Tuesday, January 26, 1999
Conductor Shaw called a giant of choral music
BY JANELLE GELFAND
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Robert Shaw “was a longtime friend of the May Festival and he will be sorely missed,” said Cincinnati May Festival music director James Conlon from Cologne, Germany, where he is general music director.
“Robert Shaw was, simply put, a monumental force in classical music in the second half of the 20th century. No other individual in our time could be compared to him. He inspired and nourished two generations of American choral artists and conductors, and has left an indelible legacy to us all.”
Mr. Shaw, who was 82, died on Monday in New Haven, Conn. He suffered a massive stroke on Saturday during a Yale University production of Endgame, which his youngest son, Thomas, was directing.
Mr. Shaw was music director emeritus and conductor laureate of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, where he was music director 1967-88. He won 14 Grammys, and his latest album, with works of Barber, Bartok and Vaughan Williams, was nominated for a 1999 Grammy.
Early in his career, he guest conducted for Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony and Serge Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony; he was George Szell's assistant with the Cleveland Orchestra for 10 years.
But for more than half a century, he created an American choral tradition, and first gained fame as conductor of the Robert Shaw Chorale, which he founded in the late '40s.
Mr. Shaw, who had guest conducted Cincinnati's May Festival 13 times since 1965, was to have opened the festival's second weekend, May 21.
“He took choral music to as high a level as it can go in this country, because he had such high standards,” said Robert Porco, director of choruses for the May Festival.
“He brought an immense and profound musical integrity to everything he did, where the music and the composer were the most important consideration, not the glamour or ego of the conductor.”
Started career in N.Y.
A native Californian, he started his career in New York, conducting the Fred Waring Glee Club in weekly broadcasts. In 1941, he founded the Collegiate Chorale. The Robert Shaw Chorale that followed (1948-67) set the global standard for choral music.
His last Cincinnati performance was in 1997, conducting Brahms A German Requiem, his signature work.
One of Mr. Shaw's joys was directing the amateur (volunteer) May Festival Chorus. The word amateur comes from the word “to love,” he told the Enquirer in 1995.
“They haven't lost their love — they still believe that the arts have something to say,” he said.
“After a rehearsal with him, it was like being mesmerized. You couldn't move. You sat there wondering how any human being could do such incredible musical things,” said John Leman, former May Festival choral director.
In 1995, Mr. Shaw took the May Festival Chorus to Carnegie Hall for a historic performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 8, “Symphony of a Thousand,” with four other choruses and the Cleveland Orchestra. Its sheer size — 688 participants — was unprecedented at Carnegie Hall.
At the time, Mr. Shaw said, “When it's over, if it's been good, it's been revelatory. This is where revelation finally happens, when a work of art is as perfectly done as it can be.”
Revolutionary ideas
Mr. Shaw's rehearsal techniques revolutionized choral ideas. He developed “count-singing,” in which he stripped the music of everything but the rhythm.
“He's probably up there telling the angels, one-and-two-and-tee-and-four,” said Betsy Young, a member of the chorus for 35 years.
Mr. Shaw influenced hundreds of choral conductors and thousands of singers.
In recent years, Mr. Shaw's annual choral workshops at Carnegie Hall drew directors and singers from across the nation. He conducted Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall in April 1996, on the 250th anniversary of the work's premiere.
“I don't imagine that anyone who's life he's touched will ever be the same without him,” said the mezzo-soprano Marietta Simpson, who sang with Mr. Shaw in Cincinnati and around the world.
“As a musician, what impressed me was he always prepared a piece as if it were the first time he was singing it,” she said. “That kind of work ethic and standard was something you tried to imitate and attain.
“As a person, I admired his discipline and that same discipline he carried into every area of his life. I admired the great love he had for his family.”
A memorable May Festival performance for both Ms. Simpson and Mr. Porco was Hindemith's Requiem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” in 1995, a work Mr. Shaw had commissioned 50 years earlier.
“He brought a special affinity to the (Walt Whitman) poetry and the music, and brought it to life in a way others could not have,” Mr. Porco said.
Last May, Mr. Shaw was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in Cincinnati.
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