Dvorak's Stabat Mater at Ocean Grove

Ocean Grove's Great Auditorium hosts its annual Sacred Concert with a performance of Antonin Dvorak's Stabat Mater tomorrow, Aug. 26 at 7:30 p.m. The auditorium choir and orchestra will be directed by Dr. Jason C. Tramm. Soloists will be soprano Monica Ziglar, contralto Martha Bartz, tenor Ronald Naldi and bass-baritone Jeremy Galyon. Organist Gordon Turk, artist-in-residence, will also perform with the ensemble.

The concert is free with a goodwill offering collected at the door.

The text of the Stabat Mater is a sacred Latin poem written in the 13th century depicting the grief of Jesus' mother as she watches her song dying on the cross. The poem attracted some of the greatest composers of history, including Pergolesi (whose fame rests mainly on his Stabat Mater and one or two other works), J.S. Bach, Franz Liszt, Giuseppe Verdi and many others.

Dvorak composed his setting as a way of working through his own grief at the loss of his three children -- his newborn daughter in 1875, followed by his two older children who died within weeks of one another of separate causes in 1877.

Dvorak's Stabat Mater was widely praised following its premiere in Prague in 1880. It was through this work that the Czech composer was introduced to the English speaking world, where he became a leading musical figure, a success that ultimately led to his invitation to visit the U.S. and the composition of his most famous work, the Symphony "From the New World."


--C.
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Rossini Stabat Mater

There was a typo in Ocean Grove's press release that was repeated in my Asbury Park Press column last week: Rossini's Stabat Mater will be performed 7:30 p.m. this coming Sunday, Aug. 30, not Aug. 23. Also on the program will be Mendelssohn's Second Symphony and his "Hebrides" Overture. The concert is in the Great Auditorium, Pilgrim and Ocean Pathways in Ocean Grove. For more information, call 732-775-0035 or visit www.oceangrove.org.

The Storm Continues

Took my two children to see and hear "The Storm" concert at Ocean Grove (www.ogcma.org) last Wednesday. As I noted in my
previous post, these free concerts invoke pictorial sound effects of a large storm, thrilling listeners. Curator John R. Shaw and organist Gordon Turk explained that this type of concert has a long history, dating back at least as far as the French Revolution. During that time, the church was out of favor and the organists repurposed their instruments for popular spectacle-type concerts, both to keep the instruments in use and to curry the favor of the populist leadership who would otherwise have surely cannibalized the pipes for scrap metal and other parts.

The kids loved it. Some of the presentation was just cheesy enough to be historically accurate. The wind sound effect, in particular, required a leap of imagination. ("It sounded like a blender," my daughter said later.) The rain effect sounded like rain. And if the lightning looked like an electric light being switched off and on ... well, that's just that much more 19th Century. And it is great fun to watch Turk rip into the pedal-tone clusters and wild, swooping passages that create the thundering storm imagery.

There are two more of these coming up. Each program uses different music as a vehicle to paint the storm picture. The next is tomorrow, Wednesday, July 29, and the last one is the following Wednesday, Aug. 5. Both begin at 7:30 p.m. Tomorrow's will have the second half of the lecture/demonstration, presented by Shaw and Turk in tandem.

--C.

The Storm

In the days before television, before movie houses became ubiquitous, when the most exciting amusement ride was a relatively tame wooden roller coaster, there were other ways for audiences to find thrills. One of them was to attend theater organ concerts that simulated giant storms. Theater organs around the dawn of the 20th Century routinely included wild sound effects as well as musical timbres, and a small repertoire of music evolved to use these to their fullest advantage.

In 1905, one such series of "Storm" concerts at Ocean Grove, on the Great Auditorium's massive organ, caused an uproar. As recorded in the New York Times online archive, summer residents found the concerts "too noisy."

Cottagers and hotel guests in the vicinity of the Auditorium have become surfeited with the organ's noise. They complain it disturbs their afternoon naps and annoys them at tea time.

Organist-in-residence Gordon Turk should take heed from this ugly precedent as he prepares for a return of "The Storm" 7:30 p.m. tomorrow, July 22, as part of the Great Auditorium's free Wednesday organ recitals. The composition, "The Storm," will be accompanied by a lecture by Turk on the subject of "storm" compositions and the restoration of certain sound effects to the Great Auditorium instrument that make the performance possible.

For more information, visit the theater's website, www.ogcma.org.

--C.