♪ >> Coming up on NYC-ARTS ARTS, a profile of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus whose unique and captivating vocal power is harnessed into one collective voice by its director, Donald Palumbo.

Donald Palumbo: We try to present ourselves as one character in any given opera, but we're composed of eighty individuals.

We figure out how to create a character as a chorus by our musical expression of the score.

♪ >> and a trip to the South Street Seaport Museum to discover the history of the seaport and the newly restored Wavertree, the flagship of the museum's collection.

Jonathan Boulware: Wavertree is an 1885 iron sailing ship.

Many people would refer to her as a tall ship, so a big tall-masted square-rig sailing ship.

And she is for us the connection between New York and the rest of the world.

FUNDING FOR NYC-ARTS IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THEA PETSCHEK IERVOLINO FOUNDATION JODY AND JOHN ARNHOLD THE LEWIS SONNY TURNER FUND FOR DANCE THE AMBROSE MONELL FOUNDATION ELISE JAFFE AND JEFFREY BROWN CHARLES AND VALERIE DIKER THE MILTON AND SALLY AVERY ARTS FOUNDATION ELROY AND TERRY KRUMHOLZ FOUNDATION THE NANCY WIDEWATER FOUNDATION AND ELLEN AND JAMES S. MARCUS THIS PROGRAM IS SUPPORTED, IN PART, BY PUBLIC FUNDS FROM THE NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CITY COUNCIL ADDITIONAL FUNDING PROVIDED BY MEMBERS OF THIRTEEN AND BY SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES.

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♪ >> Good evening and welcome to NYC-ARTS.

I am Philippe de Montebello.

On tonight's program we'll go behind the scenes at New York City's world-renowned Metropolitan Opera.

Here dozens of opera's most talented singers have graced the stage, dazzling us with unparalleled artistry.

Each Met Opera production has a unique and captivating power.

However, one voice, less heralded, is heard in every production.

It is the collective voice of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus.

Their leader is celebrated Chorus Master, Donald Palumbo.

Palumbo spends an enormous amount of time and care with his chorus, perfecting their musical expression of the scores.

After 17 years leading the chorus, Palumbo will step down in June.

Here is a look back at the rigorous preparations required to perform on the main stage.

Donald Palumbo: The chorus at the Met is, uh, an interesting component in every opera because we have to be so flexible.

Um, we try to present ourselves as one character in any given opera, but we're, we are composed of 80 individuals and so my job is, is, is to, to control the musical aspect of the chorus presentation.

Um, I try to get the sound to be unified and to come across as a certain character.

Here in List Hall, we work on our sound, we work on our diction, we work on phrasing, we figured out how to create a character as a chorus by our musical expression of the score.

And once everyone in the chorus knows this, it sort of frees us.

A new chorister at the Met is usually faced with a challenge of deciding, Whoa, I can't memorize 24 operas in the next two weeks or three weeks.

In my first year I was quite surprised to see my 23 operas that I was in for the season being rolled in on a dolly to my desk and everyone wishing me luck.

And uh, it was, it was quite a, it gets easier as the years go on.

Obviously, you develop a repertoire, but uh, yeah, it's, it takes three to four or five years to really settle in.

Traviata.

We need to rehearse it in, in, in long gestures, the entire phrase, uh, even the entire piece to get a real sense of the, uh, of the structure and the musical value of, of the particular segment.

In the concitato at the end of the scene in Traviata, it's all about singing softly, but singing, singing with, with telling Violetta take heart, take heart.

We're, we're here for you.

And you can't do that in that ensemble by singing loudly.

You have to do it by singing in- intently with with purpose and direction to the tone.

Good.

Remember with this you're introducing Traviata to people.

We don't have individual lines.

one communal expression.

♪ Fra cari amici qui sei soltanto.

Rasciuga il pianto che inond.

♪ >> With Wozzeck you really have to go bar by bar.

Almost note by note to make sure the accuracy is there before you can even begin to run the run the segment.

There's one section in Wozzeck that we were rehearsing, and it basically lasts about 30 seconds.

It takes, I would say at least an hour on singing that little segment to to get comfortable and secure.

Wozzeck: We're going to put the last piece of the puzzle together.

This is the last little segment.

>> Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Altos, altos, altos, altos, altos, altos.

Basses can you please come in stronger on your blut on your D natural.

That should be second basses, hands?

Once more please.

