Washington University to present annual Chancellor’s Concert April 29

The Washington University Concert Choir and the Washington University Symphony Orchestra will present the 2007 Chancellor’s Concert at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 29, in Washington University’s E. Desmond Lee Auditorium. The program will highlight Carl Orff’s popular cantata Carmina Burana (“Songs of Beuren”), which combines 20th century music with medieval texts.

The concert is free and open to the public. Dan Presgrave, instrumental music coordinator in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, conducts the 70-plus-member Symphony Orchestra as well as the 60-plus-member Concert Choir. Soloists are soprano Megan Higgins, tenor Joseph Michaels and baritone Nathan Ruggles — all recent master’s graduates in vocal performance. Also joining the concert will be the Kirkwood Children Chorale, directed by Mary Poshak. John Stewart is director of the Concert Choir.

The E. Desmond Lee Auditorium is located at 560 Trinity Ave., at the intersection with Delmar Boulevard. For more information, call (314) 935-4841 or staylor@wustl.edu.

A native of Munich, Orff (1895-1982) based his Carmina Burana on a large collection of 13th-century secular poems and songs composed in Latin mainly by a group of rebellious clergy known as the goliards. The original manuscript totals several hundred works on four central themes: moralizing satires (carmina moralia); celebrations of springtime and love (carmina veris et amoris); gambling and drinking songs (carmina lusorum et potatorum); and religious works (carmina divina).

Orff selected 24 of these and set them to his own music, thus creating one of the 20th century’s most-performed works for chorus and orchestra. (The piece also includes a large percussion battery — with multiple bells, cymbals, timpani and drums — as well as two pianos.) Conceived as a staged “theater cantata,” it consists of three themed sections — Primo vere (“In Springtime”), In Taberna (“In the Tavern”) and Cour d’amours (“The Court of Love”) — that unite music, poetry and drama.

Orff’s Carmina Burana was given its premiere in Frankfurt in 1937 and has received numerous stagings in Europe and America, though it is more typically presented in a concert version (as performed here) without staging. While it remains his best-known work, it is actually the first part of a musical triptych that also includes Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite. Orff is also remembered for developing innovative methods and instruments for teaching music to young children.

Also on the program will be Dances of Galánta by the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967). Like his compatriot Béla Bartók, Kodály sought to document and reflect the folk music of his native country. Dances of Galánta — inspired by music he heard growing up in the village of Galánta — includes several elements drawn from gypsy traditions, notably the use of the clarinet and the syncopated rhythms and contrasting tempos of the verbunkos, a Hungarian genre adapted by gypsy bands.