This may be an unusual way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, but on Sunday the Los Angeles Master Chorale will be performing Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem and Dale Trumbore’s How to Go On at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Two emotional works that explore love and loss. Leading the Master Chorale for this concert is Associate Conductor Jenny Wong.
Wong was named Associate Conductor for the Chorale in 2017. Her role has recently found her traveling with the group to perform Lagrime di San Pietro. I recently spoke by phone with her about Duruflé’s Requiem and her approach to it, the thematic similarities it shares with Lagrime and how she personally approaches work with religious influences.
Conductor Simon Rattle said that “conducting was hard and that the more you know, the harder it gets.” Can you explain that observation and how does it apply to you and the work you do with LA Master Chorale?
That’s a very interesting question. I think definitely for conductors, unlike the more you study about a certain composer, but the more you really dig into the score, more things begin to reveal themselves to you. It continues to opens doors into a universe that is, fortunately for us, quite endless.
A work like Duruflé’s Requiem, which has been performed so many times, how does that sound different now that we do it in 2019? Does that also inform how we perform it and how does it make a difference from our last performance which was 14 years ago?
When you prepare for a concert, how much research do you do into its creation and the composer’s intent before relying exclusively on the score?
I like to make, even some wrong decisions, just based on what is in the score first and find out how I connect to the music and how certain text and harmony surfaces and emerges before I figure out how the composer did it or other people have performed it. Of course, you find out you maybe make decisions not always in line with what you later find out something the composer might have said. You have to figure out if you still believe in it for this particular setting and performance and to see if that reason still stands. The historical context is very important and why Duruflé wrote this music and employed these kind of idioms that are central to the work. But personally I like to find how it speaks to me.
What did his Requiem reveal to you in preparation for these concerts that you hadn’t considered or realized before?
The first time I sang it I was still an undergrad. I had no understanding of chants and really very little appreciation for this kind of work, I’m ashamed to say. Now that I’ve spent a lot of time with the score, you really find that what’s so special to me about Duruflé’s Requiem is that the statements of the deepest and most profound joy and faith are actually very quiet. All he wanted to do was allow this incredible text, text that has been with us for thousands of years, to just shine. It shows his own certainty of passing through this life and into paradise. It’s an overarching sense of certainty and comfort which is something I never understood ten years ago.
You’ve been touring with the LA Master Chorale their production of Lagrime di San Pietro. Why do you think this piece has become so important for both the Chorale and for audiences around the world?
I have to say a huge part is Peter Sellars and the way he’s taken this sacred text and opened up universes of what it could mean to us, to people coming in to listen to the work. It’s become very clear they feel something unlike most performances they’ve been to. We very seldom talk about shame as individuals. We hide it. In music it is not simple to explain something as deep, loud, destructive and ambitious and hard to pinpoint what shame feels like. Yet with the text, and the way Peter has set it, it really begs us to cope as individuals. Peter encourages us to consider what it means to us as a community. How have we found ourselves as a community watching the news day after day, week after week, following things that break our heart.
When Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times reviewed the LA Master Chorale December 2017 concert you conducted he said, “You came down on the side of religion…with God at the top, Bach in the middle and the rest of us below.” How much does religion inform your approach to music with obvious religious influences?
That’s a difficult question to answer. I’m a religious person. I believe in God. I can see for sure that it does add a dimension to how I absorb this music and how I share it with our performances and with audiences. For me it’s less a performance than a sharing of what I believe in – which is God, but it is also love and hope and peace.
At the same time, I never want people who are not religious to feel that they have to feel one way or the other coming into a performance of a religious work. We’re having this incredibly vulnerable and sacred, and I say the word sacred without the pretense of religiosity, this in a space that we want to set aside for everyone to come and participate. And the hope that it creates the freedom to feel what they feel and heal the way they need to be healed. And to express comfort or anger or confusion or chaos, to be able to feel those things. These are what make us the same which is such a deeply comforting thing.
Main Photo courtesy of JennyWong-Conductor. com