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It's usually too slow. It's rarely performed with any real rhythmic muscle, so it gets flabby. I have never yet heard it with the tempos I indicated. Even the performance we heard just now—by a widely known and respected conductor—is far under tempo. There's something about this music that makes people want to linger, hold back, stretch it out. But the piece is already stretched out; it's full of ritards, allargandos, ritenutos, and if you start too slow the whole thing begins to sound exaggerated and overblown. The beginning is marked 60, not 44 as you heard it, fully eight notches slower. The following allegro is marked 72, a pretty vigorous moving-ahead tempo, but what you heard was closer to 60. And still to come there are allargandos and meno mossos, several ritards, another meno mosso, a largamente and a ritenuto. No wonder the choir was red in the face at the end, as the conductor himself told me. Yet I have to admit it was effective despite the heavy-handed tempos. But I know it would have been even more effective if he had observed my markings. Paul Callaway always observed metronome markings meticulously. He did a new piece of mine once, and I complained that he was going too fast. He said, "That's your metronome marking." He was right. I had marked it too fast. Well, it was a new piece. It takes a composer time to discover the best tempo. In a special way, he has to "learn" the piece he has written. And it's true about tempi, that they don't always have to be the same. Think of Furtwängler and Toscanini as opposite ends of the spectrum. But in a slow piece, when you go eight degrees slower than the composer's marking, it just becomes heavy and turgid, and the chorus nearly dies in the loud sustained high passages. Just once I would like to hear this piece my way. So could we just sing it through together? You all have copies of the music, and I have brought the tape of the orchestral accompaniment I made in San Francisco back in the seventies. It does not contain the first page of the music you have. I wrote that later. Therefore the orchestra will begin at the top of page 2. So could we please stand and do a bit of sight singing? I will do my best to conduct, and hope we won't have a train wreck. [From the Q&A:] First I speak the words to myself and try to discover the rhythms inside the words. Then, as much as I can, I try to absorb into myself the feelings of the words. The words are a big help. They give you the mood, the feeling, the structure; they do much of the work for me. All I have to do then is write the notes. |
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