History

A Complete History Of The Oratorio Chorale
(On the occasion of its 25th Anniversary)

The Oratorio Chorale was founded in 1974 by Bowdoin College alumnus and music scholar C. Russell Crosby, in part to continue the traditional Christmas Messiah concert begun by his Bowdoin teacher and friend, Frederic E. T. Tillotson, who directed the Bowdoin College Chorus and the old Brunswick Choral Society.

Members and conductors reminisced about their years with the Chorale this spring. "Russ was an inspiring and charismatic conductor," says Bonnie Scarpelli, who was one of the founding members. "He wanted to have 'a group of good singers doing good works,' " she recalled. Bonnie sang the mezzo-soprano part in the first concert, Handel's Messiah at the First Parish Church in Brunswick. She has since sung many times with the Oratorio Chorale and has become one of Southern Maine's best-known soprano soloists. Judith Cornell, soprano, and David Goulet, tenor, also familiar to area audiences, sang in that first concert, along with bass Landon Bowie, a Bowdoin student. Carroll Googins, longtime Brunswick High School chorus director, played the harpsichord continuo.(The less said about the pickup orchestra, the better. Jane Lamb's program scribblings, for the ambivalent review she wrote for the Times Record notes several bad moments for the orchestra, one which even required a second start. She was a reviewer, not a member of the Chorale, at the time.)

Sydney Woodbury, the only founding member still singing with the Oratorio Chorale, remembers the first meeting at the home of Col. Richard Fleming, on Maine Street across from Bowdoin College. Also present were Edie Mason, who sang with the Chorale until 1994 and Julia Walkling, who later left to sing with other groups. Julia recalls that Crosby, who had sung with the Bowdoin Chorus as an undergraduate, returned to his alma mater after studying and conducting in Germany for many years. "He saw the opportunity for a [singing] group. Cam Smith, who was conducting the Brunswick Choral Society, and Al Packard wanted to do Gilbert and Sullivan. Some others wanted to sing oratorio. Russ had a meeting in the Fleming's living room and the group agreed to try it. Russ had a fixed vision of what he wanted to do: Sunday night rehearsals and Messiah every year." The Sunday night rehearsals continue to this day. Annual Messiahs lasted until 1979, although the 1976 concert was cancelled because Crosby became ill.

Syd, who was vice president of the chorale for several years, remembers Crosby as a young man whose musical knowledge overwhelmed her. "I got caught up in listening to his wonderful voice, but I had no idea what he was talking about! He was a real treasure to work with, though his directing was sometimes hard to follow." Syd has come back to the Chorale after occasional absences during its 25-year history.

Within the larger, unauditioned Chorale, Crosby organized the auditioned, 20-member Bach Choir and orchestra, which performed the Christmas Oratorio in Portland and Harpswell in late 1976, Crosby's last performance. He died in March of 1977. Carroll "Sonny" Googins, who had been the rehearsal accompanist, took over the conductorship to perform Fauré's Requiem and Tantem Ergo in a memorial concert for Crosby in the spring of 1977. Sonny, who has been Brunswick High School chorus director for years, continued as conductor for a year, after which Robert Mills assumed the position. In the spring of 1979 the Chorale sang with other choirs in the Portland Symphony production of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

George Emlen became the Oratorio Chorale's first salaried conductor in the fall of 1979. The chorus had swelled to 65 members and he was encouraged to take on major works. "We could do so many different kinds of music, our own programs, the Verdi Requiem with the Portland Symphony, three concerts with the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival," he recalls. Although in his first year, George chose to do "Music for the Christmas Season," a program already rehearsed by the Chorale, rather than Messiah," he organized community Messiah sings with the Brunswick Regional Youth Orchestra for several years at St. Charles Church in Brunswick. "We had no rehearsal, but we packed the place," he remembers with pleasure. George left the Chorale in 1983 and, along with various teaching and conducting positions, has been the music director of the Cambridge Christmas Revels ever since. "I felt a great sense of ownership of the Chorale, even after I left," he says. "Later I realized that a new director changes the whole personality of a chorus." He sent his best regards to all.

