BRATTLEBORO — “For our upcoming concert, we are pulling out all the stops,” says Hugh Keelan, music director of the Windham Orchestra. “With over 150 singers, 75 instrumentalists, and two soloists, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana may just be the biggest thing we have ever done.”
On April 8 and 9, under Keelan’s baton, the Windham Orchestra will be joined by the Blanche Moyse Chorale and singers from Brattleboro Union High School, Bellows Falls Union High School, Leland & Gray Union High School, and two soloists — soprano Kate Saik and tenor Cailin Marcel Manson — to present Carmina! A Concinnity of Choral Community Collaboration!
The centerpiece of these concerts is Carmina Burana, a scenic cantata Keelan calls “a raucous, lusty, joyful, terrifying, gloriously theatrical spectacle.”
Carmina! A Concinnity of Choral Community Collaboration! also features this year’s Windham Orchestra Concerto Competition winners.
The competition is open to serious instrumental and vocal music students in grades 9-12 who live or attend schools in Southern Vermont, Eastern New Hampshire, or Northern Massachusetts. Contestants can perform any concerto movement or other accompanied solo piece. The winner receives $200 and performs in concert with the Windham Orchestra.
Sungho Moon, this year’s first prize winner, will play Bach’s Cello Concerto in C-minor, third movement, allegretto. Moon is a ninth-grader at the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley, Mass. He began to study the cello at 5 when he was drawn to its deep sound. Moon, who studied cello with Jennifer Allen and Phil Helzer, is studying with Nicole Fizznoglia. In the summer, Moon studies with Hyunah Kim in Seoul.
The competition also singled out the Herron brothers with a special prize for creativity. At the upcoming Windham Orchestra concerts, Simon Herron, 16, will play a solo for marimba and orchestra composed by his brother, Felix, 18.
Keelan only learned of the existence of the marimba concerto and the two “incredibly talented” brothers six weeks ago.
“I am bowled over by the sheer talent and vitality of these young men,” Keelan says. “These youthful musicians make amazing modern music that combines animal vigor and high spirits. Felix has written ... a work full of youthful creativity that is impressive for a composer [of] any age. Simon performs it with two hands, using four mallets, and it is quite extraordinary.”
In 1937 Carl Orff composed the cantata Carmina Burana by setting to music 24 medieval poems about love, sex, religion, politics, and more. The poems were mostly rhymed lyrics from the medieval collection, “Carmina Burana,” which was written by wandering scholars and students and discovered in 1803 in a Benedictine monastery.
“Carmina Burana concerns the vicissitudes of fortune, and asks what is it to be human,” Keelan explains. “The work includes the love music, which is of a high quality, both youthful and spring-based, as well as a drinking song and many humorous episodes along the way. In a famous section, a goose on a greasy spit sings a sad song about his sorry fate to be eaten.
“When Orff discovered this set of medieval texts buried in a library in Bavaria, he felt compelled to bring them to life through music,” Keelan continues. “But rather than try to simulate an imitation of medieval music, or even a pastiche of sounds from many eras, he resolved simply to translate them for the modern world through visual elements and animal means. Orff does not use complexity or high intellect in this work, and transforms the texts in a non-mystic way, but it all works.”
The piece is book-ended in identical choruses.
“Audiences will have a shock of recognition when they hear this,” Keelan says.
This chorus is one of the very few excerpts from 20th century classical music to become part of popular culture. It has appeared in numerous films and television commercials, setting the mood for dramatic or cataclysmic situations.
Keelan is going to perform Carmina Burana in its entirety.
“That means we had to draw on the resources of a lot of musical organizations in our area, from students to adult chorus members, instrumentalists, as well as our two soloists: soprano Saik and tenor Manson,” he explains.
With so many forces involved, not surprisingly, Keelan admits that there are difficulties in putting on Carmina Burana.
“Yet the textures of the music are simple, which plays out very easily,” he says. “The music, either really loud or soft, has a direct emotionality which the work completely embraces.”
Keelan obviously has great affection for Carmina Burana, which sometimes is written off by classical snobs as a middle-brow piece of music.
"Carmina Burana is a really wonderful work, encompassing rustic serenity, the passions of the senses, cosmic awe, and an unsurpassed aliveness in delivering the experience of being human,” Keelan says.