The Youth Orchestras of San Antonio join forces this weekend with other arts organizations to take on Carmina Burana. To find out more I spoke to YOSA’s Troy Peters.
“Carmina Burana is this massive, epic piece of music for chorus and orchestra," Peters says. "It opens with some of the most famous music in classical music. And it’s just thrilling music from start to finish.”
Carmina Burana’s origins are quite unusual.
“Carl Orff wrote the piece in 1936 and he was taking texts from the Middle Ages. The poems were written by a group of men who were priests without a job. They were monks without a monastery. And so they spent their time writing poetry about life.”
I also spoke to the San Antonio Choral Society’s Jennifer Seighman about the concert, who added, “To be doing a work like Carmina Burana is just epic for any chorister. It’s on every singer’s bucket list—to perform this work at least once in their lifetime. It’s going to be really just kind of larger than life.”
Peters says to do this intense a performance requires a lot of voices.
“We have the San Antonio Choral Society. We have the Children’s Chorus of San Antonio. And we have the University of the Incarnate Word’s Cardinal Chorale. So all together we have almost two hundred voices.”
The performance will be at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday, May 17, at 7PM.
Troy adds, “It’s a gas and we’re really having a great time putting it together!”
UPDATE: Catch the live webcast of Carmina Burana from NowCastSA online in the window below:
