Shaw returns to Oberlin concert

Conductor talks about his childhood, education, Oberlin, Fountain and Toscanini

Robert Shaw has been around the block numerous times, and he's back at Oberlin again. Shaw came Nov. 9 to show his respect by conducting the Robert Fountain memorial concert, a tribute to the late conductor.

Last week Shaw discussed his relationship with Robert Fountain, his thoughts on this tribute concert and his impressive career.

Shaw had a relationship with Fountain that was based mainly on what he had heard and seen through others. He wished he had had a chance to get to know Fountain better.

"He was a few years younger than I was but not by much, and obviously we had sort of known each other by reputation professionally," said Shaw.

Shaw and Robert Fountain worked together with the Oberlin Choir and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1958, '60 and '63. Each time a different Bach chorale was performed. At the final concert in 1963, it was arranged so that Fountain conducted the orchestra and the choir. Through their professional relationship several qualities of Fountain stick in Shaw's mind, those being "dedication to music and the composer, his skill with the choir and his teaching of graduate students and of choral conductors at the University of Wisconsin."

Shaw said, "I don't think I've ever met anyone who was less self-seeking in performance or in public acclaim."

Shaw wanted to do this tribute concert because of his "respect for Robert Fountain and his contributions to the choral art" and also the fact that Oberlin was gracious enough to give him an honorary degree in 1995.

"Even as an honorary alumnus, one feels an obligation to do something for the college if you can," said Shaw.

"Obviously, we had all hoped that Robert [Fountain] might outlive his illness and hoped that he would be here so that we could give him sort of a testimonial of how deeply we respected him but we'll do the same thing in his memory. That's certainly the reason we gave this concert," he said.

This past weekend did not mark Shaw's first appearances at Oberlin. In addition to working with Fountain on those three previous occasions, Shaw led the Cleveland Orchestra in one performance at Finney Chapel and visited Oberlin frequently during his affiliation with that orchestra in the 1960s.

Shaw said, "In November of 1963 I was rehearsing a Bach cantata in the afternoon when we got word that John Kennedy had been assassinated. Everybody remembers where he or she was at that moment, and I happened to be at Oberlin."

Shaw's first musical experiences were in church choir. "My father was a minister in a sort of Evangelical Protestant denomination and my mother was a very fine soloist and choir director, and all of us siblings, there were five of us children, spent some time in college conducting church choirs to help pay our way through school," said Shaw.

He went to Pomona College, which had an excellent glee club tradition. He met Julius Herfert there, where Herfert heard Shaw sing in the school glee club and invited the members to sing along with his band in some takes of a movie.

Herfert later invited Shaw to return to New York to form a separate choral organization for his radio shows.

Shaw did this immediately following his graduation from Pomona. His degrees, however, were in American and English literatures and in comparative religions.

He said he thought he would "end up teaching in some seminary though I was a little more liberal in my theology and wasn't associated with any particular denomination."

Instead he went to New York and soon found that he was very interested in music. For several years, Shaw spent 50 or 60 hours a week with Foss's teacher to make up for the education he did not receive in high school or in college.

"I hadn't taken any courses in music at all," said Shaw.

From that point on, Shaw's career took off as did his reputation. Today he still has about 20 concert engagements a year, with many of those engagements being two or three concert affairs.

He has worked with some of the big composers of the 20th century such as Stravinsky, Hindermith, Poulenc, Barber, Copland, William Schumann and Menotti. He has also collaborated with influential conductors such as Toscanini, Szell and Bruno Walter.

Shaw described Toscanini, a conductor who was generally perceived as being a tyrant, as "a pussycat. He was as sweet as can be. He was capable of anger, and he was rather intolerant of ignorance and incompetence."

"He could make his anger felt very quickly. Two things saved his anger from being unstandable. One was that he was never sorry for himself, but he was sorry for the composer. His anger wasn't self-motivated, and the second was that it was so soon released that it had no residual effects."

Shaw also said, "He was a sweet and kindly human being who had an occasional short fuse about incompetence in musical performance, but he was a dear and lovely man."

Shaw cited two incidents that he thought best presented Toscanini in his many moods and facets of personality.

The first involved an evening of singing Christmas carols at Toscanini's home. Shaw and his choir members reached Toscanini's door and began singing. The door opened suddenly and Walter Toscanini, Arturo's son, invited Shaw and the choir in. They were led past a marble staircase and into the library where Arturo Toscanini was. "He was in the library looking at wrestling on TV."

They sang 30 or 40 minutes of carols for him and "he stood there listening with tears rolling down his face."

"When we finished, we started to leave and instead they threw open a door to the dining room and there was a table full of champagnes and Italian wines and cheeses, cakes and pastries, cookies and all sorts of things and we stayed there until four o'clock in the morning.

"The interesting thing was that Toscanini made a real point of going around and talking to each person for five or 10 minutes each. Each person had five or 10 minutes to spend alone with him, and that was an extraordinary event in their lives."

The other example gives a glimpse of Toscanini as he is generally perceived to have been. During rehearsals Toscanini wanted his orchestra to be lyrical. Shaw "never heard Toscanini say to his orchestra `play.' He always said, `sing, sing, sing, you pigs.'"

The advice Shaw would give to aspiring conductors and musicians alike is simple and universal. He drew from his own experience.

"I went through not only high school but also college without taking a course in any music. No musical history, no harmony, no theory, and that's all stuff I had to pick up after my college years were over and I'm crippled by it. I learn scores slowly, I solfege each instrument, and I'm denied contact with other pieces which might enrich your ideas about this particular piece."

"So that would be the advice: Store up as much information and technique as you can as early as you can," said Shaw.