Choral Varsity

The busiest musician in Manhattan this week will undoubtedly be a shock-haired young man named Robert Shaw. When the last round tones of his RCA Victor Chorale conclude NBC's RCA Victor show, Shaw will just about have time to gobble his dinner, struggle into his heavy blue overcoat and dash four blocks to CBS's studios to lead the Columbia Chorale and Symphony in Beethoven's Mass in C. Two days--and eight hours of rehearsals--later, he will conduct his Collegiate Chorale at Carnegie Hall in Bach's three-hour-long Christmas Oratorio; next night, Christmas carols for CBS's annual Christmas program. And on top of all that, he has a Christmas symphony concert at the Juilliard School of Music, where he is director of choral conducting --in his spare time.

Send for Shaw. Bob Shaw, who looks a little like Mickey Rooney trying to be serious, and a little older (he is 31), has practically a monopoly on big-league choral singing. He has put new life into the art in the U.S. CBS and RCA Victor own only their company names for Shaw's choruses. When they want a chorus of 40 to record the Bach B Minor Mass (Victor) or 30 voices for broadcast of Beethoven's Mass, they go to Shaw. He has a huge reservoir of singers--his cleanly trained, 185-voice Collegiate Chorale. Their recorded performances of Bach rank with the best in Europe. About the only time he gets all his 185 singers together is when the Chorale puts on its own concerts in Carnegie Hall or does Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with Toscanini.

Shaw's first glee club was at California's Pomona College, where he was studying to follow his father into the pulpit. To earn his way, he wrapped bread in a bakery and did some preaching on the side. When Fred Waring filmed Varsity Show on the Pomona campus, Shaw's glee club got a bit part--and Shaw got a job tuning up lush arrangements of Moonlight on the Campus and Battle Hymn of the Republic for Waring in New York. On the side, he trained a glee club for Broadway's Billy Rose, set the swimmers' strokes to music at Billy's World's Fair Aquacade. He also took on the choir at Manhattan's Marble Collegiate Church, and organized what is now the Collegiate Chorale.

Flunk in Theory. To his singers, he is a tough taskmaster who insists on clarity of line instead of overwhelming masses of sound. Says he: "It is the performer's business to get out of the way of the music." He picks his "varsity" choir first for knowledge of musical theory, then for ability to sight-read and lastly for voice. When most of his best singers flunked the theory test, he got his own teacher, Juilliard's Julius Herford, to teach them in one-night-a-week classes.

In rehearsal, he is temperamental: his moods vary from the fire-&-ice meticulosity of Toscanini to the feverish, flop-haired semaphoring and exuberance of a college cheerleader. Says he: "I'm ashamed of myself after every rehearsal. I think you can only inspire a group when you have their respect, and they only respect dignity--but their slowness sometimes disgusts me and I forget myself."

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