It was during George's term that the Chorale participated in the "Belfast Choral Festival, an Eisteddfod for Maine" for two years. Martha Butler and Noreen Blaiklock, the two longest-continuing members of the Chorale, joined in 1979 and remember some of their adventures. Butler says that the Eistedfodd was a real competition, about which the singers felt a bit shaky. "When we sang 'Ole Joe's Gone Fishin,' they mixed us up at the last minute and we were totally destroyed. We were a ragtag bunch," she continues. "We sang at some big deal festival in New Hampshire and one reviewer said it looked like some of us got our outfits at the Salvation Army." Butler remembers a Messiah concert at the Chocolate Church in Bath when the furnace quit and singers wore long johns and boots under their skirts to keep from freezing.

Noreen recalls rehearsing squeezed into a small room upstairs over the bar in the Stowe House (Robert Matthews, one of the singers, was proprietor, and the move was made when the Chorale's inside perks at Bowdoin expired and rent was requested.) "We sat in extra captains' chairs from the restaurant. Later we rehearsed at Codman House at St. Paul's Church. Sometimes there were more people in the chorus than in audience. When George was director, we'd have yard sales to pay him."

The atmosphere, which used to be rather competitive, has changed. The group has become more mellow. "Everyone works hard at ensemble singing," Noreen adds. Bonnie Scarpelli also remembers the Stowe House days, when the singers would go downstairs for drinks after rehearsal. "After concerts, we'd sing barbershop in someone's kitchen."

Jamie Whittemore joined the Chorale in 1981 and recalls one time at the Belfast Competition. "After the concert we went to a grand mansion with a stairway up two sides of the entrance hall. The combined choruses lined up on the stairs and sang 'Sure on this Shining Night' by Samuel Barber. "That piece once got Barber out of a bad fix. The story goes that Barber, recently moved to New York City, forgot his unlisted phone number and only convinced a phone company supervisor to reveal it when she said, "If you're Samuel Barber, sing the first few lines of 'Sure on this Shining Night,' " and he did. Anecdotes like these are among the joys of working with savvy conductors like George Emlen and his successors. Another of Jamie's memories of the Belfast expeditions is singing hits from Guys and Dolls all the way home in the car, with the late Phil Robert, a longtime chorale stalwart and president, whom he admired greatly. "And after Peter [Frewen became director]," Jamie adds, "there was Katie Johnson, who used to put signs on the piano for the chorus, saying 'Smile' and 'Look Up.' "

The Chorale joined forces with the Bowdoin College Chorus when associate professor of music Robert Greenlee took over as director after Emlen's resignation in 1984. Robbie remembers well his two years with the Chorale, which included participation in the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival and a Portland Symphony production of Holst's Planets. "Handel's Israel in Egypt was our first big one and the Chorale pulled it off splendidly. The highlight, though, was Evangeline, and the wonderful way the community pulled together to produce it – the dancers from Lewiston, the orchestra from all over the state. Otto Luening [the composer] was 85 at the time and he was there for two dress rehearsals and both performances. I can remember looking up and seeing his big walrus mustache moving back and forth with beat of the Sea Chanty." Robbie continued to get letters from Luening every year until his death, thanking him for the production, which he loved, and recently received another from Luening's wife.

Luening completed Evangeline in 1932. Presented at Bowdoin's Pickard Theater, May 2 and 3 of 1986, this was the Chorale's first fully-staged program, and was in turn the first time the opera was ever presented in full-dress form. The libretto is based on Longfellow's famous poem about the Acadian diaspora. Bonnie Scarpelli sang the title role, which she says was a "wonderful experience." It was one of the few operas she'd had a chance to perform in up till then. Peter Allen, who has since sung with the Chorale many times, David Goulet and Judith Cornell were among the soloists. Andrew Sokoloff, now artistic director of the Mad Horse Theater Company, was stage director; Ray Rutan, veteran Bowdoin Masque and Gown director, designed the set. Cynthia Larock choreographed the Acadian dances and brought her Lewiston group to perform them.

