Sweet Gospel Singing In Concert With the KSO

Our attention turns to Monday’s FREE Concert in Celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. At the Tennessee Theatre at 6 PM.  That’s tonight. The Celebration Choir under the direction of Aaron Staple offers many splendid soloists, and local radio host Hallerin Hilton Hill will narrate Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait in a concert that also offers works by Brahms, William Grant Still, Rossini, Richman and more.

My first Lincoln Portrait was memorable in several ways. Also in the orchestra were oboist Phyllis Secrist and clarinetist Gary Sperl, who, unbeknownst to any of us at the time, I would soon join as permanent co-workers here! It was at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC in 1985, at a plantation known as Middleton Place, America’s oldest landscaped gardens. It’s a gorgeous spread with a stage set up on an man-made island on a pond for a big end-of-the-season bash. Back then the Festival involved 5 weeks in Charleston, then 4 weeks in Italy, playing opera, orchestra and chamber music while getting paid AND boarded AND flown over and back. I had never FLOWN before, let alone getting paid to fly. We also played a twelve-show run of Puccini’s Fanciulla del West (which will kick off our February here with the Knoxville Opera), but that’s another story...

So, put it together. A hot June South Carolina night+pond=BUGS! Skin-so-soft as a bug repellent was a fairly recent discovery then, and it flowed like wine, but that only kept the mosquitos away. It was frightening. The footlights were always veiled in janky-smelling smoke from bugs that got fried in them, and the locusts that crashed  into our stand were like zombie hummingbirds. Under the baton of Jahja Ling we managed to steer through the music, and Frank Langella’s narration was unforgettable. A dainty audience member lady in a red hat congratulated me on the concert afterwards, but was quick to ask me if the Copland piece was a world premiere, because, as she said,  “Mr. Lincoln is not a very popular person around here.” I believe I responded that it most certainly was not, and shuffled off to the bus, but... ouch! There was some work to do then, and there still is now...