The stage will be pretty packed this weekend when the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus joins the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra and its new chorus for John Rutter’s “Mass of the Children.”
“We put the chorus together specifically for this event,” said Tim Secomb, SASO’s principal violist and a member of the Governing Board. “I think we’ve reached the point where we would like to have a group of singers to call on when necessary to do these kinds of pieces.”
The Southern Arizona Symphony Chorus consists of 26 Tucson singers and a dozen vocalists from Mexico who took part in the inaugural Oaxaca Opera Festival in August. Linus Lerner, SASO’s music director, is the festival’s artistic director and founder, and SASO was the orchestra for the event.
“This is a very elaborate production we’re doing here,” Secomb said.
The performance also will include soloists Deborah Faustino, a Brazilian soprano; and baritone Seth Kershisnik, a University of Arizona doctoral student.
The production is not going be nearly as big as when SASO performed Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” with a total of 240 vocalists and instrumentalists in November 2009. But it will mark the first time in years — if not the first time in the 34-year history of the orchestra — that it will perform a program four times. The orchestra normally performs two concerts of each program — one in SaddleBrooke and the second in Oro Valley. The orchestra will take the concert to Green Valley tonight and perform it Friday at St. Augustine Cathedral downtown.
“We are trying to find ways to broaden our geographical spread. This is an effort to kind of test the waters of doing things downtown and in Green Valley,” Secomb said.
Also during the concerts, Korean violinist Edwin E. Soo Kim will solo on Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.
