Concert to honor choir’s ‘father figure’
He was always “Dr. Smith.” Not “Mr.,” and certainly not “Harvey.” Perish the thought. “He was a really strict guy,” singer Ryan Downey says of Harvey K. Smith, the longtime artistic director of the Phoenix Boys Choir who died in December 2012.
“(Smith) was reserved and very much the father figure. He was the person you never talked back to. He really held us, even at 9 or 10 years old, to standards that he would hold colleagues and adults. So it made me grow up quickly.”
Smith led the choir for 40 seasons until his retirement in 1999, building a small community chorus into a world-
The Phoenix Chorale: ‘Requiem: Day of the Dead’
» 2 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 1. Lord of Life Lutheran Church, 13724 W. Meeker Blvd., Sun City West. » 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 1. Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, 100 W. Roosevelt St., Phoenix. » 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 2. First United Methodist Church, 5510 N. Central Ave., Phoenix. Admission: $13-$32; $5 more day of show. Details: 602-253-2224, phoenixchorale.org. class touring company. Before stepping down, he conducted the choir in a recording for the Oregon Bach Festival Chorus and Orchestra that resulted in an album, “Credo,” that won a Grammy Award for best choral performance in 2000.
Over the decades, he influenced the
lives of 3,000 boys who sang for him.
Among those who have gone on to singing careers is Downey, who is in his second season singing bass for the Phoenix Chorale. Led by maestro Charles Bruffy, the chorale also is a Grammy-winning ensemble.
On Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 1-2, it will offer a Day of the Dead celebration of Smith’s life and legacy by performing the world premiere of a composition commissioned in his honor.
“At the last concert of every season, we auction off a commission from a composer friend. It’s kind of a tradition,” says Bruffy, an acclaimed conductor who also directs the Kansas City Chorale.
Smith’s widow, Dorothy Lincoln-Smith, won the right for this commission, from Southern California-based composer J.A.C. Redford.
He has written new music for the chorale before — a setting of a pair of Shakespearean sonnets titled “Time and a Summer’s Day.”
Among his many credits, he helped arrange the James Bond theme “Skyfall” for Adele and later created an a cappella setting of the song.
“I happen to be a James Bond fan,” LincolnSmith says, “so I watched ‘Skyfall’ and at the credits at the end, here’s his name, and I thought, ‘Oh, I guess he has a day job, too.’ ”
To guide Redford’s composition, Lincoln-Smith shared memories of her husband and picked out the words to be sung.
“I wanted it to be a very joyful text, as Harvey was, and I wanted it to have something to do with the ocean and fish, because we were avid scuba divers,” she says.
The quotations are mostly psalms and other verse from the Bible, but there is also a bit of verse from 17th-century poet George Herbert that gave the new work its title: “He That Will Learn to Pray, Let Him Go to Sea.”
“My first job was to take those disparate texts and to weave them together into a kind of narrative that would tell a story from beginning to end,” Redford says.
“I am hoping the listener will smell the salt and feel the spray in the course of the piece. You can hear snatches of a sailor’s fife tune in one place, and there’s a sense of a sailor’s hymn in another. There is a wavelike motion. You get the feeling that the music is ebbing and flowing and crashing.”
Although the commissioning rights were won in an auction, the chorale performance still will be a personal one for Bruffy. He met Smith in 1999 after taking the Phoenix job, and the two struck up a friendship that lasted through the latter’s long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
Paying tribute to Smith after his death, Bruffy said, “Beyond its artistic contribution, the important thing about the Boys Choir is its teaching of teamwork, responsibility, evaluation, attentiveness, self-respect. It’s the list of attributes that create a good human, and that’s what Harvey embodied.”
In addition to the world premiere, the Phoenix Chorale’s Day of the Dead concerts also will feature two 20th-century Requiem settings, one by the French composer Maurice Duruflé, the other by Englishman Herbert Howells. Both are important pieces in the choral repertoire.
“The Howells Requiem has been on my bucket list for a very long time,” Bruffy says.