Orc Week

Thank God that's over.

I thought Handel's Messiah was gruelling because of the sheer amount of choral music in it and the number of vocally challenging bits even towards the end. I thought the Brahms German Requiem was exhausting after I sang it at Carnegie Hall on a stage so crowded that I could scarcely move. I thought the Faure Requiem was disagreeable because it called for an ensemble so much smaller than ours that, in order not to overbalance the orchestra, we had to sing as it were with one lung tied behind our backs. But doing Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings Symphony now holds the kewpie as the piece of music of all the world that I feel most relieved to be done with.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performed it this past Friday and Saturday at Powell Hall, the first in a new "SLSO Presents" series that will also include, later this season, a screening of The Wizard of Oz with the live orchestra performing the soundtrack. Both performances were sold out, and even our "dress rehearsal" on Wednesday was reasonably well attended. One might regard this as a great boon to musical culture in this city, since many in the audience had never darkened the door of Powell Hall before.

Leave it to me to make the curmudgeonly remark: "We'll see what a boon it is when the receipts for Beethoven's Ninth and Verdi's Requiem are counted." And if the results at that time are what I expect - after last season's mediocre box office for Haydn's divine Creation and Rossini's sublime Stabat Mater, followed by a sold-out weekend of Orff's ribald Carmina Burana - I may revise my curmudgeonly remark to: "There is no accounting for taste."

Anyway, back to the LOTR Symphony. Why did I find this piece exhausting? It started with lousy chorus parts. Though the piece requires the chorus to sing four-part, six-, eight-, eleven-, and maybe even thirteen-part chords, the chorus parts were doggedly crammed into a two-staff format, like a piano part - betraying, perhaps, that the composer wrote it at the keyboard. The early stages of preparation were largely given to figuring out which singers would sing which notes. We had to deal with every imaginable divisi, from a two-part men/women split to SATB to "high-middle-low" divisions of each sex to two-, three-, and four-part divisis within each section of the chorus - and there were many passages in which the "road map" changed continually from one chord to the next. For a piece that has been performed hundreds of times around the world, to sold-out auditoriums, it is frankly astonishing that a truly choral score has never been published.

Between the passages in which each choir member struggled to remember which note he/she was supposed to sing, were long stretches of rests during which the orchestra played without vocal accompaniment. Again, the chorus parts left much to be desired. We had very sketchy orchestral cues at best; more often, we had nothing to clue us into our next entrance (or sit/stand cue) except the number of measures, in varying tempos and meters, which we must count. Instrumentalists have no trouble with this sort of thing, but choir singers are seldom expected to count hundreds of bars of rest without an orchestral cue to prepare them for when they are supposed to come in next. At times, our score gave us cues for orchestral lines many measures away from anything we had to sing, followed by bars and bars of rest that we had to count before coming in. This kind of thing seems worse than inconsiderate; it seems mean-spirited. Especially when our entrance is in the middle of a dissonant crunch and the conductor is beating a rapid 7/4 or some similarly daft gesture, and we are hard put to pull our next note out of the air, let alone spot the precise beat we are supposed to come in on.

Besides, we also had to sing text in languages that have never been spoken by real populations. The lyrics under the notes alternated between the proper spelling of the words in their fictitious languages and a bizarre sort of phonetic spelling that caused even more confusion. The guide that came with the music, and that was supposed to help us understand what we were singing, did not actually match what was in the score. And the published recording of the work deviated from the score in many ways.

In spite of all that, I think we did rather well. But on my own part, I can say that our success was not entirely unmixed, and that success was bought at the price of a great deal of nerve-wracking anxiety. We got a lot of help from an expert in Elven languages, who by the way sat right next to me on the stage. It must have been a trial for him, too, though. For he had to bear with the Howard Shore Recension of the Linguistic Inventions of Tolkien. Shore, we learned as my stage neighbor drilled us in our Sindarin, Dwarvish, Rohirric, and so forth, had taken considerable liberties with the text, tweaking it as he saw fit to achieve the musical effects he wanted, and thereby garbling the winged words somewhat. Nevertheless, a fan of the book and/or film could recognize some of the words and names that we sang, such as Durin, Shadowfax, Osgiliath, A Elbereth Gilthoniel, and Anduril. I believe we also sang the "One ring to rule them all" ditty in the Black Speech, for which no doubt our eternal souls are now forfeit.

