nothin That Round Sound | New Haven Independent

That Round Sound

Warmed up by a short burst of applause, Martin Lehmann was ready to become a magician again. Spurts of whispering stilled in the audience. He raised his hands. The 130 members of the Windsbacher Knabenchor — the Windsbach Boys Choir—looked back with relaxed but determined faces, ready to launch into a version of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Warum toben die Heiden? (video above) like the audience had never heard before.

Think of the piece as a slowly rising tidal wave of sound. At the beginning, you almost don’t notice the pitches becoming more intense on sentences like Lasst uns zerreisen ihre Bande (let us break their bands asunder), the diction inching forward as the tongue comes up to meet the teeth and the lips, that split second of musical joy and genius. By the middle of the piece, layers of choral music are overlapping a mellifluous, four-part sea of sound that is easy to get completely lost in.

Lucy Gellman Photo

Most of the audience did. Wednesday night, pieces from Warum toben die Heiden? and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Ich lasse dich nicht to Max Reger’s Romantic Nachtlied and even Willy Richter’s modern The Creation washed over a small but attentive group of listeners at Trinity on the Green, where the choir was making their latest stop on a ten-city tour of the United States. The group performed for 75 uninterrupted minutes, audience members rapt in their pews.

This is the choir’s first U.S. tour since 1992, when they performed in Washington, DC for the the Kennedy Center’s Tribute to Germany festival. Many of the boys in the choir are traveling outside of Germany for the first time. The key to their magic — their round sound, as tour director Cameron Grimes put it — springs from the connection between their ears and their voice boxes. Even at a remarkably young age, they have mastered the art of listening to each other.

Like, really listening to each other. Trained in voice and music theory together at the Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Gymnasium, these guys — many from the age of 7 or 8 until they graduate from high school — spend a lot of time learning that they need to know what’s going on in each of the three other vocal ranges to have a firm enough grasp on their own. The audience got a glimpse of their training between each piece, as Lehmann gave the choir 30 seconds to a minute to reconfigure themselves (the original remix, if you will) before moving forward with their repertoire. The overall effect was one of total trust and collaboration, allowing the choir to feel deeply as they sang.

And members of the audience to feel it deeply, too.

Many of the older boys have been in since they were a very young age … it makes for a more connected sound, a more round sound. The younger guys definitely do look up to the older guys too. I’ve been so impressed with the maturity in their sound … how they listen to each other. It’s how they’re able to do the loud and the soft,” said Grimes after the show.

Behind him, the choir had erupted into twenty-some conversations, its still, churchy poise traded for long, loud streams of bayrisch German as they walked out of the church and onto a glistening, rain-slicked Green. Outside, a few of their chaperones pushed for an extended evening for the older boys, who were still abuzz with energy. Others disagreed. They were planning to sightsee in New York tomorrow. It was going to be a long day, and they had beds, far from home, to slip into. 

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