O Fortuna! Nashville Ballet and Nashville Symphony Chorus, photo by Marianne Leach

MISSOURI ARTS COUNCIL ▪ OCTOBER 2012

Dance and Music Turn Fate’s Wheel in Carmina Burana by Barbara MacRobie Carl Orff had no idea in 1934, when he decided to set two dozen obscure medieval poems to music, that he was creating a classical rock star. Nor could he have dreamed that the opening movement of his work would provide the soundtrack for Ozzy Osbourne concerts, New England Patriots games, and commercials for York Peppermint Patties, Capital One credit cards, and Gatorade. But Orff’s Carmina Burana for multiple choruses, soloists, and orchestra has become one of the most popular pieces of music ever written. The very way that the thunderous shouts and hissing whispers of O Fortuna have saturated popular culture is a testament to the music’s visceral appeal. Says Charles Bruffy, artistic director of the Kansas City Symphony Chorus, “There’s a magnetic hysteria about those guttural rhythms that just gets people to their core.” Charles Bruffy is one of the Missouri artists who are creating what has turned out to be a mini-festival of Carmina Burana during the 2012-2013 performing arts season. Over the next five months, there are three very different live performances of Orff’s masterwork: Kansas City Ballet in October, Kansas City Symphony in November, and Dance St. Louis with Nashville Ballet in February. Furthermore, in the past few years Carmina Burana has been performed in Missouri three other times, each with a unique twist. This past February, the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance turned to an arrangement for wind ensemble to partner choreography by Paula Weber. The St. Louis Symphony and Chorus rocked Powell Hall in 2011 with Orff’s original full-throttle orchestration. And in 2009, the Columbia Chorale added the nearly 3,400 pipes of the organ of Columbia’s Missouri United Methodist Church to an arrangement Orff had made for percussion and two pianos. What does it take to put on such an ambitious program? What makes Carmina Burana such a perennial hit? We talked with more than a dozen choreographers, conductors, chorus directors, and performers to find out. But first, we had to travel back in time.

Street poets and the Empress of the World

Carmina Burana’s journey to Missouri started five thousand miles away and a thousand years ago with a bawdy band of vagabond poets nicknamed the Goliards—“big mouths.” Students and young clerics, they roamed the universities of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, singing of drinking, gambling, springtime, love, and lust. But even while they lauded these earthly joys, the poets mourned how fragile they were. How often was all happiness obliterated in an instant by the whims of fate—personified by the goddess Fortuna and her relentlessly turning wheel. Fortuna was of ancient Roman birth, but she still had a powerful hold on people’s imaginations in the Christian Middle Ages. “O Fortune, changeable as the moon, ever waxing, ever waning…monstrous and empty.” Sometime around 1230, somebody wrote down a few hundred Goliard poems on leaves of parchment. About 100 years later, those pages along with eight added illustrations were bound into a book. Somehow the book wound up in the library of Benediktbeuern, a Benedictine monastery in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. And there it sat, for hundreds of years. In a twist typical of Lady Fortune, if it hadn’t been for the French Revolution, Missourians would not be able to experience Orff’s masterwork because he would never have written it. The turning point in the events that brought the poetry into his hands occurred in 1803, when under pressure from France, whose armies had been trampling the armies of the many German states for a decade, Benediktbeuern and thousands of other monasteries fell victim to “secularization.” The German governments gave or sold the monks’ lands to local bigwigs and carted off their treasures. Most of the monastery libraries of Bavaria wound up in the Court Library in the capital city of Munich. It was while Court curator Johann Andreas Schmeller was

cataloguing the looted manuscripts that he found the book he dubbed the Codex Buranus. He published it in 1847, complete with the medieval illuminations, giving it the Latin name Carmina Burana—“Songs from Beuern.” Flash forward 87 years. On Holy Thursday 1934, Munich composer and pioneering music educator Carl Orff started reading a copy of Schmeller’s 1847 edition that he had bought from a rare book dealer. He was instantly enthralled. “Right when I opened it, on the very first page,” he recalled, “I found the long-famous illustration of ‘Fortune with the Wheel,’ and under it the lines: O Fortuna velut Luna statu variabilis…The picture and the words seized hold of me… A new work, a stage work with choruses for singing and dancing, simply following the pictures and text, sprang to life immediately in my mind.” That very day Orff sketched out his music for O Fortuna. After a sleepless night in which the poems refused to leave him alone, he set another. “I mourn the blows of Fortune with flowing eyes, because her gifts she has treacherously taken back from me.” With these two poems he had completed his cantata’s first section, which he would name Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi—Fortune, Empress of the World.