All this effort was eventually overshadowed by the production values of the performance. The chorus sang under a screen on which still photos (mainly of design sketches from the movie) were projected, and awash in colored mood-lighting that sometimes made it hard for some singers to read their scores. Together with the St. Louis Children's Choirs and several instrumental and vocal soloists, we were miked and amplified, with a pair of experts at the controls, ensuring that everything was perfectly balanced. The foyer was decorated with wax figures of orcs and ring-wraiths, so that members of the audience could have themselves photographed by them; and some audience members came in costume. For example, one lady was spotted in the garb of an Ent.

When I left the hall after Friday night's performance I overheard concertgoers having animated discussions, not of the rich musical performance, but of the finer points of Tolkien's plot and how it was similar to or different from the film and the symphony. I actually heard someone in the parking lot pronouncing "Cirith Ungol" correctly, and was shocked to realize that I - even after having sung in the piece - didn't know what musical passage related to it. After Saturday's performance I chatted with one of the violinists who confessed that she had never seen the movie, and had no idea whether or not the music reflected its character. I seriously wonder how satisfying the concert could have been for people who did not know the film. For when you take away all the thrilling, frightening, and melancholy associations of the story, what is really left except a vaguely silly game with pretend languages and no less than two hours of overblown and basically formless music?

I tell you the truth. I volunteered to be in the group that sang this, but I came to regret it. I wore myself down to my last nerve trying to keep count of the rests, searching for my next note, and trying not to forget which nonsense syllable came next. I was nearly exhausted before the final performance began, and as each movement ended the realization that I had sung it for the last time came to me as a real pleasure. I might have enjoyed it more if I had been in the audience, under no pressure, watching the pictures on the screen. But as it was, I couldn't help feeling that I was in the middle of something that required far more effort than it deserved.

The soloists were heroic. The guest conductor, Ludwig Wicki, milked amazing sounds out of the orchestra - albeit one that contained many unusual instruments, among them a truckload of percussion objects of which I couldn't name half. There was an Irish whistle, a pan flute, a musette, a cimbalom, harps, "distressed" piano, celesta, hammered dulcimers, and a Hardanger fiddle. There were tamtams, tom-toms, tubular bells, snare drums, bass drums, cymbals, funky rattle things, and this scary-looking wooden thing that made the weirdest noise. There were two boy soprano soloists, a pair of soloists from the chorus, and a 19-year-old beauty named Kaitlyn Lusk who got to channel Annie Lennox into a microphone. And there were spots, pictures, high-end sound mixers, and colored lights to help everything along. From the sound of the ovation it couldn't be called a failure. But from the sound of the music, I'm not sure it should be called a Symphony either.

Austro-Hungarian Lunch

This noon I decided to revisit a Bosnian restaurant where I dined a few times several years ago. It's called Grbic Restaurant, and it's located at 4871 Keokuk Street in St. Louis city. That's a block north of Gravois on Meramec Street, at a corner where Keokuk meets Meramec at a weird angle, in what I believe used to be a dairy. The front is practically all glass, letting lots of light into the street side of the restaurant, but inside is a cool, attractive dimness full of stone floors, brick arches, hardwood ceilings, and mural paintings. The bar is pleasantly appointed; a huge and ambitious still-life of food stretches across the back wall of the dining room; and somewhere in the old dairy complex there is a banquet hall as well.

It's the class of restaurant that has linen tablecloths and that serves glasses of ice-water and baskets of bread without being asked. They have one menu for dinner and another, somewhat abridged, for lunch. If you like good, old-fashioned, Austro-Hungarian food - authentic goulash (with emphasis on the paprika), paprikas, wiener schnitzel (not a hot dog), spicy sausage, apple strudel, etc. - you must visit this place. Even if you're not sure, give it a try. You might find it strangely addictive, somewhat like the way curry can be addictive.

Today I ordered the "special of the day." It came with a choice of a salad or the "soup of the day." I chose soup. It turned out to be something called Trhana. Note that, as in the name Grbic, the "r" is rolled and holds the place of a vowel in the first syllable. Trhana is a zesty golden broth filled with really tiny pieces of ground sausage, noodles, and vegetables. The bowl - served on top of a plate with a napkin in between, since you're interested in local color - had crushed herbs sprinkled around its broad rim. I liked this soup so well that I used a couple slices of bread to soak up what my spoon couldn't get at. I must confess, however, that it made me sweat. It had that indescribable combination of subtle, interesting flavor and searing, spicy heat that one associates with either Balkan or Indochinese food - not at all like curry, but as fascinatingly unlike any other taste as curry is.

