In the articles I have written for Classical Singer I have often had occasion to mention the Bach Chorale Singers and the group’s artistic director, William Jon Gray, assistant professor at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. Over the years, Mr. Gray has engaged many of his students to sing with the Bach Chorale Singers, and a number of them have gone on to significant careers. I remember a St. Matthew Passion where Lawrence Brownlee was standing on my right and Christina Pier on my left. Brownlee had just won the Metropolitan Auditions, and Pier about to do so the next year. Kyle Ketelsen, who performs widely in the United States and in Europe and recently made his Metropolitan debut, sang the Verdi Requiem with us in 1997.
IU students have often accepted invitations to sing with the “Bach Chorale,” because William Gray is a remarkably talented musician who insists on the highest standards, no matter what the project. He provides constant opportunities to learn more about music, and about how to perform it most expressively. Our municipal group gets as much detailed attention as the IU Opera choruses he prepares, or as the ensemble he forms and directs at the summer Bach Festival in Carmel, Calif., (where several IU singers followed him during the summer).
An equal if not greater attraction of working with William Gray, however, is the sincere and generous concern he has when it comes to helping shape and launch the careers of young artists. From dozens of hours spent coaching in the Baroque style that is his scholarly specialty, to giving advice on how to include performances in his students’ résumés, Mr. Gray is a true musical and personal mentor. He never puts his own interests in front of the interests of the singers collaborating with him.
So it is doubly sad that the five singers whom we lost were especially close to Mr. Gray, and thus especially close to members of the “Bach Chorale.” These five young people were to have been soloists in our performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers, scheduled for Saturday, April 22, 2006. More than just guest performers, they were also our friends. We will not soon forget Chris Carducci, 27; Garth Eppley, 25; Georgina Joshi, 24; Zachary Novak, 25; and Robert Samels, 24.
Chris Carducci was singing with us for the first time, having recently been part of the Marilyn Horne Foundation’s art song series in Carnegie Hall. He was to have been Don Giovanni in next year’s IU Opera Theater season. Whenever I passed by his seat, he was always intently reading one or another opera magazine. I was going to bring in copies of my Classical Singer interviews for him to peruse, since his interest in the professional world of opera was obviously quite keen.
Robert Samels sang in our Mozart Requiem quartet last October, and recently had a part in the world premiere of Ned Rorem’s new opera, Our Town. He was a composer as well as a singer, and last year conducted the first performance of his own opera, Pilatus, in which his friend Chris Carducci sang the title role.
Georgina Joshi held a special place in all our hearts for the way the angelic beauty of her voice matched so perfectly her beauty as a person. None of us will ever forget the extraordinary impression she made in our performances of Handel’s Solomon, when she sang the great aria “Can I see my infant gored.” The emotional effect was not, as often in this repertoire, something applied from the outside like a rhetorical ornament, but sprang from deep within Georgina’s sweetly compassionate soul.
I knew Zach Novak and Garth Eppley best. Two people in the same profession could hardly have been more different. If Chris Carducci was reading opera publications during lulls in rehearsals, you would likely find Garth pouring over the latest motorcycle magazines. He rode one himself, and had the obligatory tattoo that showed he was no poseur. Zach was much gentler, if no less tough a man, always eager to help in whatever way he could, and always generous in his estimation of colleagues’ performances. Directing the children’s choir at his church meant a lot to him, and by all accounts his young charges returned the devotion.
I remember very well a Magic Flute we did with the Lafayette Symphony a few years ago, where I was the Speaker and Zach and Garth the Two Armed Men. There was a point at which I thought to myself and laughed: “Here we all are in the middle of Indiana U.S.A. making Mozart’s sublime music together—and it really does sound just like the Magic Flute.”
This feeling is the key to understanding how great our sense of loss is in the “Bach Chorale.” The experience of being comfortable with people you are working alongside while in the service of art creates a very special bond of shared humanity. When we were given the news, that bond made the five empty, onstage chairs we stared at in disbelief Friday night inexpressibly sad.
Never once had we felt that any of these splendid young people had been condescending to us. On the contrary, they always treated us like colleagues and a part of the professional world that was their natural home. For the comradeship they extended to us, and the humility they showed us in the face of Monteverdi’s great music, we can never thank them adequately, nor will we ever forget.
The whole of the week after the accident I could not stop hearing in my head George Butterworth’s elegiac setting of AE Housman’s poem The Lads in Their Hundreds. Now, for me, this song will always belong to our dear friends and colleagues.
I waved to them at the end of our last rehearsal, and said: “See you tomorrow!” For them, that tomorrow would never come.
I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell
The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;
And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell
And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.
But now you may stare as you like and there’s nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.