Three years later, on June 8, 1937 at the Frankfurt Opera, Carmina Burana had its world premiere.

1467, detail of Fortune’s wheel from On the Fates of Famous Men by Boccaccio

The front page of the Carmina Burana manuscript that so captivated Carl Orff: Fortuna reigns within her wheel

Stereophonic Spectacular | Kansas City Ballet Kansas City Ballet, artistic director, William Whitener Choreography by Toni Pimble Conducted by Ramona Pansegrau Kansas City Symphony, music director, Michael Stern Kansas City Symphony Chorus, artistic director, Charles Bruffy Singers from the Liberty High School Vocal Music Program, director, Dr. Rika Heruth Soloists Sarah Tannehill, Chris Carr, and Casey Finnegan October 12-14; October 19-21 Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, Muriel Kauffman Theatre From the moment the idea for Carmina Burana sprang into Orff’s mind, he planned the work to be staged as total theater in what he called Theatrum Mundi, in which music, words, and movement combined to produce an overwhelming effect. That is exactly what will happen in the first of the 2012-2013 Missouri performances. Kansas City Ballet opens its second season in the spectacular new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts with a production new to the ballet company and to the city, with choreography by Toni Pimble, artistic director of Eugene Ballet in Eugene, Oregon. “Toni had done a beautiful piece for us in 2010 called Concerto Grosso—in fact we’re bringing it back this March,” said Artistic Director William Whitener. “I saw Toni’s version of Carmina Burana on DVD and determined it would be the right scale for our new theater.” In 1996, 1998, and 2002, Kansas City Ballet had performed a more intimate Carmina Burana, created by Paula Weber, chair of the dance division of the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music and Dance. “Carmina Burana has a variety of choreographies; there isn’t a definitive version,” William Whitener said. Going all out presents special musical challenges. To a full orchestral complement of strings, woodwinds, and brass, Orff adds two pianos, a celesta, and a vast array of percussion including several kettledrums, a bass drum, a snare drum, a gong, a ratchet, a xylophone, three glockenspiels, and even more. Vocally, he calls for a large mixed choir of women and men, a smaller mixed choir of women and men, a children’s choir, and three soloists. Even with just with the instruments, “It’s a little snug there in the pit!” said Ramona Pansegrau, Kansas City music director. So where to put all those singers? Toni Pimble’s choreography calls for 24 choristers to be onstage in costume and to interact with the dancers. For the rest, Ramona thought of a way to use the architecture of the Muriel Kauffman Theatre to create “an amazing sense of antiphonal stereophonic sound.” The Kauffman Theatre, one of the two major performing halls within the multi-part Kauffman Center, is shaped like a horseshoe. The stage, framed by a proscenium arch, and the orchestra pit run horizontally across the horseshoe’s open end. Flanking the stage on each side are three tiers of box seats. That is where Ramona wanted to place the chorus.