My soup was joined by a beer imported from Bosnia and Herzegovina. In its homeland it is labeled Sarajevsko Pivo, but in America the label bears the English translation Sarajevo Beer. It was a hoppy, light-colored brew, like a lager but with more bite than our local swill. After the soup came a plate of Chicken Jägerschnitzel: a pounded chicken breast, rubbed with spices and grilled to perfection, and served overlapping a puddle of dark mushroom sauce, with a huge side of buttery Spätzle. The latter are short, knobbly egg noodles; in Grbic's version they come with little specks of spice on them, and I believe I could detect the influence of garlic as well.

I am glad I was dining alone, because I would have made a very dull conversationalist while I greedily inhaled this fare. It was irresistably, indescribably good. The chicken was good with or without the sauce. The noodles were also good by themselves, but I had enough sauce left over after the chicken disappeared that I mixed the spätzle in - and still had enough sauce left to sop up with some bread afterward. We're not talking about "cream of mushroom soup" sauce with tiny flakes of mushroom in it, but a rich, dark, creamy sauce, strong in mushroom flavor, and filled with thick mushroom slices.

All this put me in such good spirits that I decided to spring for dessert. I asked what they had with chocolate in it, and the waiter recommended Palacinke (here the c is pronounced like the "ch" in "chin," and the "e" is a shwa). This proved to be a couple of cool, tender crepes, elaborately folded around a filling of fluffy whipped cream, chocolate syrup, and bits of chopped walnut. It took up a surprising amount of real estate, dominating a large plate that came dusted with fine white sugar and drizzled with a bit of extra chocolate, with a similarly-drizzled mound of whipped cream in the center of the plate. I devoured it all, and chased it with an eminently sippable shot of Slivovitz.

Though it wasn't the cheapest lunch I have had all summer, it did put me in a very complacent frame of mind - as I am sure you can tell from my manner of writing. I believe I won't wait two years until my next visit.

Moist Tackiness

The reliably tacky ELCA lighted sign near my home in St. Louis said something like this in the last week or two, time-appropriate for Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike...

GULF COAST: WHEN YOU PASS THROUGH THE WATERS, I WILL BE WITH YOU

How can one quibble with the words of Isaiah 43:2? Watch me!

Who is this sign really addressing? How is the Gulf Coast supposed to read this sign? Or does this sign rather serve a smug sense of our own care, compassion, and similar merits? How, really, does this sentiment help people on the Gulf Coast? Even if we could send this message to them, how would platitudes plucked from the pages of Scripture comfort people who have already "passed through the waters," whether or not they realized God was with them at the time? Do greeting card messages rebuild homes, replace lost possessions, and get the lights turned back on?

This, in my opinion, is the kind of cold comfort that church people find too easy to give: cold, because it has nothing to do with the Gospel. It is in the same vein as squeezing the hand of someone whose loved one has just died and murmuring, "It was God's will." In an encounter like that, a flesh-and-blood mourner would be tempted to say, "Bully for God! Next time He comes around I'll tell Him where He can stick His will!"

Could the ELCA sign have addressed the Gulf Coast situation better? I think so. It could have urged passersby to pray for the victims of hurricane damage. It could have sobered them with biblical reminders that these disturbances in nature are a reminder that our world is in its death-throes, awaiting the Day of Resurrection. It could have encouraged them with reminders of God's promise not to destroy mankind with a flood. It could have invited passersby to contribute their pocket change toward a relief campaign. Or it could have simply preached the Gospel (maybe even quoting Isaiah 43:2) without pointlessly addressing it to the absent, powerless people of the Gulf Coast: "...and through the rivers, they will not overflow you."

