Chris Russell rehearses the Orange County High School of the Arts Symphony Orchestra Friday afternoon in St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach
This was the hardest part:
Ye ice falls! Ye that from the mountain’s brow/ Adown enormous ravines slope amain –/ Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,/ And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!/ Motionless torrents! Silent cataracts!
Getting my mouth around those words by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which preface the third movement of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica, getting the tone and accents and pauses right, proved to be more difficult than I had imagined. Speaking into a microphone and hearing my voice resonate into the large room we were to perform in threw me off as well. I messed up the passage a couple of times during the dress rehearsal Friday afternoon. My friend, conductor Christopher Russell, didn’t seem to mind, and the musicians in the Orange County High School of the Arts Symphony Orchestra didn’t laugh at me, at least not that I could tell. We all had a lot on our plates, the Sinfonia Antarctica not an easy thing to get together.
Chris put the orchestra through a grueling rehearsal, the first the orchestra had had with the pipe organ, narrator and wind sounds (electronically produced). The solo soprano (Hillary Place, fantastic) sang from a balcony to the side of the sanctuary; the women’s chorus sat directly behind the orchestra. Chris told me that the orchestra was one or two rehearsals short of what they’d normally have before a concert. He had plenty to settle with his young musicians.
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