Muriel Kauffman Theatre; photo by Tim Hursley

From a business aspect, this was tricky. The boxes are owned by individual donors and companies, and are not part of Kansas City’s seating inventory. “We had a long discussion with the theater. The Kauffman was kind enough to block them off for our use,” Ramona told us. “So we’re stacking the chorus three stories high on each side of the stage,” she said. “With different sounds coming from different places, I’m hoping it’s an absolutely stupendous effect!” For the children’s chorus, the Kansas City Symphony Chorus will be joined by young women from Liberty High School. “We have two casts of about 20 voices each, which is great because it gives more gals the chance to perform,” said Rika Heruth, Liberty’s director of choirs. Conducting for dancers is different from conducting only for music, Ramona said. “I enjoy it so much to use the music the way it’s intended to be heard, yet to be able to adapt it to the needs of the dancers so they can perform to their fullest capability,” she said. “Also, Toni choreographed with specific tempos in mind, so I have to stay with her vision.” Toni Pimble spent three weeks in August teaching the Kansas City Ballet dancers her work, which she had originally created in 1992 for her Eugene Ballet. “I videotape all my ballets and work off the video, because I don’t remember every single step myself,” she told us. “It’s great for the dancers, too, because they’re looking at the original cast and how they performed it. I’ve changed some things, though, to make it work for the Kansas City Ballet dancers because all dancers are different. There’s always some finessing that goes on.” Toni said that although the movement quality of her choreography was very contemporary, dramatically she followed the structure of the five scenes that Orff built into his work: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, Primo Vere (“In Spring,” which includes Uf dem Anger, “On the Green”), In Taberna (“In the Tavern”), Cour

d’Amours (“The Court of Love”), and the turn of the wheel back to O Fortuna: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi. “For ‘In Spring,’ I use the dancers almost like creatures coming out of the earth…the longing one feels in the springtime, the desire to mate. Then it becomes more human. There’s a medieval village dance. For just the ladies, I do a little bath scene. In the tavern scene, the men onstage are sitting at tables drinking and gambling. It’s very energetic and lively—it’s a lot of fun for the guys to perform! “The court of love is more formal, but still very romantic and full of sensual tension. Then it comes full circle to O Fortuna. “I think so many choreographers have loved doing the piece because it’s so rhythmically interesting,” Toni said. “The challenge is there are many repetitions, because all the music is songs and there are many verses. You need to make each verse different and interesting but still connected to the whole.” Springtime, from the original manuscript

Josh Spell & Travis Guerin in Carmina Burana rehearsal; photo by KCBalletMedia

Kansas City audiences are fortunate in 2012 to be able to experience two choreographers’ visions. Paula Weber mounted her version on her students on February 12—making another circle, as she had originally created her work for her students in 1994 before revising it for Kansas City Ballet in 1996. “The version I did on our kids in February was the same I did for Kansas City Ballet, and they performed really well considering the difficulty,” Paula said. The UMKC students also performed at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, but in a different hall. Unlike the Muriel Kauffman Theatre, which is the performance home not only of Kansas City Ballet but of the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Helzberg Hall is designed primarily for instrumental and vocal music. There is no proscenium arch and no stage curtain, and the stage extends into the audience in the egg-shaped auditorium. Behind the stage are the pipe organ and the rows of seats that make up the choral loft. “The choir was up in the choral loft, but the orchestra and the soloists were on the stage floor with the dancers,” said Paula. “It sounded fabulous. Helzberg is an incredibly gorgeous hall.” The orchestra was the Conservatory Wind Symphony—brass, woodwinds, and percussion. They played an arrangement of Carmina Burana written in 1994 by Spanish composer Juan Vicente Mas Quiles, where he replaced the string parts with woodwinds but kept the rest of the orchestration including the two pianos. For Paula’s choreography she created a story of flirtations, courtships, betrayals, and reconciliations. “The music is incredibly powerful,” she said. “Yes, the O Fortuna moment is special because it starts and ends the piece, and of course you hear it in commercials and movies so everyone knows it. But when you listen to all the other music, there’s not a piece in Carmina Burana that isn’t significant.” See previews of Kansas City Ballet’s Carmina Burana ▪ The company’s YouTube site features a teaser trailer, an interview with Toni Pimble including footage of rehearsals, and interviews with principal dancers.

Magical Images of the Mind | Kansas City Symphony Kansas City Symphony, music director, Michael Stern Conducted by Nicholas McGegan Kansas City Symphony Chorus, artistic director, Charles Bruffy Soloists Cyndia Sieden, Marc Molomot, and Michael Kelly November 16-18 Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, Helzberg Hall A month after the Kansas City Symphony and Chorus perform with Kansas City Ballet, they move out of the orchestra pit and boxes of the Kauffman Theatre onto the stage and choral loft of Helzberg Hall to put the music of Carmina Burana in uncontested pride of place.

