Robert Bass has been Music Director of the world renowned Collegiate Chorale since 1980 and celebrated his 25th anniversary in the 2004-05 season. Mr. Bass is the sixth Music Director in The Chorale's 63-year history, and his tenure follows the distinguished leadership of his predecessors which include Richard Westenburg and legendary founder Robert Shaw. The 2004-05 season also marked the 25th anniversary of Mr. Bass' conducting debut in Carnegie Hall, where he has since conducted a wide range of repertoire including choral works and commissions. He has introduced annual opera-in-concert performances which have become a highlight of each Carnegie Hall and New York concert season. Two of his performances at Carnegie Hall with The Chorale have since become critically acclaimed recordings: the New York premiere of Strauss' Friedenstag (KOCH, 1991) which reached the top 25 on classical Billboard charts; and Beethoven's cantatas Der glorreiche Augenblick and Auf die Erhebung Leopold des Zwieten zur Kaiserwürde with sopranos Deborah Voigt and Elizabeth Futral, and the Orchestra of St. Luke's (KOCH, 1994). Singers who made their Carnegie Hall debuts under Mr. Bass' baton include David Daniels, Lauren Flanigan, Maria Guleghina and Salvatore Licitra.
In recent years Mr. Bass has led The Collegiate Chorale to unprecedented growth both institutionally and artistically. He has solidified The Chorale's relationship with The Orchestra of St. Luke's, which now appears in all Carnegie Hall concerts. Mr. Bass founded The Collegiate Chorale Singers, a chamber group of professional choral singers which performs an annual concert dedicated to American music. In addition, he combines the professional choral singers with the non-professional choral singers in the 150-voice Collegiate Chorale. He instituted The Chorale's successful Side-by-Side education program, which allows talented high school singers to join The Chorale in a Carnegie Hall concert. In the summer of 2001, The Chorale made its first European tour with Mr. Bass, performing in Prague and Vienna. That same summer NPR's World of Opera broadcast The Chorale's Carnegie Hall performance of Verdi's Macbeth, and followed up the next year with their performance of Weber's Oberon. In 2005, The Collegiate Chorale and Robert Bass were invited by James Levine to perform the Verdi Requiem at the prestigious Verbier Festival in Switzerland. Mr. Bass skillfully effected the transition from a volunteer membership board to a professional board under whose leadership The Chorale's budget now exceeds that of any choral group of its kind in New York and is in fact one of the largest of any chorus in the nation.
Mr. Bass was one of the conductors of the Richard Tucker Foundation's Fifteenth Gala Concert at Avery Fisher Hall (televised nationally on PBS) conducting the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Renée Fleming. He has appeared as a guest conductor with the New York City Opera Company, Columbus Symphony Orchestra, the Nebraska Chamber Orchestra, and the Concert Association of Greater Miami. At Carnegie Hall, Mr. Bass led performances of Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem, the Verdi Requiem, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Berlioz Requiem, Rossini's Stabat Mater, the Mozart Requiem, the Fauré Requiem, Bach's Mass in B Minor, and Handel's Messiah, among others. Mr. Bass was privileged to appear with Marian Anderson in a series of benefit performances for the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Mr. Bass is a frequent judge of the Metropolitan Opera Auditions and is the Artistic Director of the Olga Forrai Foundation which supports the careers of young singers and young conductors.
A Maestro Conducting With Heart ... a New One
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Tonight Robert Bass will make a conducting debut of sorts, when the Collegiate Chorale performs Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.
The conductor Robert Bass, in rehearsal with the Collegiate Chorale.
Mr. Bass, 53, has been thechorale’s music director since 1980 and is no stranger to the stage. But his new heart is. This will be his first performance since a heart transplant four months ago and his only gig before a stem-cell transplant next month.
These are the latest steps in a medical odyssey that has fundamentally altered both his life and his approach to conducting, Mr. Bass said, making him more vulnerable and responsive. His rapport with his singers was evident at a recent rehearsal at Riverside Church, where he conducted Brahms’s deeply humanistic “German Requiem” with the intensity of someone who newly appreciated its themes of compassion and loss.
Mr. Bass’s physical problems began late last year. He remembers being out of breath and tired, struggling to make it up the subway stairs. He was gaining weight.
