Voices of Connection: 07/20 Carl Orff: O Fortuna
FROM GUEST CURATOR MELISSA BYBEE
While I never really had the chops for the instrument, I loved the piano and worked hard at it throughout my childhood. By my senior year in high school, all of the hours I spent driving my family nuts practicing paid off: I won a concerto competition and played the first movement of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with the Monroe (La.) Symphony Orchestra; was awarded a scholarship to Brevard Music Center in North Carolina; and received a full tuition scholarship to study piano at LSU. However, I’d also started studying voice with Mrs. Budd (my church choir director), and in the same year, I performed a solo with the Louisiana All-State Choir, only because the original soloist partied too hard and woke up voiceless the day of our concerts. I’d bombed my original audition, but when the opportunity to “save the day” presented itself, I suddenly felt empowered and fearless, and well, convinced the audition panel that I was the singer they were looking for! In the summer of 1983, I headed to Brevard, ready to devote my every waking moment to piano, only to discover that all pianists had to sing in the chorus since we could read music. The chorus was directed by Dr. Mary Nell Saunders, a promising conductor whose career was cut short by cancer. Mary Nell was brilliant - a real fireball - and I was very fortunate to work with her. One of the featured works that summer was Carl Orff’s (1895-1982) ”Carmina Burana” (1935-36). Now, I have always been an avid horror story/movie buff, and I recognized “O Fortuna” as the theme song for the movie “The Omen.” To this day, I remember running late to rehearsal and being stopped dead in my tracks by the blood-curdling sounds of “O Fortuna” blasting out of the North Carolina hills! Orff was a percussionist, and ”Carmina” is loaded with percussion instruments, including two pianos. I also find the choice of text perfectly creepy (12th century Latin secular poetry) and love the way Orff calls on the soloists to do extraordinary (supernatural) things with their voices. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard the tenor sing his ”swan” song, ”Olim lacus calueram.” That summer at Brevard marked a turning point as I secretly decided that, even though I was facing four years of piano with a scholarship on the line, I didn’t want to be a pianist. This rendition of ”O Fortuna,” which features Robert Shaw conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, is one of my favorites.