| All Souls Quarterly Review | |||||||||||
| Vol. VIII, No. 4 | Winter 2003-2004 | ||||||||||
MUSICA VIVA’S TOUR DE PARIS— by Lois Chazen The Musica Viva Choir has been delighting and inspiring congregants of All Souls Church every Sunday morning for more than 27 years. Many New Yorkers well beyond the church community attend the annual concert series presented by Musica Viva. The highly acclaimed choir has just returned from a remarkable nine-day concert tour of Paris and environs, which began January 31. Under the direction of its founder and conductor Walter Klauss, the Minister of Music at All Souls, the choir gave six concerts at places of historic interest in Paris. The first concert was at the Église de la Madeleine. It was performed just hours after the choir stepped off the plane from New York. The audience, numbering more than 2000 people, listened with rapt attention to Mozart’s Requiem for chorus and orchestra. One of the tour’s patrons, Marilyn Scott Murphy, extolled the tour in Sunday Service opening remarks on February 13. “We were transformed…” she said, “by the most thrilling, heart touching and soul moving series of concerts.” She went on to say that the first concert at the Église de la Madeleine was “exquisitely beautiful, the acoustics wrap the sound of music around you… the vibrations penetrate your soul. We cried from the sheer beauty of it.” Although it was the first foreign tour for the choir, Walter Klauss has extensive concert experience abroad. When he was Professor of Music at C.W. Post College, he toured abroad with choirs from the college and various organizations. He also gave organ concerts throughout Europe and in Zimbabwe. During this time, he met the French composer Jean-Louis Petit. Over the years, M. Petit urged Walter to bring Musica Viva to Paris. He had conducted the choir in New York and was impressed by their virtuosity. The trip was finally made possible by generous grants from two anonymous benefactors and eleven patrons from All Souls, who accompanied the choir to Paris. Jean-Louis Petit made the concert arrangements. He selected the venues, provided publicity and took care of all on-site details. Penny Pleasance, the Executive Director of Musica Viva, made the arrangements for housing and hotels, travel, dining and transportation. Musica Viva performed three a cappella programs and two choral-with-orchestra programs of Mozart’s Requiem. The sixth program was Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem accompanied by Jean-Louis Petit’s Chamber Orchestra at the Old Church in Puteaux. The choir sang under the rose window at Notre Dame de Paris, at refurbished, grand Versailles, and at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Le Chesnay. The a cappella programs featured works by Mendelssohn, African-American spirituals, compositions by Jean-Louis Petit, American folk songs and music by Palestrina. On March 3, just after returning from France, Walter and the choir gave a free a cappella concert at All Souls, open to the public, similar to those presented in Paris. The appreciative audience that filled the All Souls sanctuary responded exuberantly to Walter’s imaginative programming and the beauty of the voices. Walter Klauss first came to All Souls in 1976 and quickly revitalized our music program. In 1978, he started the Musica Viva concert series, bringing in a chamber orchestra to complement the All Souls Choir. His early successes are set forth in Mary-Ella Holst’s excellent biography, The Biography of a Sound, to which the reader is referred for further details. The Paris tour and the exacting performances left Walter, “pleased and exhilarated by the experience,” he said. “As a result, we are planning a tour for Musica Viva to Leipzig, Prague and Budapest. Members of All Souls who wish to be patrons will be welcomed to join us.”
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