First Two Weeks: Italy
The choirs spent their first two weeks in Italy, most of them in the small city of Lucca, the former home of Chatham Choir Director, Lorenzo Malfatti. Hamilton Choir director, James Fankhauser, expressed his appreciation for Malfatti’s arrangements to stay ten days in Lucca: “whereas most of our tours begin with one-night stands immediately upon our arrival,” he said, “we settled into a community for ten days of rehearsals and nearby concerts before hitting the road. Aside from the intense music-making, this brief sending down of roots was the most rewarding part of the five and a half weeks.” Fankhauser's reflections about the trip were published as part of a longer article, titled "Choir on the Continent," written by Hamilton student and manager for the tour, Eric Thorkilsen '73, and published in Hamilton's Winter 1973 Alumni Review.
In Lucca, the choirs performed their first five concerts. One of them, on June 12, was recorded. The reel-to-reel recording was recently preserved and made accessible through support from the Council on Independent Colleges. The Chatham University Archives presently holds five recordings of Chatham-Hamilton concerts.
Listen to the first reel of the Lucca concert below!
Despite the trip having taken 45 hours because a bomb threat delayed their takeoff from the JFK airport in New York, as well as “two three-hour wrong turns” on their bus ride from the airport in Milan to their destination in Lucca, the choirs had fun. In Lucca, according to Fankhauser, “one tenor was invited to run in a local track meet...and placed second in a 400-meter relay.”
In Italy, the singers took pleasure in eating gelato, which they found to be “just right for soothing a tired throat,” according to Thorkilsen. "On the night of June 9, in a shop just across from the piazza of the hotel, bass Gino Malarsky '73 consumed—some in one bite—five chocolate gelati cones in less than fifteen minutes, all to the thunderous applause of those Hamiltonians, Chathamians, and Luchese present." Is the image to the right of Gino Malarsky? Was the photograph taken in Lucca? It remains a mystery!
Other encounters with Italian cuisine were not as pleasurable. In Florence and Venice, the choirs first experienced “what was appropriately called ‘canal soup’—an appetizer consisting of pancakes drowning in pond water broth.” Thorkilsen remarked that the singers ate it constantly thereafter. Despite the questionable food, the concert in Venice “turned up a number of dignitaries," including “the director of the opera house, the British Consul General, and Count Cini (overseer and patron of the island of San Giorgio Maggiore where the concert was held)” according to Fankhauser.
