The Tucson Symphony Orchestra this weekend might break its own record for the number of performers packed onto the Tucson Music Hall stage when the orchestra mounts Berliozโs mammoth concert piece โThe Damnation of Faust.โ
The two performances are part of the closing weekend of the second annual Tucson Desert Song Festival.
There will be 116 choristers โ 77 from the TSO Chorus and another 39 from the UAโs Arizona Choir โ four guest soloists and 91 instrumentalists. Thatโs 212 people on the stage when you include conductor George Hanson.
โThis may be as many people as weโve ever had on stage before,โ said Hanson, the orchestraโs music director who predicted that the number will eclipse the double chorus that performed in Mahlerโs Symphony No. 2 in April 2009 or the expanded TSO Chorus used for Carl Orffโs โCarmina Buranaโ in 2007.
And it will make Tucson history; no professional orchestra โ and, as far as Hanson knows, no other Tucson organization โ has ever before attempted to mount Berliozโs โFaust,โ which does not come as much of a surprise to tenor William Burden, who will sing the role of Faust.
โIt does take a pretty big commitment on the part of a presenting company to do something as big as this in concert,โ said Burden, a critically acclaimed tenor who has sung the title role in Charles Gounodโs French opera โFaustโ but has never sung the Berlioz concert version. โThis is two concerts, and it is a big undertaking for two concerts in a short span of time.โ
Berlioz finished โFaustโ in 1845, 16 years after he first started working on the free-flowing oratorio based on Goetheโs dramatic poem โFaust.โ The workโs premiere in late 1846 was not a critical success and a third performance of it was canceled for lack of interest. It wasnโt until 1877 in Paris that the piece got its critical due and another 19 years before it found an audience in the United States, when the New York Metropolitan Opera premiered it in concert in 1896. The Met staged it as an opera a decade later, in 1906, then shelved it until 1996, when the renowned company revisited โFaustโ with a concert at Carnegie Hall and then a staged production in 2008.
The Berlioz is โexpensive, long and hard to market,โ explained Hanson. โThatโs the problem. The great thing about it is itโs absolutely gorgeous.โ
Hanson said it is rare to see an orchestra the size of Tucsonโs take on the โFaustโ mainly because of the number of musicians and vocalists it requires.
โThe problem is that you have to start out hiring singers that are unarguably world class, and thatโs not something that an orchestra at our budget level can do,โ said Hanson, who conducted Berliozโs โFaustโ with his former orchestra in Germany years ago. โYou have to have a very particular physical type of person, and they have to have a specific type of training and experience. And there frankly arenโt a lot of people in the world who can do it.โ
Burden agrees.
โBerlioz was a meticulous orchestral composer. He writes hugely sweeping, emotional music, and that requires a certain level of experience almost to endure as a performer,โ he said. โ(The orchestra) will be pushed to the edges of technical ability. Berlioz really calls upon everyone to head toward the extreme because everything gets huge to him, whether itโs incredibly quiet and painstakingly intimate or huge, huge moments. โฆ Those moments become gigantic both for the singers and the players.โ
