This is an unlisted link (unsearchable via YouTube but accessible here, our current IP arrangement with Trinity Church) to Chris’s valedictory Trinity Wall Street concert of 2013.
Trinity Wall Street Presents: A Concert of the Songs of Christopher Berg February 28, 2013, 1pm
Naomi O’Connell, soprano
Jesse Blumberg, baritone
Christopher Berg, composer and piano.
The Trinity program notes for the concert are available at https://workinginconcert.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Berg-concert-CAO-Feb-28.pdf. And they’re amazing — very moving in the current context of freshly missing Chris.
If like me you have two screens available to you, I highly recommend following along with the lyrics on one screen while you watch the video of the performance on full screen on the biggest screen you have.
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As dear sweet Iris Arno texted today, it’s so lovely and yet so difficult to watch the well-shot footage of Berg accompanying Blumberg and O’Connell, because he is so much in his element and so much himself that it becomes painful to realize that those patent leather pumps will never alight upon the pedals of a concert piano or stride across a stage again.
It’s also a sublime shock to the system, a delightful tingle of awe and tristesse to imbibe this whole concert in aural, video, and literary form simultaneously, because especially if you have the written lyrics at hand, this ample album-length concert makes it incontrovertible, unignorable that in his sensibility as a selector of libretti for his lieder, Berg was both a Stoic and an Epicurean and also, even, a Cynic, in the non-pejorative sense of the word worthy of Diogenes himself, who at essence simply wanted to live with the voluntary simplicity and endearing loyalty of a dog. And Berg, after all, loved dogs.
I am not God’s little lamb
I am God’s sick tiger.
And I prowl about at night
And what most I love I bite
We are devastated to no longer be able to text Berg, call him on the phone, go to a movie or a diner with him again, but again and again, the poems in his anthology actually have the reassurance to give us in our grief that Berg, like Seneca, was always prepared for death insofar as he lived for the freedom of slant-told truth that he found in literature and the cold clear starlike light of truth that is in music.
It is unthinkable to think of yourself
Alive, real, existing.
It is unthinkable to think of yourself
Dead, deceased, defunct, outside of time.
It is unthinkable to think of yourself
And still more unthinkable
To think of yourself as a memory,
A dream, a soul without a body.
The other thing that the Trinity Church Concert makes amply clear if we have ears to hear as we follow along with the lines of script is that Christopher Berg had long since solved the mystery of how to set the English language to classical music in a manner worthy of the Italian roots of opera and of French chanson and opera’s unlikely apotheosis in Wagner’s German alike. In the classical music idiom of opera, English’s addiction to its almost inherent iambic pentameter since Shakespeare, the King James Bible, John Milton becomes a liability to prosody let alone melody when compared to the flexible transparency with which Italian, certainly, but even Berg’s beloved français functions equally well as glossolalia if you don’t happen to know the language. Whereas in the hands of a lesser reader, singer, piano player than Berg, English has a tendency to stick to the roof of your mouth like peanut butter.
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
Nowhere is this more evident than in Berg’s perhaps best-known feat of setting Frank O’Hara poems to music! Anyone, everyone would have said it couldn’t be done, but he did it, the ultimate proof of his concept.
He loves to watch himself
standing naked before the mirror
doing business on the telephone.
Each action is deliberate:
he bows and smiles while speaking
to his customers as if he’s dealing
with himself. His minor flaws
don’t bother him, the pot belly,
the baggy chin, he looks right over them
to the powerful swagger he’s developed,
the commanding sweep of his arm.
Wagner had to do this too — figure out how to fit a less-melodic, more-percussive language into classical music. Schubert, the Milton to his Shakespeare, had the inspiration to use the hybrid melody-percussion instrument of the piano to guide him in teasing out the contours of the lyric, which is of course half the solution, the half of the solution that Chris Berg as a piano virtuoso also had as his main guiding light in refusing to give up on the problem of figuring out how to ‘classicise’ English (and sometimes French!) prose poems. But the other half of the solution to the conundrum of how to ‘opera-fy’ German, the one that Wagner leaned on in acting as his own librettist, which was to substitute the end-rhymes of Romance language lyrics with flurries of alliteration, is not available to us in English.
So Chris Berg went the other way and largely dispensed with rhyme, and in so doing, found, as a Francophile, oh so ironically, the American equivalent of not just a canon of blank verse, but an infinitely malleable melodic meter, like Nabokov learning to love writing English with a mind so deeply steeped in Russian by finding the one place where our pirate, magpie language most uniquely excels, which is its special ability to surface le mot juste from an unusually large horde or warehouse of vocabulary words and morphemes imported (the kind word for it) from all around the world.
I found it in a legendary land
all rocks and lavender and tufted grass,
where it was settled on some sodden sand
hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.
