Sing Napa Valley Presents Carmina Burana

For its first spring performance since the COVID pandemic, Sing Napa Valley is proud to announce its concert featuring Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on Sunday afternoon, April 16, 2023 at 2:30 at Crosswalk Community Church, 2590 First Street, in Napa. For this performance Sing Napa Valley will be joined by the Napa High School Chamber Choir directed by Duncan Cooper.

From its beginnings in 1963, Sing Napa Valley (formerly Napa Valley Chorale and Napa Valley Choral Society) has provided the opportunity for study and performance of major choral literature. Sing Napa Valley is an auditioned, intergenerational community chorus that studies and performs a wide variety of music and musical styles, ranging from classical gems to contemporary compositions and from film music to Broadway favorites, folk music to premieres of new music.

Carmina Burana is Latin for “Songs of Beuern.” It refers to an anthology of more than two hundred medieval secular songs—chiefly in Latin, but also some middle German and a smattering of Frankish—discovered in the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuern during the disestablishment of monasteries in 1803. It’s understandable that the collection was discreetly tucked away for a few hundred years from the eyes of the pious: It comprises an exuberant hodgepodge of poems, simple and sophisticated, good verse and bad, in robust celebration of very earthly delights. These were songs of the Goliards, those bands of scholars and disillusioned monks who merrily thumbed their noses at the strictures of medieval Christianity and roamed Europe in quest of secular diversions. Chances are the tonsured fellow in the limerick who “burst from his cell with a hell of a yell” was a Goliard.

The poems—which remain the greatest single source of twelfth- and thirteenth-century verse—moralize and satirize, lament the abuses of church and state, the fickleness of fortune (especially as it falls upon lovers and gamblers), and extol the pleasures of bed, bottle, and table. A generally sturdy and optimistic view of the human condition prevails, despite a wary eye upon Fate, looming with massive indifference over all.

Tickets at $30 per person for the April 16^th performance of Carmina Burana are available online at www.singnapavalley.org, by phone at 707-255-4662, or by mail at PO Box 2774, Napa, CA 94558.

The public is cordially invited to attend this exciting performance of the blockbuster Carmina Burana. For more information, please call 707-255-4662 or email info@singnapavalley.org