The Chorale in Israel - July 10

Today we met Zubin Mehta for a piano rehearsal. The chorus likes him a lot-he's very easy to follow. The Bloch Sacred Service is full of places where the tempo gets stretched and compressed, and where the dynamics swell and sink often and quickly. You have to be pretty nimble to stay on top of everything. It can be really difficult for one hundred people to keep together like this, but the way Zubin Mehta conducts makes it easy. He's very businesslike. At first I was worried that maybe he didn't really like us, because we'd sing a passage, and he'd just nod and go on to the next, unless he had a specific comment to make. But it turns out he just doesn't waste words. When we finished going through the piece, he said, "Usually choruses sound terrible up there [in the loft]. You sound very good." And, hallelujah, it turns out we won't have to perform up there after all. There will be risers on stage, they just don't bother to set them up for rehearsals. So if he already thinks we sound good, he should be very happy when we get out from under that overhang. At the end of the rehearsal, he said, "My orchestra's really going to enjoy you." He says that Israel doesn't have much of a tradition of choral singing; since there isn't usually a choir in Jewish services, Israel doesn't have nearly as many choristers running around as we do in the U.S. Mehta definitely wants more consonants from us (lots more), but he told us that we were pronouncing our Hebrew vowels just right for the time and tradition in which Bloch wrote the piece. He said modern Israelis would try to correct us, but we shouldn't let them. Another example of the way music crosses cultural and national boundaries--where else could you plausibly have a man born in India telling a bunch of Americans not to let their Hebrew pronunciation be influenced by what native Hebrew speakers have to say? Tomorrow we get to meet the orchestra (and Thomas Hampson).

-- Janet Pascal