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!
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