Daniel Shaw, the artistic director for the New Haven Oratorio Choir, wants people to audition for the choir. He also wants the choir to audition for them.
That’s the idea behind the choir’s open rehearsal, which is coming up on Sept. 13 at the Church of the Redeemer on Whitney Avenue. The open rehearsal is a chance for people interested in joining to see what being in the Oratorio Choir is all about, even beyond the singing.
“Maybe they’ve heard the choir, or read about it,” Shaw said. “But they don’t know what a rehearsal is like. I think they should know. An open rehearsal is them auditioning us.”
If a singer comes to the choir and is interested in joining, it would be followed quickly by a traditional audition, so that the new member could start attending the choir’s Wednesday evening rehearsals, also at the Church of the Redeemer — rehearsals that, typically, are followed by choir members going to Archie Moore’s.
Now entering its 55th year, the Oratorio Choir’s emphasis on community as well as musical development has been part of its mode of operations for a long time. Apart from the post-rehearsal hang at Archie Moore’s, the choir follows every concert with a reception, and often more singing.
“Everyone is in everyone’s face,” Shaw said with a laugh. “I know everyone and have some sense of their voice.” Even though the choir has about 25 members, he said, “it’s an intimate musical experience.”
Sharon Benzoni Photo
The choir’s size and Shaw’s own musical curiosity — he’s a composer himself — has meant that “you’ll hear stuff that you just don’t hear elsewhere,” Shaw said. The choir’s concerts mix the famous with the less well known, and Shaw has championed works by living composers. The choir’s spring 2017 concert, titled “Northern Lights,” focused on works by Scandinavian and Canadian composers, while its winter 2016 concert tackled Fauré’s Requiem. Previous seasons mixed war horses like Brahms with world premieres by young composers, whose work Shaw often finds in his work with the Composers’ Choir; one 2015 program was made up entirely of works by women.
The repertoire is also driven by what Shaw hears in the choir’s musical development. It allows the choir to take on more challenging material and succeed. In its most recent concert, Shaw said, the choir had sounded the best it ever had. From his place as the conductor, he said, “it felt like everyone was sharing the same dream.”
For the upcoming winter concert on Dec. 8, the choir will perform Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes, which the composer wrote for choir and four-hands piano. For its spring concert, Shaw is putting together a program that can “show off the Church of the Redeemer’s magnificent organ.” He is contemplating, among other pieces, Britten’s “Te Deum,” a piece that finds singers and instrument playing in different meters, to disorienting and possibly exhilarating effect.
The work to put it together, for Shaw, is worth it. At its best, singing, and music in general, “puts you in a slightly different state of consciousness. You’re doing something that words can’t do. You’re above words,” Shaw said. “You duck out of a sense of time. You’re removed from self, from your life story, from taxes, from that toe that looks a little weird.”
And that everyone is doing it together fosters the sense of community that the Oratorio has always had, in and out of rehearsal and performance.
“I think people should get out in the world and do things. With other people,” Shaw said. “Could be singing. Could be a book club.” And it could be joining a choir that goes out after rehearsal, every time.
The New Haven Oratorio Choir’s open rehearsal is on Sept. 13 at the Church of the Redeemer, 185 Cold Spring St., at 8 p.m. Its winter concert is Dec. 8.