Artistic Director History: Bill Ganz

Bill Ganz, Acting Director, fall of 1998

Hello to my faithful readers.

Happy May to all of you. Since Trente Morant, our previous AD had stepped down the chorus once again turned to Bill Ganz to be our Acting Director for the fall of 1998. As you may recall from a previous entry, Bill had been our Interim Director in 1985 as the chorus went through some changes.

I would like to give you some background on Bill about what he had been doing at that time. He had directed the UC Men's Chorale and the Cal Jazz Choir at UC Berkeley for eight years. He had also served as Associate Director of UC Choral Ensembles. In addition to his duties at UC Berkeley, he had served as conductor of the award-winning Cable Car Chorus, which is a barbershop quartet.

On November 6 & 7, 1998, Bill led us in our fall concert Classical Music for Cowards. At this point, we were at 32 singers with good representation in all four sections. This concert brought us back to what our first AD, Robin Kay, loved, classical music. But this was Bill's take on the repertoire and he wanted to make it fun for us to learn and sing and to bring that sense of fun to our audience. Bill told us at our first rehearsal for this concert that we should not be afraid of classical music and it turned out that he was right. From what I remember, Bill really got us to blend and to listen to each other and that was a valuable lesson we all learned.

Joining us in this concert was the Oberon Quartet, two violinists, a violist and a cellist. They played the overture to the evening, the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 by J. S. Bach. We sang music by G. F. Handel, five pieces from Schubert's "Mass in G," the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Sanctus, the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei. We also sang a couple of fugues - "The Heart of the Fugue" and "Geographical Fugue." For something a little lighter there was a soprano and alto quintet who performed "Hail Holy Queen" from the movie "Sister Act." We ended the evening with "Amazing Grace" which had been arranged by Sky Evergreen.

One thing I found funny in the program was we had a Movement Coordinator, Alena Cawthorne, and that Scenic Ambiance was provided by our Production Committee. That's it for this week. Next time I will be writing about our newest AD, Michael Carlson.

Cheers, love and song, Michael Lucero