>I've known maybe 4 or 5 contrabass singers in my life (mostly in >quartets, although one is in Chanticleer) who could hit low C2 or >below acoustically, NOT through a mic and EQing. Gurney Bell of the >Sportsmen Quartet back in the '50s regularly warmed up down to about >a low G1 to be confident that his low C2 at the end of "16 Tons" >would be out there! Those voices are rare, but were selected for in >the Russian Orthodox choirs and the Don Cossacks, and of course in >Southern Gospel Quartets. Monteverdi wrote a low D2 for Seneca in >"Poppea" when he was about to take poison, but it's awfully rare (and >we don't know what his pitch standard was, since Venice was said to >have the highest standard in Europe). [...]
Mahler writes the chorus down to Bb2 in his Symphony #2 (the basses are divisi, with the others on the next octave up). When I sang Mahler 2 with the SF Symphony Chorus, some time in the 1990s, we had three or four basses who could project a decent sound on the note. And maybe another five or six who could growl out something feeble down there. Vance used all of them and added about a dozen more baritones and tenors who could work their strohbass well enough to approximate the note that way, which gave the illusion of an even stronger sound. It was quite glorious. That same performance was recorded, but it wasn't a live recording. I used to have a cassette tape with a true live recording from the live radio broadcast, which I thought was a much better performance of the piece in spite of the far inferior recording quality. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
