Tucson Symphony fills stage with big voices for behemoth Verdi

For a brief moment Friday night when the Tucson Symphony Orchestra was silent, Katie van Kooten sent her shimmering soprano to glorious heights.

It was one of those moments where you held your breath, waiting to see if the commercial was true and somewhere in the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall a glass was about to break.

It didn’t, but that didn’t stop many in the audience loosely filling the hall from holding their collective breath to see where that final high note would land.

Van Kooten was one of four superb guest soloists sharing the Music Hall stage with the orchestra and its 100-voice chorus for Verdi’s Requiem.

It was the first time the orchestra had performed Verdi’s behemoth oratorio since they did it in 2013 as the signature concert of the inaugural Tucson Desert Song Festival.

Friday’s performance — it repeats at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 24 — brought the Song Festival full circle in some ways.

The 2024 festival, which wraps up next weekend, has had several concerts that could be signature events, from tenor Michael Fabiano’s world premiere recital of Jimmy López Bellido’s “Quiet Poems” in February to Lawrence Brownlee‘s recital with Arizona Opera on March 13. But the Requiem stands out for its sheer vocal power.

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That was a central motivator of the festival’s creator Jack Forsythe, who was thinking about concerts like this when he imagined back in 2010 what the song festival would look like. He knew that if you brought the cream of the nation’s vocal crop to Tucson, it would resonate with audiences and artists alike.

That played out larger than life on the Music Hall stage Friday night. The powerful bass Morris Robinson, who summoned a soulful, nuanced tone from his 6-foot-2 linebacker-built frame, performed his part from memory without a score in his encore appearance in the Requiem; he was one of the soloists 11 years ago under the baton of then TSO Music Director George Hanson.

Friday was the second time we’ve seen van Kooten with the orchestra for a song festival event and the first time for the marvelous tenor Mario Chang, whose other festival appearance was playing Rodolfo in the Arizona Opera’s 2020 production of Puccini’s “La Boheme.” Friday marked mezzo Ronnita Miller’s festival and Tucson debuts as she showed off an impressively flexible range from a soulful lower register to a soaring high.

TSO Music Director José Luis Gomez coaxed a wonderful sound from the orchestra, from breathtakingly sobering and somber in the opening Kyrie to dramatic and exuberant in the Dies Irae, where trumpets punctuated Alana Wiesing’s ferocious timpani and Trevor Barroero’s pulsating drums.

Verdi approached the Requiem like he did his many operas, infusing it with moments of exuberance, sublime melodies and dramatic twists and turns, including the brassy fanfare that introduces the “Sanctus,” where van Kooten cries out to be delivered from eternal death when God comes on judgment day.

The soloists do the heavy lifting in the Requiem, but the TSO Chorus, under Director Marcela Molina, earned some of the biggest applause at the end of the night. They were terrific in going from quiet and delicate when they were backing the soloists to a sudden rush of intensity and considerably louder in the final passage of the second movement and in the Sanctus midway through the work.

Tickets for Sunday’s performance at Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave., are $14-$90 through tucsonsymphony.org or at the Music Hall.