The Princeton Singers celebrate three decades of musical excellence
By Michele Alperin
Musically complex, culturally wide reaching and at the same time communally focused, The Princeton Singers is a professional chamber ensemble celebrating its 30th anniversary with a special concert this month at Trinity Church.
Carol Burden, a member of the group who is a former opera and oratorio performer, said the uniqueness of singing in a small chamber ensemble versus a large choir is part of what makes the Princeton Singers so special.
A big choir, she said, produces a unified sound simply because there are so many singers. But not so in a chamber ensemble. “You are singing and making tiny adjustments to create a unified sound—creating one voice altogether,” she said.
The Sept. 27 anniversary event, titled “The Dream Concert,” which features a program selected by the artistic director, Steven Sametz, reaches from the Renaissance through new works commissioned by The Princeton Singers. Returning alumni join with 18 current singers to present the music of Lassus, Debussy, Schumann, and featuring Eric Whitacre’s “Leonardo Dreams His Flying Machine,” a reprise of Sametz’s “Dante’s Dream,” and the premiere of a new work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky.
Burden and her husband, William, still a busy singer, moved to Princeton in 2000 so that she could sing at both the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Opera.
Having met Sametz while performing in “La Cenerentola,” where he shared with her songs he had written, she discovered that he was directing The Princeton Singers and joined the ensemble for the 2003 season. After her second son was born in early 2004, she took a leave but rejoined last season. Burden no longer sings full time, but has done arts administration for the Princeton Symphony Orchestra and Westminster Choir College and now does freelance program management.
The Princeton Singers were created in 1983 by John Bertalot, then choirmaster and organist at Trinity Church in Princeton, who decided to start a small, independent ensemble based at the church.
The Princeton Singers’ board chair Ann McGoldrick has a long history with the group, beginning about 26 years ago when Bertalot asked her son Scott, along with two other teen singers at Princeton High School and in the Trinity Church choir, to join the independent ensemble.
“It was founded to sing primarily the best English cathedral music and the familiar and much-loved English madrigals and folk songs,” she said, noting that Bertalot, a Brit, had previously worked at Blackburn Cathedral in the United Kingdom.
During the tenure of her son Scott (now back in Princeton) with the choir, McGoldrick, with her husband and daughter, traveled with the group to England during its first English Cathedral tour. When the time came for the next tour, the ensemble hired her to help organize and run the tour.
“I have been involved since then either as a part-time administrator, board member, and now chair of the board,” said McGoldrick, who has lived in Princeton for nearly 48 years, and in the same house for 37. She and her husband moved here after he graduated from law school, when he worked in Newark and at Educational Testing Service.
While McGoldrick’s relationship with the choir has deepened her appreciation for choral music, the coming of Sametz in 1998 after Bertalot’s retirement added even more. His expansion of the repertoire moved her beyond the familiar into new realms, including music from different cultures and of different types, including contemporary compositions.
“I find it all very exciting, the variety — everything from medieval music in the medieval gallery of the Princeton University Art Museum to a staged version of “St. Matthew’s Passion” at Lehigh; and this year we are premiering two pieces by Pulitzer Prize-winning composers that we have commissioned,” she said.
The collaboration with the art museum that McGoldrick refers to began 12 years ago after a successful “one-off” concert as part of an exhibition of work by Titian and Van Dyke.
This was just after Carolyn Harris moved to Princeton to become the museum’s director of outreach and education. “We all thought it went so well that we decided to develop an annual concert relationship,” she said.
In fact, Harris, who earned her doctorate in art history at the University of Virginia, was well prepared to work actively with Sametz on developing these concerts that joined music and art. Her dissertation was about the 19th-century painter Eugène Delacroix and how he used musical metaphor to talk about “both painting, finished work, and the process and relationship with the viewer,” she said. “He wrote about painting in terms of ideas like harmony and melody and talked about painting as a performance.”
Every year Harris sits down with Sametz and members of the board and talks about upcoming exhibitions. “He chooses things he really responds to, and we make it work with our schedule,” she said. The Princeton Singers used to perform only once a year, in a room holding either a special exhibition or part of the permanent collection, but a few years ago they decided that the program was so popular they would do two museum concerts a year. The next art museum concert, “My Funny Valentine,” will take be performed on Feb. 14, 2015.