When Peter Frewen became director in 1986, the Chorale was on its own again and became an auditioned chorus. "I've been with the Chorale for half its lifetime," he exclaimed in disbelief when he started counting the years. "It's quite an honor!" He has seen the chorus grow "through a combination of cohesion and renewal, as members who have been with the Chorale for a long time continue to bring a lasting enthusiasm to the group and to pass it on to newer members. Objectively," he says, downplaying his own achievement, "the group has turned itself into a really strong chorus. There's something about the inner life of this chorus.... It's a social organization with a great desire to do music. It's really pleasurable to be working with them."

An ambitious and highly successful production of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde in 1992 was the Chorale's second venture into full-blown theater and community involvement. Area school children were the animals. High school and church choirs, the Brunswick Regional Youth Orchestra, soloists Constance Beavon and David Goulet, and none other than radio host Robert J. Lurtsema as God were directed by Al Miller of the Theater Project with Peter Frewen as artistic director. The project was supported by the Maine Community Foundation and produced by the Oratorio Chorale, which sang "Prayers from the Ark" by Ivor Davies as a prelude to the pageantry.

Continuing its educational outreach, the Chorale presented an introduction to choral music for young people, "Choral Music from the Inside Out," featuring Michele Livermore Wigton as MC in 1994, a program that was repeated by request the following fall as the first in the Chocolate Church's season series for children.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, produced with the Maine Music Society in 1994 marked the 20th anniversary of the Oratorio Chorale and the Androscoggin Chorale, both directed by Peter Frewen. Billed as the first performance in Maine in 20 years, it drew huge audiences at St. John's Church in Brunswick and SS Peter and Paul Church in Lewiston. The fact that the Chorale actually participated in a Portland Symphony production of the Ninth in 1979, 15 (not 20) years earlier, was somehow overlooked but did not in the least detract from this triumph.

Under Frewen's direction the Chorale has sung two more Messiahs, in 1987 and 1991, but more often, other seasonal music has been chosen as a refreshing alternative to the numerous Messiahs and other well-worn Christmas concert programs that have proliferated in the last two decades. Medieval and Renaissance music, the latter with the Calderwood Consort, works of Bach, Vivaldi, Britten, Barber, Schubert and others have celebrated the holiday season. Most prominent among these was the production of Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ with the Maine Music Society in 1996, which included a series of workshops on French Romanticism for area high school French classes, organized by Julianna Nielsen. French scholar Karen Dillman presented lectures on French culture to students and as prelude to the concert. The Chorale received a $4,000 education grant for this from the Davis Family Foundation.

Mendelssohn's rarely-performed Athalie, the "incidental" music for Racine's play by the same name provided a full-length program for the 1997 late fall concert. Members of the Chorale, which by now numbered many talented singers, took the solo parts. "Chorus Americana" the following February was preceded by school workshops on poetry and music by Fred Lipp, arranged by Juli Nielsen and supported by a $1,500 grant from the Maine Community Foundation. Along with more playful works, the program included Aaron Copland's In the Beginning, with Ruby Shields-Morse as soloist. The piece, based on the first chapter of Genesis, was repeated during the 1998 Jewish holiday season at Temple Beth El in Portland, whose rabbi, Carolyn Braun, is an alto in the Chorale.

With three concert programs each season, the Oratorio Chorale covers a great deal of musical territory, much of it fairly well-known. But among these are also found the unusual. In 1993 the Chorale presented the Maine premiere of Ronald Perrara's The Outermost House, a vivid interpretation of the book by the same title by Henry Beston, who lived and wrote for many years in Nobleboro, Maine. His daughter, the well-known Maine poet Kate Barnes, was the narrator. Luigi Cherubini's Requiem in C minor, with Joyce Moulton, the Chorale's accompanist and assistant conductor from 1991-1998, performing the piano reduction of the massive orchestra score, was well out of the ordinary. Another outstanding program, considered by many to be one of the Chorale's best performances up to that time, contrasted Fauré's beloved Requiem and the more recent and rarely-heard Requiem by Maurice Duruflé.

