Too Much Perfection

Robert Shaw, something of a prodigy at his profession, was nagged by doubt. Only 32, the top chorus master in the U.S., he was bossing his own 185-voice amateur Collegiate Chorale (sometimes broken down into smaller groups, e.g., the RCA Victor Chorale, the Columbia Choral) and preparing the choral parts for Toscanini's broadcasts of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Verdi's Falstaff, Requiem. But, as he diagnosed himself, "I don't handle the orchestra as well as the singers and I want to find out why." He promised himself a two-year breather to find the answer. Chasing off to Europe, he listened to a few concerts, then bounded back to the U.S., convinced that "I could do a lot more real work sitting on my tail in Scarsdale."

Last week Bob Shaw was back in Carnegie Hall with proof that, wherever he has been sitting for the past 24 months, he has found some of the answers--if not yet all the right ones. For the first of an ambitious series of seven concerts featuring choral "masterworks" since Bach, he presented his professional 40-voice Robert Shaw Chorale arranged behind a 45-piece orchestra. In the opening Mozart Requiem he proved that he now has one of the most highly trained and carefully blended chorus-and-orchestra combinations in the world, capable of far more clarity than a booming mass chorus and far more power than the usual smaller ensemble. In three intricate chansons by Debussy and three more by Ravel, his singers performed with gymnastic precision. Finally they went on to the first U.S. performance of Bela Bartok's exotic secular cantata, The Enchanted Deer, and handled it with perfect form and ease.

The ensemble's perfection seemed to lack only one thing: spontaneity. The crescendos and diminuendos were somehow too smooth, the phrases too surgically sanitary. Some of Shaw's listeners, though filled with admiration, felt a bit like Richard Strauss when he complained to the musicians of the Boston Symphony in 1904: "You play finely, but a little too finely. I want some roughness here."

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