INTERVIEW: Paul Winter to celebrate Solstice at St. John the Divine

Paul Winter has an appropriate last name because he is the man behind Paul Winter’s Winter Solstice Celebration, which is in its 38th year at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The four-performance run of the multidisciplinary event kicks off Thursday, Dec. 14 and concludes Saturday, Dec. 16 with a matinee and evening show.

Audience members can expect to hear many different kinds of music, all centered on the seasonal importance of the winter solstice. This year’s festival includes the Pletenitsa Balkan Choir, Paul Winter Consort (with Winter as saxophonist), gospel singer Theresa Thomason, and the dancers and drummers of the Forces of Nature Dance Theatre.

The spectacle will fill the voluminous cathedral with sounds and visuals that promise to captivate, and audience members should know that the feast for the eyes and ears takes a long time to prepare every year.

“The ideas are bubbling all the time, and each time we do the event, we get lots of ideas about new things we want to try or things we want to change,” Winter said in a recent phone interview. “And then through the year, it’s really our travels that bring a lot of ideas to us and new people that we meet, new music we hear, and sometimes old friends in the musical realm that we haven’t connected with in a long time. It’s kind of an ongoing saga for me.”

Winter will be on the stage during the performances with his group, which consists of Paul McCandless on oboe, Eugene Friesen on cello, Paul Sullivan on keyboards, Eliot Wadopian on bass, Jamey Haddad on percussion, Tim Brumfield on the cathedral’s pipe organ and Scott Sloan on a 7-foot sun gong.

Although each year brings in new acts for the Winter Solstice Celebration, there is a continuity that dates back to the 1980s.

“The first year, it was one performance,” Winter said. “We were set up in the great choir at the east end of the cathedral. Although the cathedral was pretty full, we realized that the people in the back of the nave are actually almost two blocks away because it’s 600 feet long inside. … When attempting to deal with it, we came up with the idea of putting up stages in the middle of the cathedral, and half the audience on the east and half on the west. So things like that kept changing. We moved to two nights and three nights and then four concerts. You had to think about ways that we could use the vertical space of the cathedral, having explored many possibilities on the ground floor level of different places from which players could play during the event.”

The upper reaches of the cathedral are quite far away from the pews. The ceiling of the dome is 150 feet off the ground, meaning the entire Statue of Liberty could fit in the cathedral with room to spare. Over the years, Winter wanted to fill that space with some visual gift to the crowd below.

“So what we came up with were two things,” he said. “One was this giant sun gong that we got in 1989 that is rigged to the vault, to the ceiling of the cathedral, and rises with its player, who is sitting in a chair next to it with a huge mallet. His chair is also rigged to motors in the ceiling, and they slowly rise 100 feet as he plays the gong at the symbolic moment of the return of the sun along with an intense, overwhelming organ solo. The other special effect was an earth ball, a giant earth ball that moves through the cathedral on a wagon to the nave and comes to the stage, where it’s hooked to a cable that then slowly raises it up. And it spins as it raises it slowly to the vault of the cathedral during the music that we play.”

This year’s Winter Solstice Celebration welcomes the unique contributions of the Balkan choir. Winter wanted them onboard because it fulfills a dream of his that dates back to the 1960s.

“I’ve had a long-going love for the Bulgarian choral music, which I first heard in 1963 on an album called The Music of Bulgaria by the Philip Koutev Ensemble, who was a … musicologist who brought together these mountain folk singers who sing outdoors and who sing with this intense, brass-like sound with no vibrato because they’re projecting sometimes singing over a valley, outside,” Winter said. “He brought a number of these people together and did some exquisite choral arrangements and created this tradition of these Bulgarian choirs, and I’ve loved it ever since and always imagined making music, having them collaborate with us at solstice. This summer, our cellist, Eugene Friesen, told me that there was a choir in Boston that sings in this tradition, and so then we got in touch with them and invited them to come.”

The multidisciplinary concert make take a year of planning, but Winter only gets about a week and a half in the cathedral itself for rehearsal. This means he needs to be judicious when planning tech rehearsals and production setup.

“The first several days are just involved with production setup, bringing in the staging, hanging trusses from the vault, the sound system, so the first few days are just with the crew,” said Winter, who has won seven Grammy Awards.

The celebration at the cathedral turns 38 this year, but it also can be considered a continual culmination of Winter’s lifelong passion for music.

“I never imagined growing up, even all through college, music would be a life path for me,” he said. “But it was the thing that I loved the most.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Paul Winter’s Winter Solstice Celebration will play Dec. 14-16 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.