I'm NOMAIL right now, but I was pleased to see the attention paid to Shaw.
I used to sing in choruses, several times under Shaw's direction.

There definitely was a "Robert Shaw sound" in almost all of his choirs,
and I never knew how he got it, beyond insisting on clarity of diction
and projecting the meaning of the text.  In his classic recordings (and
throughout his entire career, he made them; up to the early 70s, everything
he released was great), you never needed to look at the words in your
program or liner notes.  And the diction was High American, rather than
pseudo-British.  In fact, I often got the impression that he cared for
words as much as he cared for music.  He used to write us little notes on
the music we were doing - "Letters to the Chorus," I think he called them
- beautiful, beautiful prose and clear as Steuben.  At any rate, the sound
was full and rich and clear (it sounds contradictory, but that's how it
struck me) and exciting, in a way that didn't sound like British, German,
or Scandinavian choirs (the models for most classical American choruses).

When I sang for him, he was especially interested in getting the choir
in a rhythmic groove, so that our music moved "naturally" in massively
long lines.  His solutions to rhythmic problems always seemed to me to come
from left field.  I remember particularly that we were having trouble with
the "Credo" from Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass.  According to Shaw, it wasn't
moving.  He finally had us marching throughout the hall, singing the music
and swinging our arms in time.  It probably physically internalized the
rhythm.  After that, we had no trouble, but I know of no other choral
conductor (except perhaps Robert Fountain) who would have thought of this.

I kick myself now for not buying every single recording Shaw made with
the Robert Shaw Chorale.  There wasn't a dud in the lot.  His Bach cantata
recordings and the RCA stereo recording of the Mass in b for me have yet
to be surpassed, as does the choral work in his RCA recording of Handel's
Messiah.  RCA should release his entire catalogue.  At one point, I wanted
Shaw to record *everything* choral.  I felt he owed me and posterity.

However, the Telarc recordings struck me as variable.  If he had recorded
the work for RCA, the earlier recording is generally the more exciting one.
His Robert Shaw Festival Singers I consider mostly a mistake, although
there were some fine CDs, notably the Poulenc recording.  I also regarded
Shaw a better conductor live than on record.  This was true throughout his
career.  His recording of the Berlioz Requiem, tame beyond belief, gave no
hint of the grande guignole whoops and snarls of his live concerts.  His
Bach Magnificat and Vivaldi Gloria were the most joyous pieces of music I
ever heard before or since.  Some of this comes through in his recording.

One of the great musical experiences of my life was attending Shaw's
memorial concert for Francis Poulenc, with the Cleveland Orchestra (Shaw
was Szell's Associate Conductor) and Shaw's own Cleveland Chorus.  They
played the chamber version of Suite francaise, the Litanies of the Black
Virgin, and concluded with the composer's recent, masterful Gloria.  My
high-school choir had made its way through the Gloria the year it came out,
and that was my intro to Poulenc.  But Shaw came across with the force of
revelation.  At the beginning of the Suite francaise, a snare drum taps out
all by itself an obsessive little rhythm, which recurs (I think always for
solo snare drum) throughout the work.  A quiet laugh of pure pleasure ran
through the audience, and it showed me something that I have thought
about for years:  namely, that art doesn't have to storm heaven or plumb
psychological depths to be valuable or even most valuable; that pure
pleasure is rare and wonderful when it happens!  Consider yourself lucky
when it happens to you.

For me, Shaw died too soon.  His new Robert Shaw Chamber Singers recalled
the glory days of the Chorale, and, sadly, they made few recordings.  If
you see them, grab them.

With Roger Wagner, Robert Shaw not only raised standards of choral singing,
he defined the professional chorus.  The Chorale seemed to make the
professional American chorister possible, although that's still a dream.
Almost every American choir of note shows his or Wagner's influence.

Steve Schwartz