Test that sentiment against the current floods that have lately turned my commute to work into an insane maze of back roads. This is stuff the people right here in St. Louis need to hear now. When God's creation shows us how powerless we are, we need to be comforted by word that God loves and protects us, that He brought His saving power to bear in the weakness of the man Jesus, that when we were powerless slaves of sin (Romans 5:6) He rescued us and evacuated us to the safe refuge of His kingdom (Colossians 1:12), and that the very flood that once wiped out nearly all of mankind was also the flood by which God saved a chosen remnant, so that every flood is now a reminder of how God saves us through the water of Baptism (1 Peter 3:21). So how about: "I CALLED OUT OF MY DISTRESS TO THE LORD, AND HE ANSWERED ME" (Jonah 2:2)?

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All right, it's not much of a blog post. But what with Orc Week and all, my creative thoughts have been pretty short and disconnected. Tonight we have a rehearsal that may be attended by some 600 people! So I'd better start warming up now...

Happy Birthday to Me!

I didn't exactly throw myself a party. But I did have a quick meal at Smokin' Al's barbecue. For the record: a pulled pork sandwich with spicy sauce on the side, a tub of their delicious homemade applesauce, and a snort of orange pop.

It was also the first night of Orc Week, as the Symphony Chorus met with a substitute-guest-conductor (due to the scheduled guest-conductor's flight being delayed) and ran through most of the Lord of the Rings Symphony. The children's choir is great. It's going to be an interesting experience - and the performances are sold out!

Cocoa-Coma

My mother telephoned yesterday. She sounded happier than I have heard her in years. The reason for her joy? Chocolate!

Twenty-three years ago, my mother suffered a severe allergic reaction after over-indulging in chocolate-covered strawberries. From that day on, she conceived a strong aversion to both chocolate and strawberries. Incredible though it may sound, she hasn't touched either treat in all those years. At yet she never had herself tested for allergies, to find out which of the two triggered the allergy attack.

My mother is, under everything else, an hysteric. Throwing fits is her forte. Keening, fretting hissy fits, driven either by passion or by anxiety, are her spiritual gift. She has asthma attacks when people contradict her (even though she doesn't have asthma). She has chest pains when she is under pressure (even though her cardiologist swears she has the cleanest arterial walls in Nebraska). She breaks out in hives, feels as if her throat is swelling shut, and suddenly needs to sit or lie down during periods of crisis.

It has always been so, from the time my then-three-year-old brother fell down in an epileptic seizure and she needed to be pushed around the emergency room in a wheelchair, to the time she filed a missing-persons report on me when I, as a freshly-minted pastor just shy of 30, happened to go to a minister's conference out of town without notifying her in advance. Imagine my embarrassment when I found out the police had been looking for me because I didn't clear my movements with my mother - though I haven't lived in the same state with her since 1987.

So, obviously, I have always reckoned that Mom's supposed allergy to strawberries and/or chocolate was nothing but hysteria. She never made any effort to get a doctor's opinion on the matter, which only strengthened me in this conviction. Mom's joy, therefore, was no greater than my surprise when she told me that she had been tested, and found to be extremely allergic to strawberries. Not that being in mortal danger from the Number 3 Ice Cream Flavor in America is anything to be happy about. She was simply ecstatic over being able to go on her first chocolate binge in 23 years.

I hope she doesn't overdo it too much. That stuff can go to your head! But you know, I think this may give Mom a new lease on life. Or at least a relief-valve when the stress gets to be too much.

Righteous Spoilers

After asking the girl behind the ticket counter to describe the films, I said to her: "Based on all that you know about me, would I more enjoy Burn After Reading or Righteous Kill?" Somehow, without giggling, she gave me the impression that I would probably like the latter, since a lot of people were buying tickets to it, while the former was more of a comedy. So I followed her advice and saw Righteous Kill. And now let's roll some pictures so that, if you don't want to see spoilers, you can pull out without risk.
This film was directed by Jon Avnet, who also directed Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Up Close and Personal (1997), and last year's 88 Minutes, among not very many other things. It was written by Russell Gewirtz, who also wrote Spike Lee's bank-robbery-with-a-twist film Inside Man (2006). It stars Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as buddy cops - homicide detectives, actually. You may remember seeing them both in The Godfather, Part II (1974), though they never appeared together in the same scene. Or you may remember them from Heat (1995) - which, judging by a conversation I overheard as I walked out of the theater, at least some in the audience do. SPOILER: Last time it was Pacino who killed De Niro. Now it ends up the other way around.

