The Experience of Carmina Burana: Four family members on stage!!

The following post is from chorus manager Amy Adams, who was onstage for Carmina Burana, alongside her three children, Margaret Boggs, William Boggs, and Jane Boggs. These are her words about what the experience was like:

I have been the chorus manager for the Eugene Symphony for many years. I have formed lasting friendships in the community of choral singers. They all enthusiastically sign up for a chance to perform large choral works with our wonderful orchestra and particularly to benefit from the vocal instruction of Sharon Paul, chorus director. At various points over the years when I was expecting each of my three children, I found myself standing with the second sopranos, "great with child" and facing down a row of french horn bells (two pregnancies I sang during Mahler concerts and one pregnancy I sang during a Beethoven concert).

This season, circumstances provided an irresistible opportunity to my family: an invitation by choral director Peter Robb (who prepares the childrens' chorus) to all three of my children to sing in the Symphony's performance of Carmina Burana. They all began working on the music in rehearsals at a local church, in a resonant, spacious sanctuary - and after each rehearsal I heard Margaret (age 8), William (age 10) and Jane (age 15) piping the strange and lovely little "Amor volat undique" in the car.

Nothing I can say can adequately convey the enormous impact this performance had on my family: the shattering proximity of percussion; Margaret's thrill of being introduced to the soprano; walking toward the stage within arms' reach of my elegant and poised teenager; the night we got home so late after dress rehearsal, but stood in the kitchen talking about "The Man With Four Drums" (timpanist Sean Wagoner) and the seriously impressive vocal soloists; the tidal wave of applause that included my three and myself and swept us up together in musical satisfaction and joy.

Thank you, Eugene Symphony, for giving us this memory to treasure all our lives!

-- Amy Adams, Chorus Manager for the Eugene Symphony

Eugene Symphony Executive Director Scott Freck's Thoughts on Carmina Burana

I’ve been looking forward to our April 18 performance of Carl Orff’s epic Carmina Burana all season, as it is one of the great spectacles in all of music, and an awful lot of fun to produce.  It has a little bit of everything – a big orchestra with interesting instrumentation, a full chorus of more than 150 singers, a children’s chorus, and three solo vocalists: a soprano, a tenor and a baritone.

These three soloists play particularly important roles in the arc of the piece as a whole, even though their “stage time” (so to speak) isn’t all that long.  Indeed, in the case of the tenor, there is a grand total of about four minutes of singing, but it’s weird and wonderful and utterly memorable.  More on that in a bit.

The baritone is called upon the most during the course of Carmina, and he has a half-dozen notable solos, including one called “Ego Sum Abbas” in which he sings that as the Abbot of Cockaigne, he will beat everybody gambling at dice games in the tavern after Vespers.  For this performance, our baritone is Jason McKinney, whom I know very well from six or so productions at my previous orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, where I hired him to sing everything from Holiday Pops concerts to a part in a Mozart opera to this very role in Carmina last May 2012. 

The soprano is next busiest, with four or five major moments mostly toward the end of the piece, including one that is truly jaw-dropping.  In “Dulcissime” just a few minutes before the end, she must leap in two notes from an A just above middle C to a high B, more than an octave away, all with no accompaniment to back her up…it’s like a high-wire act without a net.  Our soprano is Brenda Rae, who spends much of her year in Germany singing at the Frankfurt Opera.

Finally, right in the middle of the piece is the tenor’s big moment, “Olim lacus colueram” which depicts a swan being slowly roasted over a fire on a spit.  Yes, you guessed it, the tenor IS the swan, singing of how he used to live on lakes but now is about to be eaten.  Musically, it is somehow chilling and comic at the same time, but it requires a tenor with incredible vocal control and high range – his part reaches to a D an octave and a whole step above middle C, a place where only the bravest tenors dare visit.  Our intrepid soloist is Vale Rideout, who has an armful of opera credits and a live recording of Carmina with the New Jersey Symphony to his name.  We look forward to welcoming him and the other two guest soloists to Eugene!