But so many Requiems (including those of Verdi and Mozart, as well as numerous other Masses over the years) do not a somber chorus make. The Chorale has had its share of romance and merriment, including several performances of Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes, Haydn's secular love and drinking songs, and cabarets. A Gala Pops Night to celebrate the Chorale's 15th anniversary in 1989 featured Broadway hits, the diabolical Geographical Fugue and the jazz ensemble Randy Bean and Friends. The Chorale sang more show tunes and tackled Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with a dazzling piano interlude by Joyce Moulton at a 1995 dinner concert in Bowdoin's Wentworth Hall.

As well as Chorale anniversaries, Handel's, Bach's, Haydn's, Mozart's and Beethoven's birthdays were duly celebrated. The chorale participated in the Brunswick 250th Anniversary Ecumenical Chorus, appeared six times with the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, three times with the Portland Symphony and twice with the Androscoggin Chorale/Maine Music Society. The Maine Chamber Ensemble, directed by Peter Frewen, has been the regular orchestral collaborator since 1990.

The Chorale has performed 15 times at the First Parish Church and 14 times at St. John's Church in Brunswick, 12 times at the United Church of Christ in Bath, 10 times at Sacred Heart Church in Yarmouth and at more than two dozen venues from Portland to Waterville to Damariscotta to Rockland. Rehearsal spaces have ranged from living rooms to Gibson 101 at Bowdoin, the Stowe House, Codman Hall, the Brunswick Seventh Day Adventist Church, the United Church of Christ in Bath and currently, the United Methodist Church in Brunswick.

Among the composers represented, Handel ranks first with 16 performances of major works, including seven Messiahs. Bach is second with 14 and Brahms, Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven, Britten, Monteverdi and Copland among the top ten. More than two dozen others from Palelstrina to Rodgers and Hammerstein as well as Anonymous and Traditional have been heard by Chorale audiences.

Longest continuing members are Noreen Blaiklock and Martha Butler, 20-year veterans. Nan Morrell, Lucie Teegarden and Jane Lamb (the only current member who also sang with the old Brunswick Choral Society for four years) have racked up 15. Five members have sung for ten or more years; 11 for five or more years; and 22 have joined in the last four years, nine of whom are new to the Chorale this season.

The Oratorio Chorale now operates on an annual budget of $35,000, raised by all the usual means open to non-profit organizations, from grants to corporate sponsorships to every level of individual contribution. But it's been a long and often difficult road. Jocelyn Geaghan, an early member who served as president for four years, remembers the ongoing battle for money and audience development. A particularly agonizing crisis arose when a possible merger with the Bowdoin Chorale, abandoning the whole idea of the Oratorio Chorale, faced a financially-strapped board. "It would have been easy, she says, "to have crawled under Bowdoin's wing and forget how hard we had worked to develop our own identity. It was a real struggle for a small performing arts organization, and I felt like I was swimming upstream, but it was a wonderful experience." Martha Butler, the Chorale's current treasurer, was treasurer back in 1976-77. "Martha bailed us out more times!" Geaghan recalls.

Lucie Teegarden has recently re-joined the board of directors and might well find herself back in the shoes of president which she filled for four years from 1990-1994. She first sang with the Chorale as a member of the Bowdoin Chorus and switched her allegiance when she got decided to stick with the community group. "It's been a wonderful experience," she says. "Evangeline was outstanding, and Noye's Fludde. All those kids in costumes!" She's seen a steady growth in board leadership, which began during her term, and the successful meeting of challenges like funding a professional orchestra and soloists. "Some things have stayed the same and some things have changed. Now we have to file a tax return!"

By Jane Lamb
Brunswick, Maine, 1998 

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