L to R: UMKC dancers Brittany Dusky, David Cross, Branson Bice & Megan Squires, Conservatory Choirs and Wind Symphony behind them; photo by Mike Strong

“I’m intrigued about the difference,” said Charles Bruffy, who is preparing the chorus for both the Kansas City Ballet program and the Kansas City Symphony’s own program. “When you are watching the activity of the stage and absorbing the music at the same time, your perception of the work is more prescribed. With only the sound of the music, people can remain open to wherever and whatever their mind and spirit take them.” Orff left this possibility wide open in the subtitle he gave his work: Cantiones profanae, cantoribus et choris cantandae, comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis—“Profane songs for singers and choruses accompanied by instruments and magical images.” “It’s like a radio play—you can use your own imagination to see how it might look in your mind’s eye,” said Nicholas McGegan, who is guest conducting the Kansas City Symphony performances. Carmina Burana is one of many scores originally written for dance where the music is so strong that it has gained an independent life in the concert hall—such as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Prokofiev’s suites from Romeo and Juliet. “Carmina Burana has a really clear sense of melody with tap-your-feet rhythm,” said David Robertson, music director of the St. Louis Symphony, who conducted Carmina Burana as the season finale May 5-7, 2011. “Orff stayed away from counterpoint, where different lines of music are going their various ways, in a way that connects up with folk songs and lots of kinds of popular music—dance music, pop tunes, campground songs, nursery songs.”

The music is so accessible that Orff’s skill is easy to miss, said James Richards, professor of music and interim dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication, University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is conducting the Dance St. Louis performances in February. “As a work of art, Carmina Burana is a finely thought-out and crafted piece,” he said. David Robertson praised Orff’s deliberate craftsmanship as well. “All the pauses, all the tempos, that Orff asks for need to be carefully observed,” he said. “Otherwise you get lots of nice moments but the overall feeling of the piece does not have this extraordinary circular arc.”

The music even makes an impact even when shorn of its orchestra. In 1956, so that more people could perform his work, Orff approved an arrangement by Wilhelm Kilmayer that reduced the instrumentation to percussion and two pianos. This version was performed on November 14, 2009, by the Columbia Chorale at Missouri United Methodist Church, conducted by Alex Innecco. (In 2011 Innecco returned to his native Brazil; the Chorale is now directed by Dr. Marci Major.) The Chorale made one splendid addition to Kilmayer’s arrangement: the church’s mammoth 1930 E.M. Skinner pipe organ.

Kansas City Symphony in Helzberg Hall; photo by Chris Lee

St. Louis Symphony; photo by Scott Ferguson

Cheryl Brewer, principal secretary at Blue Ridge Elementary, has been singing as an alto with the Columbia Chorale for 20 years, and she remembers “it was a big sound—majestic—magnificent!” Creating the organ part was up to Rochelle Parker, M.D., a hospitalist in internal medicine at University Hospital and the associate organist at the church. She followed the vocal and piano score—and improvised.

“I listened to a recording of Carmina Burana and tried to duplicate the orchestra sounds,” she said. “The capabilities of that organ go from barely audible to the full power with the 32-foot pedal stops.” That echoes James Richards’ comments about Orff’s use of the powers at his command. “While the musical forces

may be huge, Orff’s emphasis is as much on the variety as on the grandeur,” he said. “Large orchestras do not always play loudly. The sound can be robust, but the bigger value is that there are all these different colors to combine in so many ways. There may be 70 people sitting in the pit but only six playing. Then a few pages later, everyone is playing all-out.” When that explosion of sound does happen, there’s nothing like it. “Nothing prepares you for the overwhelming force of that many musicians,” said David Robertson. “The closest anyone comes is a wall of amplifiers at a rock concert—and it beats that.”

