Music for Thanksgiving with Robert Shaw

When the young choral conductor Robert Shaw made this brief 10-inch LP of Hymns of Thanksgiving in 1950, he indeed had much to be thankful for.

He had been discovered leading a Pomona College ensemble by the bandleader Fred Waring, who hired him to create a choral group for his orchestra. This Shaw did, and within a few years began his own Collegiate Chorale. He soon became so well known that he attracted the attention of Arturo Toscanini, far and away the most famous conductor in the US. "The Maestro," as he is still known, called on Shaw and the Collegiate Chorale for a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the NBC Symphony. Toscanini then engaged Shaw to prepare choruses for him until the older conductor's retirement.

The Collegiate Chorale took its name from holding its rehearsals at Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's Marble Collegiate Church in New York. But Shaw and Peale had a disagreement over the conductor's inclusive policy for membership in the chorale, so the singers departed the premises. (The story is told in more detail in this post.)

In 1948, Shaw founded a smaller group, the Robert Shaw Chorale. By that time he had already been recording for RCA Victor for three years. As far as I can tell, that association began with a set of chansons by Paul Hindemith, a composer that Shaw championed and from whom he commissioned a setting of Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.

His next recording was a popular success - the Christmas Hymns and Carols were done for Victor in 1945 and 1946, coming out as an four-78 set with nearly an hour of music. The performers at first were identified as "Robert Shaw and His RCA Victor Chorale," but by the time the same performances appeared on LP, this was simplified to the Robert Shaw Chorale.

It is that latter group that prepared 1950's Hymns of Thanksgiving, a brief 10-inch LP (and corresponding EP set), with six selections and only about 18 minutes of music. Although short, the album is of high quality. As the New York Times reviewer commented, "the chorus sings in the straightforward manner that choruses would sing in if they sang as well as the Shaw Chorale. Despite the title, it has year-round interest." 

Even considering the praise, I believe the writer is understating the skills of the chorus and its director. You will seldom hear such careful balancing of voices, clear diction, complete control of dynamics and total conviction. It is remarkable.

Hugh Porter

On the LP, the accompanist is Hugh Porter, a distinguished organist who was at the time the president of Union Theological Seminary's School of Sacred Music. The program was recorded in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. The sound is excellent in ambient stereo.

This Thanksgiving program is in effect an appetizer for the main course, both of the Shaw Chorale's mono albums of Christmas Hymns and Carols, the 1945-46 set mentioned above and its 1952 successor, which will appear here soon. The first volume was later redone in stereo, but neither of these mono sets have been reissued, to my perhaps faulty knowledge.

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