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New York Times Review, 9/13/07
Singing to Raise a Day's Spirit
People mattered more than music at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Tuesday. The sixth September Concert noting the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, shared in spirit with thousands of similar commemorations around the world, offered three choruses and plain-spoken music. Msgr. Robert T. Ritchie spoke briefly at the beginning and end.
Dark suits and sober dresses moved to the front pews. There were politicians, dignitaries from abroad, parishioners in their Sunday best on a Tuesday evening, rank-and-file worshipers — all mixed with a casual crowd in beat-the-heat tourist dress, people who might have dropped in by chance after a trip to Rockefeller Center or Saks Fifth Avenue nearby.
The music put aside mourning, tending toward the hopeful and the patriotic. The Cathedral of St. Patrick Choir, led by Jennifer Pascual, emphasized such themes, singing “America the Beautiful” and then underlining it with “God Bless America,” one of Irving Berlin’s perfectly shaped and uncluttered exercises in the melodic art.
The New York Choral Society, conducted by John Daly Goodwin, began things with Harry Belafonte’s “Turn the World Around” and the traditional “Plenty Good Room.” The St. Patrick singers added user-friendly church anthems and a little Handel as well. I was taken with Francisco Núñez’s Young People’s Chorus of New York City, a group of well-prepared teenagers in reasonably sophisticated pieces by Fauré, Stephen Hatfield, Jim Papoulis. and Mr. Núñez himself.
At the end all three choruses got together for Paul Halley’s “Freedom Trilogy,” a piece including an elaborate drum solo and shadows of “Amazing Grace.” A space this big is not kind to musical clarity. It is not that one hears too little, rather too much and too often — each individual sound bouncing off distant ceilings and arriving at the ear at slightly different times. Vaguely heard or not, the music had its effect on an audience that seemed anything but downcast.
Chorus Line: Working to Build Harmony
by RITA DELFINER
Get ready to sing "Happy Birthday" to Francisco Nuñez's Young People's Chorus of New York City.
Nuñez, who two years ago won a Liberty "Ambassador" Medal for founding the choir with the goal of making it as multicultural as the city, will celebrate its 10th anniversary as an independent chorus this October with a gala concert at Carnegie Hall.
"My dream was to bring children of diverse backgrounds together because there are so many kids that can relate to music," said Nuñez, the artistic director. "The dream has come true."
The singers, ages 8 to 18, come from different racial, religious and economic walks of life.
"We have 1,000 kids working together to create a beautiful sound, and the most important thing is that, being in a diverse environment, they learn about each other," he said.
The Post's Liberty Medals program seeks to recognize the everyday heroes who are the backbone of our city. We invite our readers to nominate people who have made a difference with their skill and compassion.
Hitting All the Stops and High Notes of a Subway Ride
By ALLAN KOZINN
There is a lot to be said for children's choirs, both in musical terms — when they are at their best, they produce a pure tone that adult choirs cannot match — and in terms of the social relationships they foster, to say nothing of the affinity for performance they create among their young charges.
Francisco J. Núñez, who directs the Young People's Chorus of New York City, has been raising the bar over the last decade by commissioning a steady stream of works from composers who usually write for adults and weaving them into programs that include choral classics, spirituals, theater songs and pop arrangements.
On Monday evening at Pace University , Mr. Núñez and his chorus opened “Summer Stars,” the classical music series within the River to River Festival, with the kind of eclectic program that has become their trademark. Five works were commissioned for the occasion.
The most challenging was Meredith Monk's “Three Heavens and Hells,” in which rhythms, quirky melodies and vocal sound effects multiplied. Michael Gordon 's “Every Stop on the F Train” tested the choir's contrapuntal suppleness as well. A surprisingly inventive setting of the subway map — the text being the list promised in the title — the work presents a unison melody for the Queens stops, a two-part canon for the stations in Manhattan and a four-part canon for those in Brooklyn. Along the way, Mr. Gordon's cross-rhythms create the clacking sound of the subway itself.
The other premieres were “Afternoon on a Hill,” a gracefully simple group of four short pieces by Ned Rorem ; “Taxi,” a sweetly melancholy Amy Lowell setting by Tarik O'Regan; and Bruce Adolphe's “Singing This Piece,” in which the choir sings about singing.
Mr. Núñez also led two sacred settings, his own “O Sacrum Convivium” and Eleanor Daley's “In Remembrance,” as well as Fauré's exquisite “Cantique de Jean Racine” and Karl Jenkins's modishly folksy “Kayama.” Mr. Núñez turned the choir over to an assistant, Lauren Quigley, for works by Holst and Frank Loesser , and took up the reins for a finale that included robustly sung spirituals and a lollipop version of Paul McCartney 's “When I'm 64.”
BBC Music Magazine, April 2007
Voices of the Streets
by Brian Wise
To see them filing on stage wearing their pastel blue shirts and multicoloured scarves, you might think the Young People's Chorus of New York City is just another cute group of kids singing earnest choral music with simple, uplifting messages. Then they start singing pieces with big topics - sexual identity, war, mental illness or the holocaust. They use extended vocal techniques (sighs, chants, moans, drones) and texts in unfamiliar languages such as Swahili, Hebrew or Native American dialects. And the composers they present have name recognition beyond the margins of the choral music world.
read the full article (PDF)
Voices Of The Shoah
Ruth Fazal's 'Oratorio Terezin' sets to music children's writing and art from the 'model' concentration camp.
by George Robinson
Ruth Fazal had finished reading the book and put it on a shelf, but a year later she knew that she would have to do something with it.