Romantic and Spiritual Journey | Dance St. Louis Dance St. Louis and University of Missouri-St. Louis Dance St. Louis artistic & executive director, Michael Uthoff Nashville Ballet, artistic director and choreographer, Paul Vasterling MADCO, artistic director, Stacy West UMSL University Orchestra, conductor, Dr. James Richards UMSL University Singers, director of choral studies, Dr. Jim Henry Bach Society of St. Louis, music director, Dennis Sparger St. Louis Children’s Choirs, artistic director, Barbara Berner Soloists Stella Markou, Tim Waurick, and Jeffrey Heyl Conducted by Dr. James Richards February 21-24 Touhill Center for the Performing Arts, Anheuser-Busch Performance Hall Michael Uthoff had wanted to mount Carmina Burana ever since he took up the reins of dance presenting organization Dance St. Louis six years ago. His original dream was to restore the choreography created by his father, Ernest Uthoff, which he had already presented when he directed Hartford Ballet and Ballet Arizona. The musicians would be from the University of Missouri-St. Louis; the dancers would be from St. Louis-area dance companies. But a destructive flood at the warehouse where the sets and costumes were stored put an end to those plans. “The restaging would have been prohibitively expensive,” Michael said.

Columbia Chorale at Missouri United Methodist Church with the Skinner organ; photo by Joel Anderson

By that time, however, the UMSL musical team was so excited about the project that he decided to look for a pre-existing dance production. “It wasn’t easy,” Michael remembers, “because of course I was spoiled by what my dad had done. When I encountered Carmina Burana in Nashville, though, I was delighted. Paul Vasterling deals with the work in a far more abstract way than my father, but he keeps a very dramatic process, and he captures the grandeur of the piece.”

The artistic director of Nashville Ballet since 1998, Paul Vasterling made his Carmina Burana in 2009 and revived the popular production in 2011. “The music is lovely and fun,” he said. “It has this innate simplicity—dance can wind around it. “I started to look at the history of the Codex and where the source material for the words came from. That brought me back to this idea of the original documents. I started to think about what parchment is—how because it’s made of animal hide it can be written on and erased several times. My imagination was that this Carmina Burana represents an idea of human development. The music takes you on this journey “There’s a redemption at the end. Many of my ballets are about redemption—many choreographers have a couple of themes they go back to during their careers. The court of love becomes about heaven. There’s this gorgeous poem, In trutina (‘in my mind’s wavering balance’), about the balance we find in a romantic love relationship. There is a final pas de deux that deals with the moment of balance in the context of all this stuff we’ve been through—and then we go back to the circle, the

circle of life, back to the wheel, back to the beginning.” The chorus is on stage with the dancers, ranged on risers behind them. “The symphony is in front of us. So it’s a shared experience. There’s a surround of the dance; it’s smack in the middle. It feels like a ritual, and that’s perfect for this ballet.” The performances open with Michael Uthoff’s own Bach Cantata #10 performed by MADCO, the professional dance company in residence at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. “It’s great for us to be working on projects with dancers from somewhere else,” said MADCO Artistic Director Stacy West. “It makes us better artists to have collaborations with people we’re not used to.” All the stops are being pulled out to make the event a highlight of Dance St. Louis’ season and one of the premier events in the campus’ 50th anniversary. The student chorus is being augmented by the St. Louis Children’s Choirs and the Bach Society, St. Louis’ oldest continuous choral society. “We are drawing on our faculty to be the principal players in the orchestra,” said James Richards. And for the first time in the 10-year history of the Touhill, the full orchestra pit is being used. “We have never actually had the orchestra pit all the way open because the size it is now accommodates most orchestras of about 50 pieces,” said Jason Stahr, the Touhill’s director of operations and stage services. “We have to pull out the first two rows of seats. The seats are sitting on platforms that are removable, but in the whole 10 years we’ve been here, those platforms have never been touched. Nobody until now has pushed the envelope!”

