Carmina Burana by Carl Orff and The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky (arr. by Seann Alderking)
Conductor’s Note

I am writing this note on a breezy and sun-dappled spring day — in a darkening world.  Even as, with bright hopefulness and fierce creativity, we direct our energies toward emerging from the pandemic, impassioned and whole, all of us are inescapably mindful of the global crises that command our attention.

The Cecilia Chorus of New York has been a cultural force in our city since the first decade of the twentieth century.  For over a hundred years, through two pandemics and two world wars, we have represented both steadiness and invention, continuity and renewal.  

Tonight's extraordinary program embodies this dual perspective fully. The Rite of Spring and Carmina Burana are repertoire staples to be sure.  But is there any concert-goer who can claim to have experienced them side by side in a single program...with the magnificent spectacle and power of four concert grand pianos and a full battery of percussion thrilling and delighting our ears and eyes?  

The enduring popularity and reach of these two seminal works bear considering.  Sharing recognizable elements of melody, absolutely distinct yet also not wholly unrelated in their use of harmony, each in its own particular way draws from the wellspring of rhythm, tapping its unique potential to galvanize and unite. Rhythm captivates and coordinates us, harnessing nature's inexhaustible resource of oscillation to entrain our bodies in individual and collective action. It is a way — the way, really — we experience time, which is an essential dimension not only of music, but of life itself.  (The other is space.)

As living creatures who evolved on earth, we experience in our marrow the revolution of the earth, the motions of satellites and planets, the passage of minutes, hours, days, and seasons.  We know viscerally that there are orbits and cycles and turnings, beginnings and endings.  Wherever and however we live, in one way or another we plant and harvest, sow and reap.  We are young, then older.  We are cared for, then caring, tending and enlarging our store of wisdom and practice even as we pass it along, ever changing, ever vital, to a new generation.  

Both Rite of Spring and Carmina Burana are living, breathing artifacts that in performance speak to us with astonishing clarity and directness about experiences biographical and historical that all of us, metaphorically if not literally, can understand and relate to.  

O fortuna...semper variabilis.

--Mark Shapiro