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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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