Robert Shaw

Born in 1916, Robert Shaw conducted his college glee club in the 1930s and caught the attention of radio entertainer Fred Waring, who asked him to form the Fred Waring Glee Club. Looking to perform more classical music, Shaw established the Collegiate Chorale in 1941, which Arturo Toscanini selected for a series of performances of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony. The Robert Shaw Chorale, which he launched in 1949, was Shaw's best-known ensemble, and for decades was one of the country's top choral groups. Among the students of Robert Shaw was Margaret Hillis, who went on to found the Chicago Symphony Chorus. See my [Interview with Margaret Hillis .] Robert Shaw: I take all of the rehearsals when I’m in town. This coming season, because of a projected trip to Paris with the chorus and orchestra, we have to prepare an awful lot of materials. So I’ve cancelled or withdrawn from most of my outside guest conducting engagements, which means that I’ll be taking substantially 100% of the rehearsals with the chorus, as well as all the rehearsals with the orchestra for the subscription series and our tours and recordings and so on. BD: Because of your great choral experience, do you purposely look for great choral works that you can do with the Atlanta Symphony? BD: You’ve been involved in recordings for quite a long time, and recording techniques have changed and improved considerably. When you’re preparing a chorus or an orchestra specifically for a recording, do the new techniques affect the way you prepare it, or do you just let the technicians worry about the technical stuff? BD: Mm-hm. Do you find that when you’ve done a performance, done a piece on a subscription concert, and then bring it into the studio—is that more live, and does it have more life, than just something that you worked only for the studio? RS: I feel one deals with it the same way. Your attention must be on the music, and to seek, if possible, the extra-communicable by the music in the composer’s spirit and with the composer’s spirit and intent. But there are dangers in knowing that the thing is down on tape. You can’t be too picky since all you can do is scrap it, throw it away. You don’t have another chance, really. If you don’t like it, you can’t afford not to issue it. So this does put some economic and other kinds of pressures upon performance. I think everybody feels that. Also, there are simply pressures in the session itself as to time, as to when intermissions have to happen, with what frequency, and for how long. As one gets closer and closer to the end of the session, or the group of sessions, and there are more and more minutes of the piece yet unrecorded, these sorts of pressures begin to work against the freest and most expressive of performances. BD: I just wonder, though, if you find that because you can cut and splice the tape a little bit, that does make some mistakes — at least early in the sessions — a little more expendable? RS: Yes, I suppose that’s true. Our recordings began with analog tape. Since we now use the digital system, I simply have not participated in any of the editing, other than telling the producer at the session my preferences of the takes. I have simply not participated in any cutting and splicing at all of these particular recordings. RS: I think generally, though again it’d be only fair to say I’ve heard fragments. That I can recall, I’ve never heard any record we’ve made. The reviews are better than anything we used to get when we were winning Grammys, but I never listen to any of those. Other than at the final splicing sessions, I never listened to any of those old recordings or those with the professional chorale, either. I happened to hear some in traveling in France this summer, because somebody brought me a tape of a bunch of old, old titles that we’d done many years ago. Things like Whiffenpoof Song and the B-minor Mass — a mélange of things that Victor put out in one of its commercial nightmares. It was charm