Sure on This Shining Night
Composed by Samuel Barber.
Performed by the Los Angeles High School Festival Choir at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
This is an enormous choir made up of over 850 students from around 25 different schools. Their sound echoes through the concert hall with great power. The pitches are spot on, with no fluctuation and the voice parts are clearly heard. Sopranos and altos weren't perfectly in harmony with each other and the tenors, rarely, sung out with minor intonation problems. The last chord of the piece also wasn't perfectly in tune, but these are minor problems to the entire performance of the piece. Amazing dynamic levels with this grand choir, the alternating dynamic phrases are well executed. Its not an easy task to get so many people to create a single product of music that sounds fantastic as this did.
What a challenge it would be to work with this number of singers! The women's tone is rather spread, but I wonder if this is a bit of a reflection of the cultural diversity...
ReplyDeleteThe amount of choral repertoire that exists for a choir this size is very slim, if any exists at all. That being said, I think that the conductor did a good job ok making sure that the students didn't completely blow out their voices, which is easy to do when you're immersed in an ensemble of that size.
ReplyDeleteI'm impressed as to how so many performers were able to create a cohesive product. The sound in that hall must have been very impressive. I don't necessarily think it fair to pick on minor intonation issues as with any sort of doubled (or more) ensemble the minor imperfections and differences make up the characteristic sound of the ensemble. Think of a 12-string guitar: if each string were exactly identical it would just sound like a loud 6-string (ignore octave displaced string courses at this point). The differences give it that depth...now think of how deep an 850-string guitar could sound!
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