“I conducted the Bach Christmas Oratorio at Carnegie Hall,” he said, “and I can remember feeling very out of sorts but thinking it was holiday time, and we have two kids, and it’s always busy, and I’m just stressed out and stuff.”
Mr. Bass, who had passed a stress test with flying colors in August, wasn’t getting better, despite taking it easy after the Dec. 12 performance. So he went to see his doctor in early January. A chest X-ray was ordered and a cardiologist consulted, and Mr. Bass was quickly admitted to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. Heart failure was diagnosed and he was treated in the intensive care unit. His body continued to falter over the next two weeks. He could walk less and less.
“I was turning shades of green,” he said with a laugh during a recent interview in his Upper West Side apartment, where he was flanked by a Bechstein piano and his 7-year-old son. “And there was this one doctor who said: ‘You know, there’s this rare disease called amyloidosis. It could be that.’ ”
It was. Throughout his tenure at the chorale, Mr. Bass has sought out musical rarities. Now a medical one had found him.
Amyloidosis comprises a category of diseases in which abnormal proteins are deposited in the body’s organs or tissue, like the heart, kidneys, liver and nervous system. The protein fibrils build up, eventually causing failure. Specific types of amyloidosis are defined by the source of the protein, and Mr. Bass developed the most common type, primary systemic amyloidosis, which originates in cells in the bone marrow.
The cause is unknown, and until recently there was no cure. Thedisease affects about eight people in a million, manifesting itself through a variety of symptoms and over widely varying time periods.
Amyloidosis is often described as a chameleon disease “because so many of the symptoms are the same as other diseases,” said Mary E. O’Donnell, president of the Amyloidosis Research Foundation, “which is why a patient might be diagnosed with congestive heart failure. They’re treating the patient for that, and it happens to be cardiac amyloidosis, so the treatments are doing literally nothing, and the heart is just getting worse and worse and worse.”
After the initial bad luck of contracting the disease, Mr. Bass’s luck improved. He encountered a doctor who recognized that he might have amyloidosis and was able to point him to the cardiac transplant program at the Columbia-Presbyterian Center of NewYork Presbyterian Hospital, where his condition was diagnosed and he was cleared for a heart transplant.
Amazingly, he waited less than two months for a new heart because he was the only candidate who fit the relatively rare blood type and body size of the donor, a healthy 17-year-old. He has had complications but no rejection, and the disease has not spread to other parts of his body.
Mr. Bass is scheduled for a stem-cell transplant and chemotherapy treatment next month as part of a clinical trial at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Raymond L. Comenzo, the director of the hospital’s cytotherapy laboratory, is one of about 20 doctors in the United States on the cutting edge of amyloidosis research.
Stem-cell transplants, first used to treat amyloidosis in 1994, were a major breakthrough against a disease that had been fatal for more than 95 percent of patients. If all goes well, Mr. Bass will effectively be cured.
“There are three responses,” Dr. Comenzo said: “no response; partial response, where about 50 percent or more of the abnormal protein is eliminated; and complete response, where you cannot detect the abnormal protein.” Some patients, he noted, have been in full remission for more than a dozen years. Doctors will know in about three months whether the treatment has worked for Mr. Bass; if not, he will receive drug therapy.
“In my business,” Mr. Bass said of his doctors, “you’d call them virtuosi.”
“We think that we are in the age of instant communication and that the information is up to date,” Mr. Bass added, recalling his horror when he researched amyloidosis online. “I would like people to know that you can kick it. It’s just not necessary that anyone be misdiagnosed anymore.”
Mr. Bass plans to organize Collegiate Chorale performances to help raise awareness of the condition after he completes his next round of treatment. For now he is savoring his return to performing.
“Having a new heart has changed everything.” he said. “I’ve just begun rehearsing again, and all of the sensations, whether they be as a musician or as a person — everything is different. There’s a lot to discover, and a lot of uncertainty at the same time.”
Mr. Bass has long relished the unknowns in picking up a rare score. Now, he said, he is trying to ride out the medical uncertainties and hoping that his luck will hold.
“We’ll find out,” he said with a feisty chuckle. “I’m in the middle.”
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