REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS/GEORGE HANSON, CONDUCTOR

posted by James Reel

    George Hanson led the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night in a stimulating program any way you look at it. Do you want spiritual stimulation? Meditate on the mystical Medieval texts set by Stephen Paulus in his recent Voices of Light. Want erotic stimulation? Check out the salacious Latin lyrics toward the end of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Or maybe you just want to be slammed back into your seat by the power of a full orchestra and chorus? Well, Hanson and company were fully capable of that in stretches of both works.
    Don’t get the idea that the program was a nonstop noisefest, though. At least half of Carmina Burana is delicate music celebrating springtime and love, and Voices of Light runs the gamut of emotion and effect in a mélange of audience-friendly styles.
    Now, that “mélange of styles” comment may lead you to suspect that Paulus’ score is derivative. Some passages, indeed, do spring a bit too pure from other sources, but for the most part Paulus manages to filter everything through his own sensibilities. He draws his texts from 13th-century writings by the women mystics Mechtilde of Magdeburg and Hadewijch II. The first of the five movements blends the general sound of early Vaughan Williams (specifically his Sea Symphony) with the more contemporary choral harmonies of John Adams, though without a trace of the latter’s minimalism. The second movement steps out with Bernstein-style syncopations, and late portions of the score evoke Samuel Barber’s sadly under-performed The Lovers. But there’s plenty of echt-Paulus here, too, particularly in the central movement, “The Oneness Within,” which is in part a nocturne with delicate touches of percussion, and in the choral scherzo that follows.
    The chorus was very well prepared by Bruce Chamberlain, and Hanson kept it and the colorful orchestra in good balance. The one real drawback, here and throughout the concert, was the chorus’ enunciation; either it was mushy to start with, or the hall garbled it by the time it got past the conductor’s ears.
    Orff’s ever-popular Carmina Burana came off almost as well. Hanson did take the opening and closing “O Fortuna” at a clip just a shade too fast to convey the music’s underlying grim inevitability, but the tempo worked on its own terms. At times, the orchestra pulled ahead of the chorus; this was fine in contrasting instrumental episodes, rather less good if chorus and orchestra were supposed to be together. This didn’t happen often enough to compromise the overall effect.
    Otherwise, the performance fell nicely into place, with good contributions from the vocal soloists. Baritone Charles Roe nearly came to grief near the end when Orff sent him into a cruelly high tessitura, but otherwise he was tremendously effective: suave and tender in “Omnia sol temperat,” in praise of spring, and spitting out the drunken “Estuans interius” with the syllables popping almost like little hiccups. Tenor Jason Ferrante sang the song of the roasting swan with plenty of character, and soprano Mary Wilson delivered lovely, floating solos in the final third of the work.
    The programming was smart—two post-Romantic choral works employing Medieval texts—and so, overall, was the performance.