So I wanted to hear the Rossini Stabat Mater which the University of Maryland Concert Choir performed awhile back with the National Symphony Orchestra, both in Kennedy Center and in Carnegie Hall.

I heard a clip of the UMD Concert Choir’s rehearsal for the piece and they were superb, as expected. A friend of mine watched this with me and he was extremely impressed especially with the Men of the Choir. He said: They sound like one guy singing because of their superb perfect intonation. Yes, the same is true for the rest of the Choir. Too bad their performance was not recorded by the University of Maryland or by the NSO. Disclosure: I sang with Dr Paul Traver’s renowned and superb University of Maryland Chorus when they were around, which the UMD Concert Choir replaced when The Maryland Chorus was “retired” by the UMD.

I think I heard the Rossini years ago, but it’s not a piece that stuck with me. After hearing the beginning of it I can see why.

The performance I watched part of was from Deutschland and the Chorus was superb as was the Orchestra. But the soloists — as usual — stuck out because they did not match anybody’s “sound” on stage. The Chorus sang with SATB perfect intonation. The Orchestra played with perfect intonation. The soloists? They stuck out because they refused to sing (or couldn’t sing) with perfect intonation. So they did not at all match the choral sound. They clashed with it, as per usual with symphonic choral performances. The soloists sounded like the usual train wreck that one hears from the quartet in Beethoven’s Ninth. It appears that most soloists have never been trained to try to blend with others — the soprano soloist who consistently seems unable to control her voice and is usually the worst of the bunch followed by the tenor soloist — and they’ve never heard the term perfect intonation, one of the foundations of choral excellence.

What is it about vocal soloists — especially sopranos — who think they have to screech, wobble and flutter through their parts and they mistakenly think they are the “stars” of the performance? When in reality, the “stars” of the performance are the Chorus and Orchestra.

And this is the case in nearly every symphonic choral performance where wannabe opera divas are brought in to scream their way through the solo passages, rather than have the best-trained soloist voices in the Chorus perform the solo passages. Every time the soloists ruin the performance for me, with few exceptions to that.

Meanwhile in the comments under the Rossini performance I briefly watched, as usual, the classical music armchair critics and others were gushing over the soloists, worshipping the conductor, thanking “the chorus” (rather than the Chorus) and other drivel that people write in classical music comments, which is why I don’t have comments turned on because I know the type of comments that the classical music armchair critics write and I find them consistently annoying.

But this is a tradition thing, once again, and silly and ridiculous traditions are steeped in classical music. Similar to the Messiah addiction on cue every holiday season. At the Conservatory where I was trained, I was trained in these traditions as well, but after graduation I began to reject some of these outdated and silly traditions. In reality, I don’t think most of the audience — most of whom know nothing about music; they’re just there to be “entertained” or to be around people to deal with loneliness — couldn’t care less how the soloists “sing” (if you can call wobbling and fluttering “singing”). And it should be pointed out that noticeable vibrato is often used to cover up pitch and vocal technique problems. So since the audience couldn’t care less how the soloists sing, why doesn’t the conductor ask the soloists to please sing without any noticeable vibrato so that they will match the choral sound and the orchestral sound? The Vibrato Cultists would say, “They have to use vibrato to be heard over the Orchestra.” Nonsense! Orchestras are quite capable of accompanying and with technology being what it is today, any of the soloists can be mic’d so they don’t need to scream, wobble or flutter over the Orchestra. If need be, the soloists can be fitted with a headset as is done in some operas, or as is usually the case anyway, have a microphone placed on the stage in front of each screamer. When they’re screaming with their noticeable vibrato, those mics are not at all needed anyway. In fact, they make matters worse. The soloists screaming, wobbling and fluttering can be heard in the next city over. It’s like listening to the siren of an emergency vehicle going by. As an example of what I’m talking about, none of the soloists of Collegium 1704 in the Czech Republic sing with noticeable vibrato, wobbling and fluttering or screaming. And their audiences love them.

But tradition being what it is, I live under no illusion that this unfortunate tradition of bringing in opera divas to scream, wob