The features it combines mark it as new
to science: shape and shade—the special tinge,
akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,
the dingy underside, the checquered fringe.
That’s what awaits you when you press play on Christopher Berg’s Trinity Concert: a master class in how to set alight, give flight and second sight to a poem or even ‘a prose’ that is normally read in the register of the spoken word or silently scanned and spoken aloud only to the mind’s ear by the mind’s tongue (although recent MRI experiments have shown that our larynxes do flutter inaudibly, but visibly, if we have eyes to see, when we talk to overselves in our own everyday inner monologues). The voices heard are those of Naomi O’Connell and Jesse Blumberg, but if you look over to the man on the left, the now dearly departed Chris Berg, it is clear that in some sense, since he is sharing with us the music of the spheres of his awareness of the musical potential of this or that text that he took down from his groaning bookshelves or unfurled from an envelope out of the US Mail, even, in the case of Letter from Richard, and then scored at his trusty, dusty piano shrine, we are being vicariously ventriloquized to be able to partake in the experience of his exquisite sensitivity and taste. His gourmandism and nobility and humility commingled. His wicked sense of humor and his…woe.
But since we are here, let’s talk a little about the cruel and constant
feasting that goes on here, especially at this time of year – not that
we don’t eat the same things that are eaten everywhere: partridges,
for instance, are common enough, but less common is that they
should all be like those which in Paris, when their scent approaches one’s nose making it twitch with pleasure, provoke cries of “Oh,
what an aroma! Just smell that!” We suppress all these raptures.
Not that I love thy children,, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,-
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea
And give my rage a brother – ! Liberty!
Trinity Wall Street Presents A Concert of the Songs of Christopher Berg February 28, 2013, 1pm Naomi O’Connell, soprano Jesse Blumberg, baritone Christopher Berg, composer and piano PROGRAM NOTES Today’s program includes songs composed between 1978 and 2006. The earliest, “Selling Techniques,” from 1978, was composed during a stay at Yaddo, and as a tribute to its poet, Nellie Hill, whom the composer encountered there. The latest, “Letter from Richard,” from 2006, was composed for a concert by the Mirror Visions Ensemble featuring songs based on correspondence, and later performed at Paul Sperry’s 75th birthday concert. In between, there are groups of songs on poems by Stevie Smith (three of a set of five), Frank O’Hara (five of a set of twelve), Vladimir Nabokov (one of a set of four), six songs on postcard texts of Stephane Mallarmé, a duet on a letter of Madame de Sévugné, and two short songs on letters of Abraham Lincoln. As with the Nellie Hill songs, the two songs on poems by Carol Stevens Kner resulted from a personal encounter with the poet and were commissioned by soprano Phyllis Clark. “Sonnet on Liberty,” on Oscar Wilde’s poem, was commissioned by baritone Richard Lalli. “La Moisson,” finally, is an extraordinary meditation on mortality by Robert Desnos, a Surrealist poet and tragic victim of the Holocaust, composed for the Mirror Visions Ensemble and first featured on a program focusing on the life and music of Darius Milhaud. Other poets and writers whose texts have been set by Berg include Tim Dlugos, Gertrude Stein (his first songs), Jean de la Fontaine, Dante, Goethe, W.H. Auden, V.R. Lang, Perry Brass, Erik Satie, William Jay Smith, Benjamin Franklin (a letter in French, set for vocal trio), Emmannuel Chabrier (again, letters) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Recordings of many of these songs (as well as duets and trios) have been made by sopranos Tobé Malawista, Lauren Snouffer, and Vira Slywotzky, mezzo-soprano Janice Felty, tenors Carl Halvorsen, Scott Murphree, and Paul Sperry, baritones David Krohn, Richard Lalli and Chris Pedro Trakas, and actress Elaine Stritch, on the Albany, MusicMaster, Musical Heritage Society and Opus One labels. Berg’s small catalogue of instrumental music includes piano music (much of it recorded by Bennett Lerner on the Albany label), two string quartets (one with voice), a flute sonata, a cello sonata, a clarinet sonata, and for orchestra “We Have Heard the Chimes at Midnight,” a Sinfonietta, and a set of short pieces called Outmoded Forms. Berg is also the composer of a musical, Back Home (New York Musical Theater Festival 2007) and an opera, Cymbeline, based on Shakespeare’s play. Most of his music is published by his own company, Tender Tender Music, distributed by Classical Vocal Repertoire. The full program notes of lyrics can be found here: https://workinginconcert.org/wp-conte… Video uploaded with permission of Trinity Wall Street for unlisted use. In honor of our friend and musical colleague Christopher Berg (1949-2026) by Claudia Hommel for Working in Concert www.workinginconcert.org #artsongs
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