Word: conductor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...West Side. The members of a New York chorus and orchestra, having failed to raise money for expenses, have had to cancel their planned performance of Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall. After a potluck supper, the singers and some of the instrumentalists squeeze into their conductor's dining room to perform the work for themselves and a few friends...
...festival, called Basically Bach. Inspired by Lincoln Center's long established Mostly Mozart festival, the twelve-day event is complete with buttons, T shirts (I AM A BACH BACKER), lectures, concerts, organ recitals at various churches, and free open-air performances by brass ensembles. The conductor watches concertgoers stream into Avery Fisher Hall and happily ponders the leap from his dining room...
...group in these two scenes is called Musica Sacra. The conductor is a hearty, frustrated baseball player and onetime concert organist named Richard Westenburg. Musica Sacra is a time whose idea has come. That is, it embodies a period and style of music-the great sacred, choral works, especially of the baroque-that few before had been able to move from church choirs and amateur choruses into a professional concert series. In the past three years, the group (which works with a nucleus of 29 singers and 28 instrumentalists) has given notable performances of such works as Mozart...
Besides serving as head of the choral department at Juilliard, Westenburg is now music director at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (where most of his Musica Sacra singers also perform) and conductor of the Collegiate Chorale, a 160-voice amateur chorus. And he is planning another Basically Bach festival for next year. All of this has forced him to forgo his weekly summer baseball games and subside to the status of a merely passionate fan. His team? "The Yankees-I guess because they're winners." Coming from a man with Westenburg's recent record, that figures...
Higgins, author of the minor classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), still knows how to place surreal descriptions in the dialogue of his characters: "Marian looked like a small horse, perhaps a pony, who had read Vogue and believed it." And he has not lost his conductor's ear for the music and lilt of Boston Irish patois. Here the punch lines are stronger than the plot lines, but Higgins' characters are so shrewdly observed by Year's end, as Edgar confronts Peter, that it is impossible to disagree with his summary...