It's going to be a bit of a challenge.

It's a really angular music.

It's not always pretty.

A lot of German text.

That's a hard to chew on sometimes, but it's going to be a neat production.

I know already.

>> Its been an interesting journey coming from the background as a soloist and learning to incorporate my voice more and blend more and just find my way as a chorister.

>> Menschenblut And that's tie!

>> Yes, you're putting in an extra meh-heh.

That's right.

Menschenblut And its tie.

>> It was driving me crazy.

♪ >> It may seem like we're gathered together in a group huddle here in List Hall, but then we go out and we play the game and you know, if the huddle is intense, usually the results in the game are, are powerful.

♪ >> I cannot think of a better scene to start the opera season with than doing the witches of Macbeth with you.

>> Sometimes directors come in and they think, oh, I have 80 people, I've got to move them as a block.

We need to keep the sopranos together.

We need to keep the tenors together.

And it's not like that at all.

This group can function as individuals and it's so great to work with people like Gina who, know, know, us as individuals and immediately she can find ways to allow everybody to bring their best.

>> Good.

Now what we wanna see we have to, we have the right?

Its three witches in Macbeth so it's really important to keep your groups separate here.

Its uh -- we want to keep a defined group.

And your group will be able to come more from an angle.

And your group will be able to come more from an angle.

>> Of course, Macbeth, the play, the witches are three individuals.

We have three individuals, but each individual is basically made up of about 14 or 15 women and to get 15 women to articulate a very earth-shattering prophecy to Macbeth in a very confident, unified fashion takes a lot of work.

And it's the first scene of the opera.

You're sort of, you know, getting, getting, going vocally for the evening and it's a question of the witches at the beginning of Macbeth have to be turned on immediately when they make that first decent from the top of the forest and they come running down to the front of the stage.

>> Che faceste?

Dite su!

Ho sgozzato un verro!

E tu?

frullata nel pensier la mogliera d'un nocchier.

>> We're an ensemble and its about getting our sound refined and so sometimes you have to step back from trying to be a soloist kind of thing.

You need to be with the group.

>> The Met chorus is one of the greatest chorus in the world.

And they're the chorus that I kind of grew up with because I was a young artist here at this house.

And this is one of the biggest roles I've ever sung.

Not only are they supportive emotionally, they're literally supporting me.

They pick me up sometimes.

They help me get up on tables.

They help me get down.

They hold my hand.

You know, so I feel really comfortable with them and grateful that they're here with me.

>> We will probably run the entire scene once, just so everybody gets a sense of the, the flow of the scene and then probably stop, go back and do as much nitpicking as we have time for.

♪ La chose ne s'est jamais vue.

♪ >> I love the nitpicking part.

It should be a lot of fun.

It should be noisy, it should be chaotic and yet still structured musically.

That's always the difficulty with these party scenes.

They have to sound like everybody's having a grand old time and everything's very spontaneous, but it really isn't.

It's all very controlled and very, very structured musically.

I think if you were coming to the Met and you wanted to see what the Chorus is about, you should come to Butterfly, Madame Butterfly and watch the entrance of Butterfly in this production where the entire group of geishas appear magically coming up from the bottom of the stage.

And all of a sudden all appear at the top of the Hill as Butterfly is making her entrance, this simple moment where everything just seems to be in place and just happens.

And you see, you see simplicity and it's so beautiful here at the Met.

>> The story of New York City begins at its waterfront the original center of trade.

The South Street Seaport Museum chronicles the history of the area through its historic buildings and collection of ships.

The flagship of the collection is the newly restored Wavertree.

Built in 1885, Wavertree circled the world four times before the end of her sailing career and represents the type of cargo ships that used to line South Street.

Captain Jonathan Boulware, the museum's director, spoke with NYC-ARTS about Wavertree and the history of the seaport.

Wavertree will set sail for the season on May 25th.

Capt Jonathan Boulware: The South Street Seaport Museum is a 50 year old institution that exists in the original port of New York.

It is located in the buildings and adjacent to the piers and with a fleet of ships that are representative of the original port of New York.

So New York was a port before it was a city.

For us, place really matters where we are doing our work is in actually the original accounting houses that are the first world trade center of the city of New York.

The shipping piers and the ships and their connection to the rest of the world is what built New York.

So we really tell the first chapter of the story of modern New York.

The Street of Ships is a term that's used to describe South Street, really from the Battery up to Brooklyn Bridge and beyond.

