While others look forward to celebrating the new year this week with honey cake, I'm still chewing on bitter herbs: each year, Erev Rosh Hashanah is the night that I'm forced to sing the deeply unsatisfying and unflattering bass solo in that damn trio at the end of Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. It may be only a few measures long, but it's exposed, it's not particularly attractive, it's physically uncomfortable, and it's in front of 1300 people. While the soprano and mezzo are doing pretty things, I'm basically stuck holding a B on the same vowel for half a minute. And I mean half a minute literally; in one recording with Bernstein conducting, he makes the poor sap spend 35 seconds on this note. And unlike the kid who gets to do the big "Adonai" solo in the second movement, this earns me no accolades. No matter how well I do it, there ain't nobody gonna be coming up to me afterwards with tears in their eyes saying, "I loved how you kept the tone spinning on beat 15."
This assignment was quickly dumped in my lap as soon as I started this temple job several years ago, only because the other guys didn't want to do it. I'm not a Jew, but I play one during the High Holy Days. You might think that it's difficult for me to pass -- I'm not just a goy, but I'm pretty obviously a goy (unless you consider that special branch of the Diaspora) -- and yet every once in a while there'll be some bloke who comes up to me afterwards to check out if I'm really in the Tribe... which i suppose, upon further reflection, isn't a totally unreasonable assumption if someone's in shul chanting the v'ahavta.
I myself shall mark the Days of Awe this year by going to hear the unhunky but truly awesome Thomas Quasthoff with the San Francisco Symphony. He's doing some of the Schubert Lieder transcriptions he recorded a year or so ago. I listened again last night to his most recent recording with Justus Zeyen, A Romantic Songbook, and man, I don't think I've ever heard Morgen! sung and played so tenderly. What a wonderful record. I just wish he had resisted the urge to throw Danny Boy on as an encore.
Also on the Symphony program are the first section of Four Sections by Steve Reich (or, as the program notes strangely say, Stephen Michael Reich) and Sibelius 2. Though I like a lot of Steve's work, I've never really gotten into Four Sections. But then again, I've never heard it live so I'll go in with an open mind.
L'shana tova, folks. Enjoy yourselves while you can.
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