the institutionalized racism of the day. The program notes helpfully pointed out that "Alexander" was a code-word for saying it was a Negro's Rag Time Band, and the background- the real background- of Bill Bailey would make you blush.

But the Diva took it on and belted it out and made the songs hers and hers alone.

At the intermission I looked around the crowd of performers in their pale blue gowns and severe black tuxedos.

There was no champagne to drink and I wound up smoking a couple cigarettes outside. I was surprised to find a couple of die-hards from the Chorus were out there to have a smoke as well.

I was around the corner of the auditorium so the smoking police would not yell at me. I was intrigued to see a fire door open and from it emerged a well-turned out you African American woman in tight low-cut jeans and pert white top that highlighted her prominent figure.

It was Audra, to my surprise. She had shed the elegant dress a quick as a lick and was back in the jeans with a cell phone pressed up against the tight curls. She had some hand luggage stacked against the wall and all the smokers showed her deference. She was not going to stick for the rest of the program, and obviously had an aggressive agenda elsewhere.

The program has said that she had two Tony awards from Broadway, guest shots on the BBC and gigs with Symphonies in Chicago and San Francisco and LA, and has a one-woman show coming to Carnegie Hall.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, Practice. Practice.

She did not have an entourage, unless you count the chunky young man who had carried her music stand and now was stacking her bags, or the white guy in the Blues Brothers porkpie hat and sunglasses who was driving the black limo. The Blues Brother was there to scoop her up for the next appearance in the rich purple gown. She walked up the sidewalk, backpack on shoulder, hips swaying gracefully, hand on phone pressed to ringlets, boutique bags in her other hand.

She was far away from me in the brilliant sunshine as she had been in the darkened hall. I debated if I should tell me that the power of her voice had brought tears to my eyes, and laid open a path to our great-grandfathers time.

She was still talking on the phone, worrying about a relationship or the next engagement. She clearly did not need my validation, nor the intrusion on her publicly private space.

I did make a wave as the black car sped around the circle and plunged back down to Beauregard Street, and back into the world of the Carnegie and London and exclusive three-album deals with the prestigious Nonesuch label.

Then, still dazzled by her presence, I found myself in the cool darkness watching the Chorus enter once more, row by row, the musicians down front sawing and tooting to warm the fingers and lips.

John Adams was back on he podium, though his Diva had flown.

What a long strange trip his three-part Harmonium had! From the little no-bedroom apartment in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to this I would have liked to have talked him about how a minimalist wound up retrieving coon songs from a vanished age and re-crafting them into something that was quite new and made it all approachable. Like the way genius Scott Joplin had to let the coon stuff slide off his back, and make the music.

And then he grabbed me by the throats of the Chorus and showed me something that brought pause in the spinning of the world.

The first movement was based loosely on the ancient John Donne poem Negative Love. It began with waves of voices, starting a the single phrase like bees fom the soundtrack of 2001. Then the sound shifted and shimmered across the front of the chorus. John waved, the folds on the back of his black jacket moving with his gestures to the bass viols, and to the Chorus and back, growing, scintillating rising and falling and ending unexpected, as life does sometimes.

Brilliant.

But it was Emily Dickinson's words in the next two movements made the tears run down my cheeks.

"I could not stop for Death," cam the words from the Chorus. "So he kindly stopped for me."

Her words of the horses of Death's carriage with their heads toward eternity brought me to another poem, this one by Marvel with equine image, of Time's Winged Chariots at our heels, running us down.

The Chorus finished with Dickenson's Wild Night, and the passion of that enigmatic woman, so miscast in our schooldays, a woman of seething Eros.

That was the key and that was the afternoon. God, the swirl of the passion. The beauty of the massed voices. The collective will and voice.

"Might I but moor-tonight- in…" the words swirled around me. "Might I moor…."

I slid out of the hall in the third encore, still clapping as I hoped to beat the traffic out of the parking garage. I had other things to accomplish that afternoon.

But having seen the Diva and heard the voices, I wasn't quite sure why.