Music community unites for night of celebration

GREEN BAY — With a combined 80 years of musical performance, Civic Symphony of Green Bay and the Dudley Birder Chorale of St. Norbert College will bring together hundreds of performers from across northeastern Wisconsin on October 26 to perform one of the most renowned works in the Western canon, Carmina Burana.

Haven’t heard of Carmina Burana? Kent Paulsen, conductor and artistic director of the Dudley Birder Chorale, promises that you have.

“The very opening and closing (“O Fortuna”) is the most-used piece of music in films, TV shows, and commercials,” he said. While it has been divorced in the pop-cultural imagination from its original context — a protest against the Roman embodiment of fortune, who doles out good and bad fortune to mortals at random — “O Fortuna” remains a popular arrangement for its intensity and drama.

This popularity — especially within musical circles — is what led CSGB and the Dudley Birder Chorale to choose it for their Milestones concert, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of CSGB and the 50th anniversary of the Dudley Birder Chorale for a combined total of 80 years.

“Carmina Burana is a very interesting number,” said Yi-Lan Niu, a soloist for the Milestones concert and a music professor at St. Norbert College. “The music is very complex.” She described the cantata as a collection of “appetizers:” loud numbers that sound aggressive to a first-time listener followed by “very fine and very delicate” ones.

“The diversity in the music is a lot,” she continued. “It’s like having a weird music festival in your ears.”

Niu will not only be covering the soprano part for this concert, but the tenor part, as well.

“As the soprano, I’m singing the female role, a very innocent, beautiful girl who discovers love. She’s flirtatious, she’s beautiful. The voice is very light,” she said. “As the tenor, I have to become a dying swan who’s being cooked. It’s so random! That’s why this collection is so charming. You just hear a collection of random music.”

Milestones will see over 400 performers from across Northeast Wisconsin on one stage, welcoming around 250 students from Green Bay Preble High School choirs, the St. Norbert Youth Choirs and the Appleton Boy Choir to join the Dudley Birder Chorale and Civic Symphony for the performance.

“You need to have very quality people working with you so you can spend less time performing and more time singing and having fun,” said Niu, praising her collaborators on the show, some of whom she’s known for a decade, for their dedication to putting together a cohesive performance for such a challenging cantata on such a large scale.

Paulsen, who is in charge of connecting Northeast Wisconsin’s handful of musical groups for the concert, expressed surprise at how uncomplicated the process for doing so has been.

“About a year or two ago, we started these conversations with the four major classical arts groups in Green Bay… and we formed a sort of informal partnership called Great Music Green Bay,” he said.

This partnership has allowed for a more organized pooling of resources and wider cross-promotion to allow the area’s classical musical community to flourish.

“You know how small the world is,” Niu explained. “It’s not like we’re very limited. It’s more like you need the right person to do the right things.”
Paulsen said that while participation in the choral department at St. Norbert is higher now than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, audience attendance hasn’t returned to pre-COVID-19 levels.

“In our area, our biggest competition isn’t each other, it’s Netflix and the concept of streaming and not participating in things as a small group or an individual,” he said.

All the same, he’s excited about collaborating for an event on such a grand scale.

“It’s great. It’s kind of a nice way to celebrate because we are all doing these activities to promote arts and culture and make this a community that celebrates participation in the arts, and it’s nice to celebrate with people who are also doing that,” Paulsen said.

Seong-Kyung Graham, who has been the conductor and artistic director of CSGB since 2005 and will conduct the Milestones concert, shared that excitement. “I think it’s gonna be very much fun for all of us,” she said. “Many people came together, and I think when that many people are on the stage, that excited adrenaline makes really special potions for all of us – including our audience – so that excitement and energy will be something through the roof. That’s what I’m hoping for.”

“I’m particularly excited that the students of Preble will be joining us because it’s an opportunity to be part of 400 people on stage that they can’t do on their own at school,” Paulsen said. “It will leave an indelible mark on a lot of those students.”

“Hopefully we’ll have lots of audience, so if anyone is reading this, we hope you come out!” said Graham.

Civic Symphony of Green Bay and the Dudley Birder Chorale’s Milestones concert, a performance of Carmina Burana performed by musicians from across northeastern Green Bay, is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 26, at UW-Green Bay’s Weidner Center.

Tickets cost $29 for adults, $24 for seniors, and $19 for students and can be bought through Ticket Star. Discounted season tickets are also available.

For more information on Milestones or Civic Symphony’s 2024-25 season or to buy tickets, visit gbcivic.org/events/milestones.