The book was "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," a collection of children's writings and art from the Terezin Ghetto, a concentration camp "city" that the Nazis had created from an 18th-century village northwest of Prague, a camp that in its several years of use included some 15,000 children among its prisoners. The ghetto was a way station on the road to Auschwitz. Of the children imprisoned there, only 132 are known to have survived.
But Terezin left behind a rich cultural deposit created by its Jewish inhabitants, and the contents of that book are only one small sample. Since Terezin was a "model" camp, the Nazis allowed a degree of freedom and even normality not to be found in other camps. As a result, Terezin had an active cultural life that produced music, both popular and classical, and theater pieces like Viktor Ullmann's "The Emperor of Atlantis."
Ruth Fazal knew little of this story when the children's voices in the book began haunting her.
"I'd grown up in my nice middle-class England," she says from her home in Toronto. "I hadn't known anything about this. Then a year later I felt that I should do something with some of these poems."
The result was "two and a half very tough years" of writing, she says, which culminated in her work, "Oratorio Terezin," which will have its U.S. premiere on Wednesday, Feb. 7.
Fazal found that the children's voices were raising the same questions that were troubling her.
"As a Christian, I had been struggling with this dilemma, where was God in all this terrible suffering," she says. "As a believing person I wanted to deal with this."
Her first instinct was to write a simple piece juxtaposing some of the poems with texts from the Hebrew Bible. But the piece quickly outgrew any ideas of simplicity.
"If I was going to struggle with these issues, I needed an adult perspective as well, so the adult chorus became a necessary component," she explains. "Then I realized that I would need the voice of God, and the voice of a Prophet and a soprano voice as the voice of Suffering."
Complicating this process was the fact that, as she quickly adds, "I'm not a composer." She is, however, an experienced songwriter and an accomplished professional violinist who has been concertmistress for several orchestras. The latter experience in particular was a boon to the writing process, which began seven years ago.
One decision she made early in the process was that she was not going to listen to the music that had been made in Terezin, neither the original compositions of Ullmann, Hans Krasa and Gideon Klein, nor the music performed there, most famously the Verdi Requiem.
"When I started writing a lot of people would say, 'You've got to visit this museum, you've got to hear this music,' and I felt very strongly that I shouldn't do any of these things," she says. "I needed to express this journey myself."
She readily admits her influences, though. Of course as a symphony musician, she has played all the great composers, but the ones who she felt guided by in her writing are all 20th-century giants whose music responded directly to the turmoil of their times - Ives, Britten, Shostakovich and Prokofiev.
The other significant influences on her writing were her own children.
"Both of my kids were in children's choirs, and I always remembered the pieces that they hated to perform," she says with a laugh. "I wanted to write something the children will sing to themselves, tunes that they'll remember."
After a world premiere in 2003 in Toronto, "Oratorio Terezin" has been performed in Vienna, Slovakia and Israel. That trajectory was carefully chosen, Fazal says.
"It had an order in which it had to go," she asserts. "I thought it was more important to have it play where the history took place first. I had a sense of carrying a light into a dark place. So we played Slovakia, where Terezin was located, then Vienna, in a concert hall in which a tribute concert to Hitler had been played when he visited. We wanted to take back that ground. And it was important that it went to Israel next."
That concert, which was held in Tel Aviv, coincidentally took place on Yom HaShoah, on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. "We gave free tickets to all Holocaust survivors," she says. "The hall was packed and we got a long standing ovation."
The idea that this piece of music could also have an impact beyond the concert hall is not merely lip service. The children's choirs that have participated in performances of "Oratorio Terezin" attend Holocaust education sessions as well as rehearsals.
"That was amazing," says Francisco J. Nunez, artistic director of the Young People's Chorus of New York City, which will be performing at the Feb. 7 concert. "They brought a survivor in and he talked to the children. He told them, 'I was your age when this was happening,' and they understood and identified. The children's questions were so amazing, so sophisticated for kids their age. A lot of the children in this chorus are Jewish, and they had particularly poignant and pointed questions, because they are familiar with this subject."
The children, Nunez says, are stirred by what they learn.
"They want to know more," he says. "The Jewish children feel pride in having done this piece, the non-Jewish children feel very good about being a part of this. We have kids who are Muslims, Evangelical Christians, atheists, and they are together on stage for this, and they feel it."
Fazal concurs.
"For the children who have been involved in this piece since the very beginning, it's set them on a path they would never have been on," she says. "The Oratorio expresses hope. Works like these can be a doorway to a huge change happening." n
"Oratorio Terezin" will have its U.S. premiere on Wednesday, Feb. 7 at 8 p.m. at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts on the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University (Brookville) and will be performed on Thursday, Feb. 8 at 8 p.m. in Carnegie Hall (57th Street and Seventh Ave.). For information on the performance at the Tilles Center, call (516) 299-3100 or go to www.tillescenter.org. For information on the Carnegie Hall performance, call (212) 247-7800 or go to www.carnegiehall.org.
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