Collaborative 'Carmina Burana' highlight of SASO's 40th season

There’s something soul-lifting about that opening song of “Carmina Burana.”

When the timpani rumbles and the choir lifts its voice and exclaims “O for tune aaaaahhh!” you brace yourself for the full impact to come. The percussion quakes and growls, growing louder with every boom, and the voices seem to be coming on high, from somewhere other than the back of the stage.

“O Fortuna” is drama wrapped up in the two simple words of the title — the only words you can clearly understand throughout the two-and-a-half-minute song unless you’re fluent in Latin.

Sitting in the stillness of the Marana High School Auditorium last Friday night, you could hear a pin drop. No coughs, no ruffling candy wrappers, no quiet conversations to interrupt as the choir and orchestra students of Marana High School joined the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra and the Helios Ensemble choir for the first of five “Carmina Burana” concerts. The concert is a cornerstone of SASO’s 40th anniversary season.

SASO Music Director Linus Lerner marked the volunteer orchestra’s 30th anniversary season with the same piece. And now as back then, he is collaborating with community groups to pull off the magnitude of composer Carl Orff’s large-scale oratoria, a piece that calls for a children’s and adult’s choir, a full orchestra, and a trio of soloists.

In the 40th season iteration, Lerner tapped Marana, whose orchestra joined SASO on Friday and whose choir will perform in three of the group’s five concerts, including this weekend’s subscription concerts at Oro Valley’s St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church; and Rincon-University High School, whose chorus and orchestra performed two of the concerts — at Empire High School last Saturday and at Rincon-University on Wednesday.

The collaboration is a chance, Lerner said, to give the high-school musicians a shot at performing a big-scale work that they would never be able to pull off on their own.

And if Friday’s performance was any indication, the Marana student musicians in the orchestra and in the choir met the challenge with pretty terrific results.

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You didn’t have to squint hard to spot the Marana orchestra members and their director Rachel Vega among the SASO rank and file. But even if you closed your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to figure it out from hearing the combined efforts. The kids did a great job of following the veteran musicians’ lead to bring out the bombastic drama that dominates much of Orff’s score.

Marana Choir Director Sarah Ross, who sang in the adult choir, also had prepared her students well. They sang with confidence and mostly clear diction, nailing Orff’s challenging Germanic Latin pronunciation in lock step with the adults of Helios. If any of them was off, it went unnoticed by the audience that filled about a third of the auditorium.

Most of the cars packed into Marana’s parking lot Friday night belonged to the musicians — with their high school counterparts, there were nearly 170 people packed onto the Marana stage. The three soloists — Brazilian tenor Adriano Pinheiro, Mexico City soprano Liliana del Conde, and baritone Andrew Stuckey, a University of Arizona doctoral student — had to shimmy past a violist and violinist whose seats encroached in the narrow pathway to get to their center-stage spots.

Admittedly there were some acoustic hiccups with the Marana stage, which is not really designed for that many bodies and that big sound. It would have been easy for the orchestra to drown out the choir, pressed up against the back of the stage, but Lerner took care to find a balance. There was one or two points where it seemed the orchestra was too loud, but it was short-lived.

Here’s what you also can expect from this weekend’s concerts:

• The story: “Carmina Burana” is a lusty rhythmic romp with 23 songs that explore passion, pain, longing and drinking, all penned by 11th- and 12th-century monks and set to music by Orff in the 20th century. “O Fortuna” is the most famous of the songs, adapted in movies, television commercials, sports and video games. Trivia: It’s also the song playing as rocker Ozzy Osbourne goes on stage.
• The soloists: Wow does Lerner know how to pick ‘em. These are not merely vocalists; they are actors and each created these characters, from del Conde’s seductive maiden to Stuckey’s lovesick lad falling under her spell. We’ve seen del Conde with SASO several times in recent years, including most recently at SASO’s annual Mexican Independence Day concert in September. She is the total package. She has an amazing voice that gracefully scales every inch of her gorgeous range, from the impossibly high notes to the midrange alto. Several times on Friday, notes would quietly appear as if they were coming from somewhere other than her and then she would pick them up and carry them for what seemed an eternity, her smile never fading. Stuckey, a familiar voice on Tucson stages, carried the bulk of the solos with a rich, soft baritone. Pinheiro, who has performed with SASO a few times in recent years, had the smallest of the solo roles. But when he was in the spotlight, he showed off a vulnerably charming tenor.

The music: Orff’s score brims with bombastic highs from clanging and thundering percussion and moaning lows from the strings that Lerner had to balance with the voices, especially at Friday’s Marana concert when the choir was stuffed into the back end of the stage. With the stage setup there was a big risk that things could get muddied, but Lerner kept the orchestra’s volume in check with the choir so you could hear each clearly no matter where you were sitting in the auditorium.