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The shortest day plus the longest night equals the winter solstice
(which this year, in New York, falls on December 21st, at 1:35 p.m).
For the past twenty-five years, Paul Winter’s Winter Solstice
Celebration has celebrated this ancient rite (originally created to
ensure the sun’s return) at the world’s largest Gothic cathedral,
the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, with more than ten thousand
people witnessing such theatrical effects as the sun’s return in the
form of the world’s largest tam-tam gong (seven feet in diameter),
ascending, with its player, to the Cathedral’s vaulted ceiling.
Or, in other words, before Kenny G., there was Paul Winter. Before
CD101.9, there was Paul Winter. And where some might find blame,
there is little doubt about Winter’s ability to mesmerize his
faithful audiences, for each year, Paul Winter’s Winter Solstice
Celebration is one of the holiday week’s top-grossing events, with
the subsequent NPR broadcast one of the most popular program
specials of the year.
This year, apart from the sun gong, and the gigantic Earth Ball
traveling the Cathedral’s 604-foot interior length and rising into
the starlit nave, and the 28-foot tall spiral, rotating Christmas
Tree of Sound with its bells, gongs, and chimes, there was also the
Brazilian singer Renato Braz making his Winter Solstice debut. Fresh
from his successful American debut at the Spoleto Festival in May
2004, Braz made his entrance into the darkened Cathedral in a floppy
hat with a drum strapped around his waist, and as he made his way
onto the stage, his ethereal voice conquered any skepticism about
one’s position in the audience.
Born in Sao Paulo and singing since the age of five, Braz sings
about Brazilian workers and their lives in the country, songs that
speak to the heart (even when a listener is not remotely fluent in
Portugese). And on Friday evening in the hush-dark of the Cathedral,
Braz’s clear tenor voice, with its angelic high registers,
captivated the audience, and provided the perfect complement for
Winter’s haunting soprano saxophone. Together, Braz and Winter, with
their respective instruments, made manifest the season’s reflective
spirit alongside its inherent yearning for renewal
There were also performances by the Cathedral’s artists-in-residence
dance troupe, the Forces of Nature Dance Theater Company, an
African-American corps of eighteen, all of whom seem particularly
gifted with the most fluent and flexible bodies, and also the Dmitri
Pokrovsky Ensemble, a group of Russian folk singers and dancers,
known to many as the voices of the trademark theme of the television
show Survivor, who, alas, on Friday evening looked as if they had
wandered in from another stageset – perhaps a sequel to Waiting for
Guffman set in a small town outside St. Petersburg. And also, for
the first time in twenty years, Winter was joined by one of his
Consort’s original members, the double reed player/oboist, Paul
McCandless, and their side-by-side triumphal procession down the
Cathedral’s 640-foot length was a testament to the power of music
with an environmental and ecumenical bent.
It’s little wonder that Paul Winter’s Winter Solstice Celebration
continues to be the most popular secular event at the Cathedral, for
once the sun has risen again high above the rapt audience, and this
year with Renato Braz’s ethereal voice still ringing in the ears, it
is nothing to leave the great Cathedral’s front entrance and glimpse
snow and feel the cold. Nothing at all, for you have been warmed by
the triumph of light over darkness. |
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