“Steven is really inspired by the collaboration between the singers and the musicians, and the repertoire and the works of art,” said Harris. Noting a painting by Mark Rothko on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she said that Sametz built a whole concert around it, focusing on the idea of abstraction in music and in visual art. “With each piece, he gave a short explanation of how he connected this piece of music with this painting.”
Although the museum has three galleries with good acoustics, space is at a premium, for example, the American gallery can hold only 100 people for a concert. “It’s tight but we like that special feeling of being with the art while the music is unfolding,” Harris said.
In 2007 Harris joined the board, both because of her art history background and her involvement in the joint concerts. “The people who perform as part of the group are extraordinary; their commitment to their craft is really moving, and that is what keeps me involved with the group,” she said.
Sametz notes that the ensemble has also done high school festivals in Princeton, like one at Stuart Country Day School, where members of The Princeton Singers helped students with their choral and musical skills and also premiered a new work with them.
Because of the group’s versatility and its ability to perform pieces from the Middle Ages to modern, switching styles very quickly, the ensemble has biennially been in residence at Lehigh University, where Sametz is a music professor and director of choral activities, for a composer’s forum, where the composers create works on The Princeton Singers.
“They are told not to come with anything written,” said Sametz. “They write on the Princeton Singers, like a choreographer would work with a dance company.” Some of the works created this way will be in the 30th anniversary concert.
McGoldrick said that last year, after the composers forum, the ensemble gave a concert in Washington at a convention of composers where all 22 of the compositions written during the week were performed.
Also talking about the ensemble’s versatility, Sametz said that they come together to do “very daring, somewhat provocative repertoire, [but] we also do pieces people grew up loving.”
One of these is “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” by Dylan Thomas, done with guest readers. “We interlace music with the story in a kind of magical way, but it is often serious and silly,” Sametz said, noting the balance between serene lullabies and music from Fantasia about hippotami dancing.
Becca Migliore, who joined the ensemble during its first season, has deep roots in Princeton. She was born in Princeton, where her father, Daniel Migliore, was a professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary for over 50 years, and her mother, Margaret Migliore, taught in the Princeton school system. Becca also sang with the Princeton High School Choir and the Trinity Church Choir.
Migliore remained part of The Princeton Singers from 1983 to 1988, while she studied at Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, then rejoined in 1996. She currently lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey, where she is pastor of United Presbyterian Church of West Orange, and she continues to sing with The Princeton Singers.
“I’ve loved singing since I was a very little girl, and The Princeton Singers is an exquisite experience because you are singing at the highest level with such talented people, and you get to make beautiful music,” said Migliore. “I’ve sung with a lot of different groups, and there’s nothing like it.”
Beyond the quality of the singers and the musical directors she has worked with, Migliore points to the difficulty of the music as a distinguishing characteristic of The Princeton Singers. With 18 singers on the current roster, they often sing 8-part music and sometimes 16, where, said Migliore, “everybody has his own thing to do.”
Migliore has also traveled with the ensemble to amazing places — with Bertalot, she sang at Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Kings College. She has also been part of amazing events — with Sametz, she was part of a theatrical production of “St. Matthew’s Passion” that included dancers, and she performed at the American Choral Directors meetings, both regional and national. The Princeton Singers have also gotten to premier the work of both Bertalot and Sametz, who are both composers.
The work, said Migliore, challenges her as a musician, encompassing “the breadth of what you’re able to experience musically, from Bach to a piece that no one else has heard.”
Over the last three years Migliore, as she has faced a diagnosis of leukemia and gone through a bone marrow transplant, has especially come to treasure her experience with The Princeton Singers.
“I’ve been much more aware of what makes my heart soar,” she said. “I had to take a medical leave for a while, but coming back to the singers reminds me of just how joyful it is to be able to make beautiful music.”
The Princeton Singers presents “The Dream Concert – A 30th Anniversary Celebration!” Saturday, September 27, 2014, 8 p.m., at Trinity Church, 33 Mercer Street, Princeton. Cost: $25. Tickets may be purchased at www.princetonsingers.org/shop/, by emailing tickets@princetonsingers.org, or by calling (866) 846-7464. For more information, contact Kal Sostarecz, executive director, at (866) 846-7464 or execdir@princetonsingers.org.
,
