This Robert Shaw CD is AWFUL!!

[Rabrrrrrr]

I respect Shaw as a conductor of songs, but this is a CD of serious music - Gorecki, Part, Schoenberg and others - and it's AWFUL! I am a HUGE Part fan, and I've never heard such a poor performance. He actually makes Part sound uninteresting and vapid and empty. All the mystery, all the otherworldliness, is totally absent.

It's like Shaw thinks he's doing that light bullshit music he did with Alice Parker and others.

All these interpretations are utterly the shits.

He's like the Ron Howard of choral conductors, at least when it comes to serious music. When he's doing songs, he's brilliant.

I guess he just shouldn't do music.

Thank God I borrowed this from the library and didn't buy it.

I have stopped listening. Even the Barber piece he managed to destroy. What the fuck?

And it was with the Robert Shaw singers, too.

The only good thing I can say is that they were totally on pitch and had their entrances and exits down. But I don't think Shaw understands how serious music works at all.


The CD is "Evocation of the Spirit", from 1995.

The play list is:

Gorecki - Totus Tuus

Part - Magnificat

Frank Martin - Mass

Barber - Agnus Dei (based on Adagio for Strings)

Schoenberg - Friede auf Erden





Awful.

[regnaD kciN]

1. He's done a lot of serious music before...

...after all, he was the music director of the Atlanta Symphony for many years, and his discography includes the Berlioz, Verdi, and Faure Requiems, Beethoven's 9th, and what is for many people the finest Carmina Burana committed to disc.

The date on this recording is suspicious. Didn't he die several years before that? It's possible that these are performances he was dissatisfied with, and decided not to release while alive. Many of them might have been recorded as possible filler for other albums, and thus may have been taped at the end of sessions, when everyone was tired and ready to go.

[Rabrrrrrr]

2. I did some digging in the CD materials

It was recorded in 1994, and, as far as I can tell, it was conducted by Robert Shaw.

It's the "Robert Shaw Festival Singers", which is a choir made up of select faculty and students BU, Ohio State Univ., and UCLA. Every year, at for some small period of time, 75 people were selected to form the "Robert Shaw Festival Singers" and they met in France for 3 weeks in the summer, and did choral music and some concerts.

This CD was recorded at the Church of St. Pierre, in Gramat, France.

So, I can only assume that the choir singing on this is one that had been together for only 3 weeks, at best. Which could be why, while they are marvellously in tune, they have such a weird sound - that's a load of VERY difficult music to put together in such a short time.

But that's just me guessing.

It could very well also be a problem with the recording equipment and editing.

[TrogL]

3. He was still conducting in 1997

http://www.singers.com/choral/robertshaw.html

In 1997, the French government awarded him its medal as "Officier des Arts et des Lettres." Last September, Mr. Shaw was Guest Artistic Director at the Kennedy Center for the National Symphony Orchestra's two-week Beethoven Festival, leading performances of the Missa solemnis, Choral Fantasy and Ninth Symphony. Immediately thereafter, he was called to step in for the ailing Seiji Ozawa to conduct the Ninth Symphony for the gala opening concert of the Boston Symphony¼s season. In October he was inducted in the American Classical Music Hall of Fame