GMCD 7244 You can order this CD in our E-Shop under Vocal Reviews ***Sound Clips***	Low Bass Great Art Songs from the Bass Repertoire Kevin Maynor - Bass  Richard Woitach - Piano

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DDD Total Time = 57:52 - Recorded: Seltzer Sound, New York City 16 October and 18 December 2001

"To die will be a very big adventure", says Peter Pan in J M Barrie’s eponymous play. To make a CD or write programme notes may not be quite as big anadventure but sometimes it seems so. The odyssey, if one may call it that, of the new CD "The Low Bass Voice" (or "The diary of a CD that almost vanished" by Richard Woitach) was beset by a series of adventures (not too many misadventures), butnow the disc is done and I have the honour (and the adventure) of composing the liner

The idea for the CD was conceived during the latter part of 2001. In addition to a busy performing career and having already made discs of songs by Paul Robeson and other black American composers of the 20th century as well as an album of jazz hymns, Kevin Maynor had a fairly good idea of the programme for this new disc.
He had in mind a programme of Baroque arias which he had first encountered much earlier in his career when working with the late Newell Jenkins who had left him a treasure-trove of orchestral parts. Baroque music is not my personal speciality and I was a little apprehensive until a decision was made to change to repertory featuring the glories of the bass voice in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I was much happier because I feel much more at home with this repertory which is one with which audiences seem to have a natural affinity - Wolf, Brahms, Schubert, Strauss, a dollop of 19th century French songs, a little bit of Russian and 20th century American - these are all things which particularly suit the lower voice. So it began and I was amazed that the programme practically put itself together.
When we got to work on it Kevin Maynor, by having done much of the repertory already in recitals, had put together a number of pieces which, while not consciously related so far as I know, seemed to tie together very well. As I got to know the programme more and more I found it really did exist as a unified whole. As a matter of fact I had thought, as I began working on the programme, that it was perhaps too unified; too much of it was in 4/4 time. But there was contrast, although I was wondering if there should be more. To a certain extent, however, the order of the pieces took care of that: the order in which we rehearsed and even recorded was not the final order in which the pieces appear on the CD.
So we began rehearsing off and on during the summer of 2001, between Kevin Maynor’s engagements with Seattle Opera singing Wagner. In particular we had to work on Jack Beeson’s "To A Sinister Potato" (I dubbed it "The Spooky Spud"). I’ve known Jack Beeson for almost 50 years, he has a very good sense of humour which comes out not only in the song but in the way his song has been treated with that nickname. This was the only song in the entire programme which Kevin Maynor did not know at all but he agreed to learn it from scratch and I had confidence in him, because having worked with him in a variety of repertory over the past 20 years, I have seen him always do his homework and knew he’d find somebody in Seattle with whom he could work on the song.
On September 11th Kevin Maynor and I, along with millions of others, were shaken by what happened at the World Trade Center in New York, but we continued rehearsing and set the first two sessions for early October. There were to be 16 songs in the programme (although somehow the number 17 kept getting mentioned and I never could count 17 - that mystery song has disappeared, never to be heard of again) but we planned to record nine songs in the first session on Tuesday in October and the remaining seven two days later on Thursday. Then, when Kevin Maynor returned from Sacramento the next week, we were going to finish with the two most difficult songs, the Beeson song and "The Erlking" which I warned him I might ask to delete: it’s a terror and I had never done it in public. In the first session we finished the nine songs in three hours but I was exhausted the next day, Wednesday, and asked Kevin if we could possibly postpone the Thursday session until after his return from another engagement where he was singing the role of "Sparafucile" (which I had helped him get). He said, "Fine, let’s get together and rehearse what we have to rehearse"; I had confidence that he would cater to me and indeed, he did. So he left and the way the dates worked out with the wonderful engineer Carl Seltzer (Seltzer Sound Inc) - more than an engineer/producer - we were to meet again right after Thanksgiving, which would have been five weeks after our first session. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving I got a call from Kevin saying that Carl Selzter had had a stroke and, of course, the ramifications of that were that we lost the wonderful calm security that he provided, his own home studio, the wonderful Steinway piano he had and his calm voice eerily similar to that of Martin Bernheimer, my colleague and friend, who appears regularly on the Metropolitan Opera Intermission features. When it became apparent that Carl’s stroke was not a small thing, a search went on to find someone to take over which took two or three weeks. We were definitely committed to work in the same studio and reminiscing about the great first session we had, the second session was coming up with a different engineer and set-up. Then I had the bad luck to have a car service driver who seemed to know where he was going but who left me off more than 15 blocks (3/4 mile) from the studio, which is in a part of New York City that is not familiar to me. It began to be more and more desperate as I realised how far away from the studio I was and how late it was getting. As I went ahead determined to keep going in the right direction, I didn’t look down at all; there was a small mountain of overripe vegetables in front of a market the result of which was a fairly large pianist flying through the air! My right shoulder painfully hit a pile of cardboard boxes but the main injury was to my dignity; my spirit was bruised enough that I decided the session couldn’t happen that night. The fates had spoken. Fortunately, as we now sailed into early December bloody but unbowed, we managed to schedule the final evening with one short session, followed by a longer one from 4:30 - 6:00, a dinner break, and 7:00 or 7:30 until finished (we always worked at night, by the way). So that seemed fine and we made it to the studio. The Beeson song had progressed into Kevin’s brain but because of my arm I was still very apprehensive about "The Erlking". I had been practising those difficult passages for all these intervening weeks, I was even dreaming of "Erlking" in my sleep! There were seven songs to go and within the hour and a half, four of them were done! I couldn’t believe it. We only had three pieces to do in the last hour. We had done "The Erlking" in the first half of that session and it seemed to be all right; it was taped two and a half times with a couple of little patches where necessary. We used just two of the remaining three hours to do the Beeson song and to redo a couple of pages of "The Erlking" in which, in a kind of chilling Freudian slip, Kevin had repeated about four times the words "in my arms the child was dead" ("In meinem Armen das Kind war tot") instead of "in his arms": here was Kevin, the loving parent, with a small child that I’ve seen in his home. That was something I won’t forget. So, the work seemed to be done. I didn’t quite believe it. The tapes were wrapped upand put in whatever they’re wrapped up in and the two gentlemen, the engineer and Mr Maynor, and myself got to work editing. I’ve done extensive editing in my day, including, I remember, 60 hours editing a solo piano tape.
A little more time passed and in the early part of the December holiday season I received a cassette that was copied from the original DAT tape. I listened to the sessions and the songs, which were now arranged in performance (CD) order. I became more nervous because of the fact that the sound of the second session didn’t seem so good as the first. I knew that the mike set-up had been different but alas, the piano had gone slightly out of tune (about which I felt very stupid because it hadn’t been played in the meantime and that’s all the more reason for someone to have it looked at. I had not asked for that). And I couldn’t hear the voice well enough sometimes, while, even though Kevin Maynor has crystalline diction, some of the words seemed in my opinion to have been lost in this mike set-up. I played it over to my wife without comment and she said exactly the same thing. That was on a Monday night and I made a date for Tuesday to go to Kevin’s house in New Jersey to hear it on his equipment. A huge sigh of relief! I don’t know exactly what the difference was (probably my tape recorder), but we were getting closer. Now I had no excuse to procrastinate writing the programme notes!
As you can tell, I’ve enjoyed every moment of working on this recording with Kevin Maynor, Carl Seltzer and his successor. I would be overjoyed if another CD could be produced of out-takes or things that were thought of but not included. But in show business you have to leave them wanting more, and we hope there will be an appetite for it. I think that that appetite can very well be supplied, so I’m already "shopping at the greengrocer’s" and am stocking up the cellar in the hope that I will be called on to provide more.

Page revised 27.06.03