Sadie Bo Harris & Jon Upleger in balance, costumes evoking parchment; photo by Marianne Leach

Monica Alunday & Jason Flodder, MADCO , in Bach Cantata #10; photo by Steve Truesdell

How to roast a swan

Orff’s music has the power to elicit completely different but equally compelling responses from choreographers. For instance, In Taberna begins not with a jolly drinking song but a chilling lament. A solo tenor, singing painfully high in his range, is the voice of a dead swan roasting on a spit. The swan cries: “Olim lacus colueram…Once I lived on lakes; once I was beautiful. Now I am black and roasting fiercely. I cannot fly—I see bared teeth!” The three choreographers to whom we talked roast their swan in distinctive ways. Paul Vasterling sees this scene, he says, as “a vision of hell.” It is the low point on the spiritual journey of his ballet. His white-clad ballerina is whipped about by flames made of painted silk. Toni Pimble puts her ballerina literally on a spit. “She’s wearing a belt that is suspended from this huge spit, so she goes through all these contortions while the men of the onstage chorus are sitting at tables eating and drinking. It’s a lot of fun! Though the role requires a really good inner ear. You can’t be like me and get seasick. I wanted the dancer to be comfortable, so I asked the ladies to audition for the role only if they

wanted to. They all tried out! We had one who could manage it. Jill Marlow is great—she handles all the spinning very well.” Paula Weber has no literal swan. Instead, she stages a scene of manipulation and seduction, as a woman toys with man after man and then drops them. “She eats them up,” Paula said, “and spits them out.” Paula is captivated by the idea that the manuscript lay hidden from the rest of the world for hundreds of years in a monastery, so she begins her O Fortuna with the monks. “Right there before our eyes we see the poems come to life in the minds of the monks,” she said. The wheel is subtly referenced by the circular patterns of the monks’ movements. Toni Pimble, on the other hand, has a physical wheel, “with a man extended on it, kind of like the DaVinci drawing.” And for Paul Vasterling, Fortuna herself makes it onstage, with

her wheel symbolized by her enormous skirt. Words for the music

The poems of Carmina Burana are written in medieval Latin, Middle High German, and Old French. So one of the first decisions for any performance is to decide how the words should be pronounced. “One of the ways we think we can tell how an old language was pronounced is by looking at the sounds the poets rhymed that don’t rhyme any more in the modern languages,” said Dr. Dale Simpson, head of the English department at Southern Missouri State University in Joplin, who specializes in medieval literature and linguistics.

Alexandra Meister, Nashville Ballet; photo by Heather Thorne

Jill Marlow, Kansas City Ballet; photo by KCBalletMedia

Spelling is also a clue, especially because it was not standardized during the Middle Ages. “Latin was used very consistently into modern times, and the spelling reflects changes in pronunciation over time,” said Dr. Johanna Kramer, assistant professor at University of Missouri-Columbia, whose focus is medieval and Renaissance studies. “Scribes will actually write words based on how they pronounced them.” A Missouri resource for the past 20 years is the pronunciation guide created for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra by language coach Lola Rand in preparation for their 1994 recording. “She did a phonetic transcription of what she felt was historically accurate, and that’s what we are still using,” said Amy Kaiser, director of the St. Louis Symphony Chorus since 1995. Amy has shared her materials with Dr. Jim Henry, director of UMSL’s University Singers, for the Dance St. Louis performances. The availability of genuine scholarship published on the internet has been an invaluable resource, said Charles Bruffy. Like the St. Louis Symphony and UMSL singers, his Kansas City Symphony Chorus will use Germanic pronunciation of the Latin rather than modern Church Latin. The Dance St. Louis team faces the additional challenge of three choirs who will not rehearse together until the week of the performances. Both Dennis Sparger, music director of the Bach Society, and Barbara Berner, artistic director of the St. Louis Children’s Choirs (which also sang for the St. Louis Symphony performances), are working closely with Jim Henry to ensure that everyone will be on the same page. “Jim and I sat down together for two hours and went through the score measure by measure to double-check on pronunciation, phrasing, where we breathe and where we don’t,” said Dennis Sparger. All three 2012-13 performances are providing the complete lyrics in the original languages and English. “We hope the audience will get there early enough to peruse the lyrics and the translation so they get a rough idea of what each song is about,” said Jim Henry. “But it’s not critical, because the way that Orff set the actual sounds of the words just works aurally independent of the actual meaning of the text. The language is the percussion of the piece.” What to perform before the wheel turns?

