Chorister was an enormously troublesome job even when the Met’s repertory prolonged from Handel by way of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and Puccini to the center of the twentieth century. However as the corporate has taken on much more up to date opera over the previous twenty years — in idioms as various because the time-stopping repetitions of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten” and the dense dissonance of Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel” — the calls for have elevated. That the refrain’s high quality has elevated together with them owes an ideal deal to Palumbo.
“Once we began ‘Satyagraha,’ everybody was sort of skeptical,” mentioned Jean Braham, a chorister for the reason that late Nineteen Nineties. “And by the tip it actually felt like a Zen expertise. It was superb. And Donald’s preparation of it actually made that doable for us.”
Maybe essentially the most outstanding factor about Palumbo’s ascent to the top of his occupation — “all of us aspire to be like Donald,” mentioned Michael Black, Lyric Opera of Chicago’s present refrain grasp — is that he has no formal musical coaching. He fell in love with opera as a boy rising up in Rochester, N.Y., performed some piano and sang in his college refrain. However as an undergraduate at Boston College, he studied chemistry.
After graduating, although, he moved to Vienna, the place he turned towards music, absorbing the fertile opera scene of the early Nineteen Seventies and singing a number of occasions in choruses carried out by Herbert von Karajan. “It was within the day when Karajan and Georg Solti had been the 2 poles,” Palumbo mentioned. “And I turned sort of absorbed by Karajan’s type, this rounder, mellower, deeper high quality of sound.”
One in all Palumbo’s catchphrases is “by no means push your voice previous the purpose of magnificence.” That seek for a heat, blended, refined sound blossomed when he returned to the USA and took work as a pianist for a outstanding voice trainer in Boston. And he discovered a parallel to the Karajan type within the previous Italian college when he turned the assistant to Dallas Opera’s refrain grasp, Roberto Benaglio.
When the Met got here calling, he had been at Lyric for effectively over a decade, and had simply completed constructing and adorning a brand new residence in Chicago. “However there was no method to say no,” he mentioned. “Not in the event you’re an American and also you grew up listening to the Saturday Met broadcasts, in the event you needed to get again out of your working towards to activate the radio at a sure time.”
