Bruce Tammen looks back on 24 years with the Chicago Chorale
Their day jobs include working as a psychologist, attorney, many teachers, several software/IT professionals, a medical student, piano tuner, and tattoo artist.
Yet all of these nonprofessionals will come together next Sunday as the Chicago Chorale to fete Bruce Tammen, who will conduct his final concert as artistic director. The main work on the program will be Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem.
Tammen, 77, has been the guiding light of the Hyde Park-based chorus, which he founded 24 years ago. And under Tammen’s passionate leadership, this group of “amateur” singers has delivered performances of complex and demanding works with a polish, power and expressive depth that have often been extraordinary.
Among the Chicago Chorale’s highlights have been performances of Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil (reprised last fall); a luminous program of Scandinavian choral music including Einojuhani Rautavaara’s bizarro Vespers (No. 2 in the 2019 CCR Top Ten Performances); and Randall Thompson’s The Peaceable Kingdom this past March. Their transcendent performance of Rodion Shchedrin’s The Sealed Angel topped CCR’s Top Ten Performances of 2012, and was also released on CD.
It’s been a trying road at times for Tammen over the past near-quarter-century. As recently as a few years ago, the Chorale was nearly dealt a fatal blow by the Covid pandemic, which in some ways the group is still recovering from.
Yet the origins of the Chorale came about for simple human reasons. Tammen was looking for work.
After conducting at the University of Chicago for 12 years, he left to move down to Charlottesville where his wife, Esther Menn, was hired at the University of Virginia. Five years later the couple moved back to Hyde Park when she began work at the Lutheran Theological Seminary.
“By that time I had no job,” said Tammen with a rueful laugh. “That happens to academic couples. It’s kind of a rat race. I was wondering to myself ‘What the heck am I going to do?’ I was at a professional crossroads.
“I was still singing at the time with Robert Shaw. “He was an important mentor to me and he said, ‘Bruce, just start your own group. Take the chance and do it. The world needs more choruses made up of real people.’”
Fortuitously, a former singer from his university days ran into Tammen on 55th Street the very day he moved back to Chicago. “She said ‘Bruce, what are you doing in town?’ And I said, ‘We just moved back, and she said, “Well let’s start our own choir.”
As word got out that Tammen was starting up a chorus of nonprofessionals, he began to hear from former colleagues. “Plenty of singers who had sung for me previously, both at Rockefeller and at the department, wanted to sing for me again. So we soon had a choir.”
Tammen received some individual support from U of C friends and former colleagues, like Bernie Brown, former dean of Rockefeller, and David Bevington, celebrated classics scholar.
But for the most part, despite his previous University of Chicago tenure and close connections, Tammen said he got little assistance from the university and often encountered outright hostility from some in the music department who saw the newly founded Chorale as a potential rival.
“Here we were in Hyde Park and it felt difficult because suddenly we were competing with Rockefeller Chapel and the university.” Tammen did a survey to see if other schools in different areas of the city might be more professionally welcoming but ultimately decided to, as he put it, “just stay here [in Hyde Park] and tough it out.”
“I didn’t want to continue fighting with them,” said Tammen. “We just did our thing and we got more and more support from elsewhere.”
Despite the fitful professional friction, Tammen credits the influence of the University of Chicago and the local intellectual milieu as aiding the Chorale’s mission. “Being based in Hyde Park we attract people who are interested in erudite things—like learning how to correctly pronounce Finnish and Church Slavonic.”
The Chicago Chorale’s first concert came in December 2001, three months after the terrorist attacks of 9-11. They performed a Lessons and Carols concert at a church that provided rehearsal space and a decent piano. “At that first concert, I had 20 singers. Then other former singers of mine got word and called or emailed me and said ‘Can we sing too?’ So then we were up to 36 singers.”
The Chorale stayed at about 40 singers until they were finally allowed to sing a Mozart Requiem at Rockefeller. “I had conducted at Rockefeller for a long time and I knew my kind of singers—amateur, mostly light voices— were not going to cut it with an orchestra in Rockefeller. So we enlarged to about 60 singers and we’ve maintained that number ever since.”
Despite the considerable challenges, Tammen said he persevered with the Chorale because his back was against the wall. “I felt like I had nothing else and I didn’t have the option of quitting.”
“Maybe it was just pride. I had 15 years of college choral conducting and I know what I’m doing.”
Tammen said the major Bach works, the Rachmaninoff Vigil and the Rautavaara Vespers were among his personal favorite performances over the past 24 years. “It’s a crazy piece,” he said of the Rautavaara. “It’s like he’s sitting at a desk thinking, ‘What can I throw in here that will surprise people’?”
Tammen also cited as memorable the European concert dates that took the Chorale to Spain, France and especially Lithuania where they packed a large hall. “If this were in Chicago the fire marshals would have shut us down,” he recalls. “People were sitting on stage and in the aisles. They loved our music and they loved our repertoire.”
One unexpected highlight, says Tammen, was singing the Lord of the Ring’s music scores live during film screenings at Ravinia. “It was a tremendous amount of fun to learn these crazy scores, take the bus up to Ravinia and sing with the CSO. That was a real highlight for us.”
Tammen said he decided to retire a couple years ago when mobility issues began to limit his vigorous, physical style of conducting. Next season, the Chorale will be led by three guest conductors (Benjamin Rivera, Maurice Boyer and Amanda Huntleigh) in concerts that will serve as auditions to succeed him as artistic director.
Tammen said many former Chorale members came back to sing in his last season. “We’re now up to 70, which is kind of unwieldy when you’re singing Schütz and Palestrina. But they wanted to be a part of it. We have a function as a community organization. We provide an important social service for our people.”
Bruce Tammen conducts the Chicago Chorale 3 p.m. Sunday, May 31 at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, 5472 S. Kimbark. The program includes Fauré’s Requiem along with a cappella works by David, Golovanov, Rheinberger, Schütz, and Tavener. chicagochorale.org
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