Also starring as partner detectives are Donnie Wahlberg and John Leguizamo, who led the cast of the 2007 Spike TV series Kill Point (in the last episode of which Wahlberg kills Leguizamo). SPOILER: They both live through this one. Their lieutenant is played by Brian Dennehy, and Carla Gugino rounds out the principal cast as a crime-scene analyst who has romantic ties to both Leguizamo's character and De Niro's.

All the characters are pretty well into antihero territory, except you are immediately forced to suspect that one of them is actually a villain. The obvious villain, from the first shot of the film, is De Niro - which makes it a sure thing it isn't really him, since only a very lousy mystery would begin by telling you who done it. Gradually the cop characters begin to suspect that the serial killer they are looking for is also a cop; and their first suspect is also De Niro. He looks guilty as hell. But the Gugino character also looks pretty fishy. Who knew that (SPOILER!!!) it was Pacino all along? Pacino who, hypothetically speaking, says "I'm the killer" at one point; Pacino who is the first to point out the possibility that the killer is a cop; Pacino who seems to be trying to deflect suspicion from his partner while the real killer seems to be doing everything in his power to frame De Niro?

Well, I knew, from almost the very start. I spent most of the movie asking myself, not "Did De Niro really do it?" or "Who did it?", but "How does Pacino get De Niro to confess on video to 14 murders that Pacino committed?" That was the puzzler that kept me on the hook until the end of the movie. And in retrospect, the fact that the two lead characters are always addressed by their nicknames Turk and Rooster turns out to be the conceit that makes it all work. For although De Niro begins the film with the words "My name is David Fisk," you don't realize until the point in the story where he actually makes this statement that David Fisk is the name of Pacino's character.

So, essentially, the whole messy, convoluted plot boils down to a single trick: you assume Turk=Fisk all along because the person who first says "I am Fisk" is always called Turk, and never by his own name. The film is, at bottom, all about finding out the names of its main characters, establishing identity, learning who is who. And once you realize who they really are, you see them in a different way. Instead of a homicidally angry cop who could explode at any moment, you finally perceive De Niro's "Turk" as the kind of guy who lets his serial-killer partner fire several rounds over his head without shooting back - who tries to talk him out of committing suicide by cop - and who, in firing the "kill shot" that ends their standoff, can be seen painfully surrendering to the inevitable.

It's a brilliant deception. Whether or not the motivations of Pacino's character are at all plausible, I cannot say. The police psychologist character in the film seems to consider the idea of a serial-killer cop ludicrous. Some of Pacino's actions as the villain seem arbitrary and even contradictory, self-defeating. Some of De Niro's behavior makes him look guilty. But the film's attempt to conceal the identity of the real killer (and rapist, by the way) seemed a bit silly by the end. You should know De Niro couldn't be the guy who raped his girlfriend. By the very fact that they don't show you who did it - or the guy who visits the wounded witness's hospital bed with dastardly plans - or the picture Gugino shows the witness when she asks: "Is this the man who shot you?" - you ought to know enough to surmise that it isn't De Niro's face you aren't seeing. And because of the way movies work (as opposed to reality), it can only be one other person.

A final word about the cast. Trilby Glover plays the lawyer-turned dope defendant-turned informant against Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson. As Victim #14, Jackson creates the kind of screen presence that makes you hope that his character gets a bullet in the head; so his spectacular death gives a good deal of satisfaction. Glover, on the other hand, has a certain Alicia Silverstonesque cuteness. She seems too smart to play "clueless," but because of her charm and beauty you might feel protective of her - which heightens the suspense of the scene in which she risks her life in a sting operation.

It seems a pity that her character has so little screen time. She's the nicest thing to look at in the whole movie, and even with a cocaine habit her character comes across as a nicer person than the cops and crooks who populate the movie. De Niro's voice-over (actually reading Pacino's written confession) explains why this may be the case. Cops and crooks share a darker slice of life than everybody else - a side of existence the rest of us barely notice as we go around shopping, eating out, and watching movies. This isolates cops from regular folk and gives them a more negative outlook on the world, since they spend so much time with the worst sliver of the social pie graph, and since they are trained to look out for things most of us ignore. This does as much as anything to explain what makes Pacino's character, as a killer cop, tick - and why De Niro and the other detectives in the film have such tough, unpretty lives outside of work. Yet the movie ends on a note of hope: a gift that, after Godfather II and Heat, you may not expect.