5th Annual Nathan Gottschalk Memorial Award Banquet and Auction

We honor the memory of Nathan Gottschalk, who served as Music Director of the Pioneer Valley Symphony & Chorus from 1956 through 1993 by presenting the annual Memorial Award in his name. Each year, we present the award for outstanding contributions to music performance and education in the Pioneer Valley. On October 29, 2006, Gottschalk Memorial Awards were presented to William Bolcom and Joan Morris.

For the past third of a century, William Bolcom and Joan Morris have delighted audiences at the summer Mohawk Trail Concerts in Charlemont with their amazing range of repertory, from art song to ragtime, Tin Pan Alley to Latin America, Victorian parlor to cabaret and everywhere else song takes them. William Bolcom is one of the great composers of our time. His operas play at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Chicago’s Lyric Opera, his scores have been commissioned by the major American orchestras and he has been showered with grants and prizes, including four Grammy Awards. Joan Morris’ career has ranged just as widely, from the operatic stage to the Cafe Carlyle. She is a leading exponent not only of her husband’s work, but of the whole panoply of American popular song. In performance, she combines the skills of a scholar, a singer and an actress.

Bolcom and Morris will be honored at the fifth annual Nathan Gottschalk Memorial Award Banquet and Auction, featuring a festive dinner, the presentation of this year’s awards and a silent and live auction, on Sunday, October 29, 2006, at the UMass Campus Center, Amherst, Massachusetts. For more information on the Gottschalk Memorial Awards or the October 29th event, call the PVS office at 413-773-3664.

Board President Zeke Hecker introduced the 2006 recipients at the dinner with the following remarks:

"Good evening, everybody, and thanks for coming to the party ...

We've got many people to acknowledge. The staff of the UMass hospitality center, who have welcomed and served and fed us royally. The Organizing Committee, headed by Paul Peelle, who put this whole thing together; you can imagine how much work it takes to do that.The donors of all our auction items, whose generosity makes it possible for you to feel righteous about being competitively acquisitive.

I'd like to recognize a few notables among our guests. First Polly and Susie, Nathan Gottschalk's wife and daughter. Next, Ruth and Hilary Black, whose long-lasting friendship with our honorees accounts largely for bringing us together at this event.

Tonight we supposedly honor William Bolcom and Joan Morris by presenting them with the annual Gottschalk Award, but that's not really what's happening. Instead, they're the ones who honor us by accepting it, and by sharing their music with us as they did last night, not to mention for the past third of a century up the road a piece at Mohawk Trail Concerts in Charlemont.

I'm not going to go through the whole biographical sketch business, the Grammys, the Pulitzers, the commissions, the stage appearances, and so on. You can read about those in lots of places, virtual and actual. Instead, I'd like first to say something about the nature, the essence, of a performance by William Bolcom and Joan Morris, as I see it; and then to tell you a story.

Bolcom and Morris country is wide. It encompasses a century and a half of American song, from the Victorian parlor and the 1950's night club, from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building, from ragtime and jazz and rhythm and blues, from opera and art song. It acknowledges every ethnic source. It stretches into every region of the nation, and down through Latin America. A Bolcom and Morris performance is, musically speaking, democratic and egalitarian. The focus is on the song and its particular excellences. For one thing, when they do a number from what we now insist on calling "The Great American Songbook," we hear not only the familiar first chorus, but the less often heard verse and, if there are any, the second and subsequent choruses.

Between songs, they talk about them. They are both scholars, and we get plenty of information that places each song in its social and artistic context, but there's no whiff of the academic. A Bolcom and Morris evening is not like your conventional recital, with its rituals and artifice. It respects the audience and the music, but in a relaxed, intimate way that's closer to a club act than a symposium.

A word specifically about Joan. She doesn't sing songs. As the best vocalists know, that isn't enough. In show business parlance, she 'sells' them; she acts, dances, and lives them. She becomes the voice, the persona, of the song; she incarnates all the characters who populate it. Each song creates its own world. That's the way it should be done.

When Bill plays a solo, a classic rag or one of his own, like the now standard "Graceful Ghost," a Gershwin prelude or a tango by Nazareth, he tosses it off the way I imagine Gershwin himself did at all those legendary parties; none of that "Will he make the putt?" intensity, that priestly solemnity of a Glenn Gould or a Horowitz, but nonchalant, with a few casual flourishes.

Put 'em together, which they are, and you get Bolcom and Morris; to many of us, that has become one word. But now I'll separate them again and tell you the story.

I frequently bring students to the Metropolitan Opera. On December 5, 2002, four students and I were at a performance of "A View From the Bridge," music by William Bolcom, libretto by Arnold Weinstein and Arthur Miller, based on Miller's play. I have the Playbill right here. We had really good orchestra seats, close to the front. The opera is a gritty affair about Italian dockworkers in New York. The first act was moving along nicely: compelling story, strong acting and singing, dramatic score. Then something new happened. From the orchestra, in the lower strings, there welled up music of startling beauty, slow and legato. It told us that something important, something special, was about to happen. A secondary character, Rodolpho, stood in a spotlight downstage left. Rodolpho is a young man, a recent immigrant to New York, homesick for his native land but overwhelmed by the lights of the Manhattan skyline. At the Met the role was taken by the lyric tenor Gregory Turay. Out of this orchestral introduction grew his aria, "New York Lights." Remember: this was autumn 2002. I was entranced; it seemed to me one of the most gorgeous things I'd ever heard in an opera. Well, that's saying a lot; maybe it was just me. But I became aware of an unusual hush in the packed house, a kind of collective leaning forward by 4000 people, and I realized that I wasn't alone. I wasn't making this up. It was happening to all of us. The song ended, and there was nothing for a few seconds. Then my students and I and our 3,995 friends went nuts. 

A few days later the New York Times devoted a couple of columns to this phenomenon, with a practically life size color photo of Mr. Turay in full cry, and interviews with the various people involved, including the composer. The thrust of the article was that here, for the first time in recent memory, was an opera aria to join the pantheon, and perhaps even to cross over into the popular repertory, like, say, Gershwin's "Summertime." The composer, I repeat, was William Bolcom. Let's invite him and Joan Morris to cross over and accept the Gottschalk Award."

Here are some photos from the 2006 Gottschalk Award Dinner:

Previous Years Award Recipients
2002 Deborah Sherr
2003 Alice Parker and Ron Bell
2004 Robin Stone and Gary Steigerwalt
2005 Judy Hudson