Donald Palumbo is breathing a bit easier now, having successfully presided over perhaps the most difficult, concentrated choral season in Lyric Opera history. From Boito`s ”Mefistofele” to Puccini`s ”Turandot,” the technical and musical demands made on all 60 regular chorus members were intense. And it was the chorus master`s job to make sure everyone was prepared.
During any given performance you could usually spot Palumbo somewhere in the wings, conducting an offstage band, or, if the scenery made it difficult for the chorus to see the conductor`s baton, marking the beat with his trusty penlight. Palumbo put colored nail polish on the tip, he explains, so it would be visible to the choristers but not to the audience.
As the chorus master sees it, each opera this season had its own problems. For ”Mefistofele,” he had to coordinate the massed adult and children`s choruses in stage director Robert Carsen`s opera-within-an-opera. For Bellini`s ”I Puritani,” the chorus worked as a unit and as individual voices, which required full-throated singing and a delicate, transparent sound.
”The biggest problem,” Palumbo explains, ”was Barber`s `Antony and Cleopatra,` because the concept evolved into an offstage choral presence. Most of the onstage group were supernumeraries, not chorus, and this involved a lot of last-minute scrambling to find positions for the chorus.
”For the big choral interlude in Prokofiev`s `The Gambler,` the chorus had to be in the pit; we couldn`t coordinate them backstage. Because the scene came late in the opera, the chorus call was for 9 p.m. They had two quick run- throughs of the music backstage before filing into the pit, singing the scene and filing out.”
When Palumbo began his first season as Lyric chorus master early last year, many observers felt the Lyric Chorus was somewhere between mediocre and good, one or two notches below the Metropolitan Opera and San Francisco Opera choruses, both full-time ensembles. Lyric choristers are paid on an hourly basis during the preseason April-to-August period of musical rehearsals; they assume full-time status from mid-August through the end of the opera season in early February.
”My initial reaction (to the chorus) was that everything was basically there (but) that it needed a better, more consistent concept of sound than was being produced,” Palumbo says. ”I feel an opera chorus has to have a dark, rich, full, dramatic sound rather than a loud, brash, aggressive sound. That`s the kind of sound I hope we can go for.”
By season`s end, the improvement-not only in sound, but in the quality of ensemble, intonation and expressive depth-has been noticeable.
A choral singer before becoming a choral director, Palumbo thinks it`s time people realized how much hard work and dedication is expected of the average opera chorister. Indeed, he believes it`s tougher to perform choral parts in opera than to sing many leading roles.
”The musical discipline that is required of a choral singer is higher,” he says. ”On any given night a soloist has the freedom to stretch a note value or cheat the sound a bit. But a chorister must execute the music the same way within the group every night.”
Creating and sustaining a high level of choral singing on a performance-to-performance basis requires a tough taskmaster, and that is exactly how Palumbo sees himself.
”You have to be tough,” he says. ”All of the good chorus masters are. I think I`m severe, but I always try to keep the final musical goal in mind. It`s very easy to be mediocre. I have to establish a chorus sound and somehow get all those voices to conform to that.”
”We are hoping in the next couple of years to be able to attract more voices with guts in their sound. It`s going to be difficult with our (pay)
structure, though.” First-year male choristers can expect to earn about $16,000 annually, female chorus members about $12,000; men are required to work more hours during the musical rehearsal period.
Of his joining the Lyric`s artistic staff, Palumbo says: ”I feel it`s a kind of pinnacle of my career; I feel very much at home already. This first year has been tough in many ways, but I expected that. All my friends in the profession had told me how great this company is. It turned out to be true.”
