Lux life
May 3—You know the music, even if you don't know the name of the composition.
Albuquerque choral group Coro Lux, which is led by former University of New Mexico choir professor Bradley Ellingboe, will tackle the Carl Orff cantata Carmina Burana this week in a pair of performances at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Albuquerque. Amy Owens, director of the Young Voices of the Santa Fe Opera, will join Coro Lux as a soloist for Carmina Burana, and Ellingboe says her part is a floating and ethereal high soprano.
"It is certainly one of those pieces where the iconic first movement is used in movies and commercials," he says of Carmina Burana. "You may not recognize it by its title. Our pianist said she was at her book club and said, 'You should come. We're doing Carmina Burana.' One of her fellow members said, 'Who's she?' But if you don't recognize it by title, just Google it and hear the music for five seconds, and you'll go, 'Oh, that is a famous piece.'"
Ellingboe served on faculty at UNM for 30 years, and when he retired in 2015, he wanted a way to keep making choral music. So he formed Coro Lux, which started as a non-auditioned chorus. He made it an auditioned group the following year, and over time, Coro Lux has added a youth chorus and a 20-member chamber chorus to go with its 60-voice oratorio society.
details
Orff's Carmina Burana
* 7 p.m. Friday, May 3, and Saturday, May 4
* St. Paul Lutheran Church
* 1100 Indian School Road, Albuquerque
* $35; $30 for seniors and $25 for children
Carmina Burana, because of its structure, has parts for all three segments of Coro Lux. That's fun, says Ellingboe, because it means Coro Lux can handle the whole show themselves.
Orff (1895-1982) was living and working in the early 20th century, and Ellingboe says he was a music educator of the highest rank.
The composer stressed rhythm and repetition in his work, and he used poems written by monks centuries before he was alive as his source material.
"The texts that he set to music are wild," Ellingboe says of the original poems. "They are the writings of bawdy and earthy monks of the 11th century; sometimes they're religious, but a lot of the time they're talking about how much they enjoy wine or how pretty that girl is who's walking by. They're thoughts they're not supposed to have, theoretically."
In addition to Owens, Ellingboe says, a tenor and a baritone soloist will accompany the Coro Lux group.
The baritone represents the monks, Ellingboe, says, and has a more earthy part, while the tenor is singing about "what it feels like to be a swan roasted over an open fire." Ellingboe says that Carmina Burana has been done in a variety of ways over the last century; the music was written to leave room for alternative forms of expression like staging and dance.
"Mostly it's done in a concert hall with an orchestra and chorus and everybody is wearing tuxedos and gowns," he says of Orff's signature piece. "But we wanted to take this a step closer to his ideal; we have four professional dancers. There are 25 short movements in Carmina, and it lasts a little more than an hour. They're going to dance in 10 of them."
