Bass Morris Robinson (CFA’01) says he’s happy to be performing live again after a year and a half singing mainly on Zoom. Photo by Lawrence Brownlee
This article was first published in Bostonia on January 28, 2022. By Joel Brown.
EXCERPT
Bass Morris Robinson isn’t technically a Grammy nominee, but he’s still thrilled that the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s CD and streaming release Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Symphony of a Thousand is nominated for Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Album–Classical at the 2022 Grammy Awards. Robinson (CFA’01) was only one among 350 performers on stage for the Mahler, but his powerful solo is a highlight of the performance and recording.
“It feels like you’re walking out on the 50-yard line and you’re the captain of the football team, all your buddies are behind you, and you’re representing, saying, ‘I got this, follow me,’” says Robinson, a three-time All-American offensive lineman for the Citadel. “Of all the solos, the bass solo is the most exciting. It’s high, it’s low. You get to unleash, so to speak.”
Despite his college gridiron achievements, Robinson was not quite big enough for the NFL, and after a brief corporate career, he enrolled in the BU College of Fine Arts Opera Institute at age 30, kicking off a dramatically successful career as a singer.
The performances of what is formally known as Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major (1910), recorded at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, May 30 and 31 and June 2, 2019, were conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, the orchestra’s acclaimed music and artistic director, and featured six soloists besides Robinson, as well as the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the National Children’s Chorus, and the Pacific Chorale.
The symphony “is glory amplified,” Los Angeles Times classical music critic Mark Swed wrote after attending one of the performances. “Can radiance be recorded? Goosebumps digitized? We’ll find out. Deutsche Grammophon came to town to preserve a historic occasion for now and whatever media we rely on in the future.”
“Especially memorable [was] Morris Robinson with his imposing, rich Pater Profundus, a voice that seemed to bellow from the depth of the earth,” Néstor Castiglione says in a review on the site Bachtrack.
Robinson’s aria (track 13 on the recording) comes in the second part of the symphony, a musical setting of Goethe’s epic poem Faust, in which he sings the part of Pater Profundus, literally Father of the Deep.
“It’s one of the most challenging solos ever written for bass,” Robinson says from his home in the Atlanta suburbs, where he lives with his wife and son, a high school junior. “You have to go up to high F sharp several times, and it’s lots of leaps and bounds and requires a virtuosic control of your instrument and you don’t get any mulligans, you’ve got to do it right now. I love the pressure, the intensity, the excitement of the moment, and I love being able to do it.