Music – Jonathan H. Ward

We said goodbye to the Viking Star this morning and checked into our hotel in Bergen. We have two days on our own before we leave for home. Now it was time for us to venture out, independent of tour buses and groups. We hopped onto Bergen’s light rail train for the town of Hop (pronounced hoop) and a one-mile walk to the home of Norway’s greatest composer, Edvard Grieg. The back door at Troldhaugen Grieg and his wife Nina selected a site on Nordås Lake, south of Bergen, to build their home in 1885. Troldhaugen, meaning ‘valley of trolls,’ was the name Grieg chose based on local children’s legends about the countryside near the home site. The view from Grieg’s front yard Jane and I had the place practically to ourselves today. The museum office said that only five tourists had visited the museum the whole day. We had a private tour of the residence and had a wonderful opportunity to talk...

Twenty years ago today, the world mourned the passing of conductor Robert Shaw. Shaw was a towering figure of the American classical music scene beginning in the early 1940s when he prepared choruses for Arturo Toscanini. I had the great good fortune to sing with Mr. Shaw on two occasions in the 1990s. Those two periods were among the most profound experiences of my musical career and my adult life. Carnegie Hall, January 1995 Despite having only three years of experience as a choral singer, I somehow passed an audition to participate in one of Mr. Shaw’s annual workshops at Manhattan Center Studios, capped with a performance at Carnegie Hall. The program included two short Brahms pieces—Nänieand Gesang der Parzen(Song of the Fates), as well as Paul Hindemith’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Making the week extra special was that my wife Jane and our good friend Dina Weiss were also at the workshop, as were several of our choral conductor friends from...

Category: Music

Sidebar: Edvard Grieg’s Home, Troldhaugen

Recollections of Robert Shaw, 1916-1999