The image of the Street of Ships is that of the bowsprits, the head rig, the spar that comes off the bow of the ship and meeting with the city, hanging over the buildings that are there.

It is that connection between waterborne transportation and the growing metropolis that represents really the birthplace of New York as we know it.

These ships were in the 19th century the engines of trade.

They were bringing raw materials in and manufactured goods out, but they were also instruments of globalization, they were instruments of connection.

They were the instruments of the migrations of peoples, of cultural exchange.

Wavertree is our flagship.

She is an 1885 iron sailing ship.

Many people would refer to her as a tall ship, so a big tall-masted square rig sailing ship.

And she is for us the connection between New York and the rest of the world.

So she was a globe trotter.

She was a- what's called a tramp for most of her life.

So a tramp was the name for a ship that would carry any cargo, anywhere in the world as long as it paid.

On the day that Wavertree was launched in Southampton, England in 1885 she was a profoundly normal ship, no more special than a Mack truck or a freight car today.

But she is the last surviving ship of her type in the world.

She has outlasted all of her sisters.

She did so actually because of what I think you could call a series of happy accidents, which might not have seemed happy at all at the time.

In 1910 during her second attempt to try to round Cape Horn, the Cape at the southern end of South America, and probably the most violent and dangerous body of water in the world, she was dismasted.

Which means that her tall sailing rig came falling down to the deck, iron and wood and steel and cable and cordage and canvas all came crashing down, destroying the ship's ability to sail.

Remarkably, killing no one.

She was declared by her owners a functional loss.

She was converted first to a floating warehouse.

She was then converted by having her decks cut out into a sand barge.

She was found by the South Street Seaport Museum.

And so in 1970 she came here to great fanfare and she has been lovingly preserved by volunteers and staff of the museum ever since.

Wavertree just completed in 2016 a completely unprecedented restoration project funded by the city of New York, a 16 month, $13 million restoration that brought her really as close to sailing condition as she has been since she was dismasted in 1910.

Life on a sailing ship in the 19th century was a pretty grim business.

So let's first think about what's the function of these ships?

The job is to get a small pile of coal, a couple thousand tons of coal, or its equivalent, halfway around the world or die trying, right?

So the inversion of importance of money and human life between the 19th century and now can't be overstated.

Crews were expendable, sailors were expendable, cargos and ships were not.

It was a rigid class hierarchy and you can see a really stark example of that in the cabin door that leads to the captain's saloon.

Inside the captain's saloon, she's a Victorian ship, so posh, you know, cushions and nice chairs and a pump organ and a settee and a tea service made of silver and so on.

On that side of the door, it's brightly finished with varnish and nice panels.

On the other side of the door: painted white utilitarian, work-a-day.

And so too was the lifestyle.

Aboard the ship, the captain enjoyed a pretty comfortable existence.

The sailors lived forward, toward the bow of the ship, and lived many men to a small cramped thing, sleeping perhaps on a straw mattress, eating salted meat out of a wooden barrels.

One of the impacting things about Wavertree, about seeing her, is just walking down to the pier and seeing the majesty of her tall masts and the rigging that's necessary to make a ship like that work.

But the real gem is to get into Wavertree and go down into the hold space, which is open this year for the first time ever and be able to take in the size and the scale of a huge cargo sailing ship from the 19th century.

It's like being inside the belly of a whale or in a cathedral.

At one turn incredibly beautiful the construction is breathtaking and yet its function was to do a very mundane and dirty job.

And this is where I would say that Wavertree is truly unique.

There is not another ship in the world that has a space inside like the one that Wavertree has.

She isn't the ship that built in New York, but she is of the class of ship that made New York what it is.

And so for us, particularly as the last of her type, she represents a New York's connection to the rest of the world.

That in the 19th century from an East River pier, you could get on a ship like Wavertree.

You could go out the Narrows, turn left, go right, go straight, and end up anywhere in the world.

PdM: And now, this week's Curator's Choice.

A look at the work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the American Wing galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

His portrait of Abraham Lincoln was informed in part by the subject's own speeches and writings.

Thayer Tolles: I'm Thayer Tolles, I'm curator in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and we're standing in the new American Wing galleries.

Twenty-six new spaces devoted to art from the 18th century through the early 19th century.

I'm here today to talk about Augustus Saint-Gaudens who is arguably the greatest American sculptor of the late 19th century.