At about one hour in length, Carmina Burana is not a full concert program, so other works must be chosen that will create a harmonious and illuminating experience. For the St. Louis Symphony’s 2011 performance, David Robertson played a bold stroke: the world premiere of Symphony No. 3 by American composer Christopher Rouse. The new work was a match for Orff on Carmina Burana’s own terms—as Chuck Lavazzi of KDHX-FM wrote, “an aggressive mix of wild cacophony and surprising lyricism.” Audiences gave the new work standing ovations. For the Kansas City Symphony’s November performances, Nicholas McGegan has also chosen a full-length symphony. This one, however, is from the 18th century repertory for which this guest conductor is best known—Franz Josef Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony No. 94, the epitome of classical clarity and wit. By coincidence, Haydn’s music also begins Act I for Kansas City Ballet with Mercury by Lynne Taylor-Corbett. “With five movements from different Haydn symphonies, it’s a bright and vivacious opening,” said William Whitener. “Then we shift the mood with End of Time.” The music changes to a cellist and a pianist (who is conductor Ramona Pansegrau) and to the Romanticism of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata in G Minor. Instead of the full high-flying ballet company, there are only one man and one woman—imagined by choreographer Ben Stevenson as the last people alive on earth. “End of Time is quiet and poignant. Now the stage has been set for the dark opening of Carmina Burana.” Michael Uthoff’s Act I choice contrasts both musically and spiritually. Instead of the straightforward songs of Carmina Burana, J.S. Bach’s Cantata #10 twists its melodies into intricate contrapuntal patterns, The text is a German expansion of the Magnificat, the Virgin Mary’s song of praise—“My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Says Michael, “It’ll give you a more angelical view.”

Full circle

"Fortune smiled on me when she put into my hands a Würzburg second-hand bookshop’s catalogue, in which I found a title that drew me in with magical force,” said Orff. Fortune is certainly smiling on our state during this 2012-2013 performing arts season.

From the first notes—“when I feel like I’m throwing the switch and lighting up the entire nation’s power grid with a single downbeat,” says David Robertson—to the final chord, Missouri audiences are being treated to a work that, as William Whitener says, “has the ability to dig deep into the soul. “People are not only touched individually, but in live performance we have a shared primal response,” he says. “That’s part of the reason for the work’s tremendous appeal.” Robin D. Fish, Jr., executive assistant at Good News Magazine who has performed with the St. Louis Symphony Chorus since 2005, summed it up this way on his blog after singing the performances in 2008. “It is music that revels in an excess of food, drink, love, and other amusements; music that celebrates spring, youth, and pleasure; and music in which all these things are held between two shattering statements on changeable and changeless fate. It is seriously pagan music preserved for centuries in a monastery; it is seriously primitive music that survives, like the text before it, as a great work of art; and it is seriously fun music that, quite understandably, draws huge crowds to this day.” Learn more about Missouri arts groups

▪ Bach Society of St. Louis ▪ Columbia Chorale ▪ Dance St. Louis ▪ Kansas City Ballet ▪ Kansas City Symphony ▪ St. Louis Children’s Choirs ▪ University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance ▪ University of Missouri-St. Louis College of Fine Arts and Communication

Dance and Music Turn Fate’s Wheel In Carmina Burana was created in October 2012 for the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency and division of the Department of Economic Development. The Missouri Arts Council provides grants to nonprofit organizations that meet our strategic goals of increasing participation in the arts in Missouri, growing Missouri’s economy using the arts, and strengthening Missouri education through the arts. For information, contact moarts@ded.mo.gov.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Attribution: Courtesy of the Missouri Arts Council

O Fortuna! Nashville Ballet, photo by Heather Thorne