by Robert Rollin
Last Sunday, August 12, an all-Brahms concert by the Master Singers Chorale and Orchestra at SS. Cosmas and Damian Church in Twinsburg honored the retirement of founding artistic director J.D. Goddard. The afternoon’s high point was the performance of the Fourth Symphony.
by Daniel Hathaway
For his final performance with Master Singers Inc., the Akron-based chorus he founded 17 years ago, conductor J.D. Goddard will lead two of his all-time favorite works by Johannes Brahms — the Fourth Symphony and A German Requiem. The free concert, featuring some 70 singers and full orchestra, will take place on Sunday, August 12 at 3:00 pm in SS. Cosmas and Damian Church in Twinsburg.
Goddard and his singers have logged some impressive statistics over the years, having performed 61 major works, 71 world premieres, and 22 American premieres. “That’s what I set out to do,” the 73-year-old conductor said in a telephone conversation. “All I wanted to perform was classical choral literature and world premieres. There are many very good choral organizations out there that do pops and barbershop — far more than sing classical music— but I tell people up front that our motto is ‘preserve the past and premiere the future of classical choral literature.’ Come sing with us and see if that’s for you.”
The conductor’s invitation to ‘come sing with us’ is one of Goddard’s guiding principles. “We have an open-door policy and there are virtually no auditions,” he said. “Some conductors want to audition people out, but we audition to include, not exclude.” That system seems to have worked for nearly two decades, and to some extent, his singers self-select themselves. “The majority of people who come and sit in on a rehearsal don’t come back because they realize it really is just classical music.”
By Daniel Hautzinger
For most people, the name Antonio Salieri denotes mediocrity envious of genius, and is inextricably (and unfavorably) associated with Mozart. In Pushkin’s play Mozart and Salieri, Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera of the same name, Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus and its film adaptation, Salieri is depicted as a jealous composer who poisons Mozart after being upstaged by him.
But Salieri was a popular composer in his own right, and the mythology surrounding his relationship to Mozart has probably been exaggerated. His operas were widely known in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and he was a well-regarded teacher of composition whose students included Liszt, Schubert and Beethoven.
You can evaluate Salieri and his music on their own terms at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron on August 3, when the Master Singers Chorale and Strings present his Requiem in c minor under the direction of J.D. Goddard. [Read more…]