Performance Practice
The full roster includes over 250 singers who volunteer their time and talents. Subsets of the group are selected by Mr. Oliver to meet the needs of the repertoire being performed.
The chorus performs the vast majority of its concerts from memory, without scores. Of performing from memory, Oliver says:
Memorization is not a trick. It internalizes the music for you; it makes the music, somehow, a part of your own physical being. And you can express so much more like that. If you don't see a singer's face and you don't see the posture of a singer, the address of a singer to the audience, you're really not getting what a singer can deliver in music and what composers expected the singers to deliver.
Read more about this topic: Tanglewood Festival Chorus
Famous quotes containing the words performance and/or practice:
“The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall.... The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldnt do if your life depended on it.”
—Robert Benchley (18891945)
“Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)