The Metropolitan has 50 works by Saint-Gaudens and we're very fortunate to be able to present his work in such a comprehensive way from early cameo portraits to low relief portraits of his friends and fellow artists to models for and reductions after his great Civil War monuments.

Saint-Gaudens was born in Ireland but came here to New York as an infant and was raised on the Lower East Side.

He began at age 13 working as an apprentice for a cameo-cutter and that really fueled his interest in becoming a sculptor.

In 1867 he went abroad to Paris to study and trained at the cole des Beaux-Arts which was really the foremost training ground for students across the world at that time.

Saint-Gaudens also studied in Rome, he came back to New York and established a career as a sculptor of great Civil War monuments.

Some of the best known works in New York are the Farragut Monument in Madison Square Park and the great gilded equestrian statue of General Sherman at 59th Street and 5th Avenue in a space called Grand Army Plaza.

Here I am in front of one of our most recent sculpture acquisitions, Saint-Gaudens Standing Lincoln, This is a really exciting piece for our collection because despite the comprehensiveness of the collection, we had no sculptures representing this great commission that he did for the city of Chicago.

Saint-Gaudens was commissioned to complete a full-length portrait of Abraham Lincoln in 1883 and it was unveiled in Lincoln Park in Chicago in 1887.

For Saint-Gaudens portrait of Lincoln he relied on a number of different sources, but very interestingly he had first-hand experience with Lincoln because he grew up in New York City and saw Lincoln when he came to New York in 1861 on his way to Washington to assume the presidency.

Later, Saint-Gaudens was one of thousands of people who went through a line at City Hall to see the slain president lying in state in April of 1865.

So he said that these two times that he saw Lincoln really formed his impression of the great man, as he called him.

Saint-Gaudens also read his speeches and writings and referenced photographs that were taken of Lincoln during the Civil War, but a very interesting opportunity arose for him in 1885 when an artist friend of his showed Saint-Gaudens plaster models of Lincoln's face and hands.

And these were models that his father, the sculptor Leonard Volk, had taken from life when Lincoln was running for president in the spring of 1860.

So, Saint-Gaudens was able to use the life mask as well as the models of the hands to incorporate into his sculpture.

Here's Lincoln in a transitional moment.

We can presume he's just stood up from this oversized chair of state with an eagle emblazoned on its crest rail and he is in this moment of contemplation where we presume he's about to lift his head to address the audience in front of him and say something meaningful and serious and profound.

And Saint-Gaudens captures the pensiveness and the solemnity of the moment and the burden that Lincoln felt during this great war.

Saint-Gaudens was known for his attention to naturalistic detail, not only to getting an accurate portrait, facial representation, but always thinking of little ways to enliven the compositions, to make them more interesting, whether it' attention to textural detail or just little narrative details that really bring the pieces alive.

I aThayer Tolles, curator in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum and I hope you come and visit our galleries and pay special attention to the installation of our sculpture collection.

>> I hope you enjoyed our program this evening.

Im Philippe de Montebello.

On behalf of NYC-ARTS, thank you for watching, and good night.

FUNDING FOR NYC-ARTS IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THEA PETSCHEK IERVOLINO FOUNDATION JODY AND JOHN ARNHOLD THE LEWIS SONNY TURNER FUND FOR DANCE THE AMBROSE MONELL FOUNDATION ELISE JAFFE AND JEFFREY BROWN CHARLES AND VALERIE DIKER THE MILTON AND SALLY AVERY ARTS FOUNDATION ELROY AND TERRY KRUMHOLZ FOUNDATION THE NANCY WIDEWATER FOUNDATION AND ELLEN AND JAMES S. MARCUS THIS PROGRAM IS SUPPORTED, IN PART, BY PUBLIC FUNDS FROM THE NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CITY COUNCIL ADDITIONAL FUNDING PROVIDED BY MEMBERS OF THIRTEEN AND BY SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES.

SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES.

WE HAVE A DIFFERENT WAY OF LOOKING AT AUCTIONS, OFFERING VINTAGE BOOKS AND FINE ART SINCE 1941.

WORKING TO COMBINE KNOWLEDGE WITH ACCESSIBILITY, WHETHER YOU ARE A LIFELONG COLLECTOR OR A FIRST-TIME BUYER, OR LOOKING TO SELL.

INFORMATION AT SWANN GALLERIES DOT COM.