Adrenaline and High C

Nobody reads the arts section to find more things to worry about, but here’s one anyway.

Let’s say you go to Saturday’s annual Lansing Symphony choral blowout. Overwhelmed by the sight of some 200 massed choristers and musicians from the MSU Choral Union, State Singers, University Chorale and the full orchestra, you drop your program under the seat. The lights go down.

How will you know when the night’s major work, Anton Bruckner’s “Te Deum,” has begun?

Two quick anecdotes will put this fear in perspective. In grade school sex education class, one of my classmates timidly raised his hand and asked how he’d know when he was having an orgasm.

“You’ll know,” the teacher said.

One more: A few years ago, before GPS and smart phones, I drove down a dirt road in northern California, wondering if I’d know when I found the grove of redwood trees I was looking for.

I knew.

Once a year, Lansing Symphony maestro Timothy Muffitt tosses the keys to MSU’s director of choral studies, David Rayl, and this year Rayl is unleashing a rarely performed, thundering masterpiece. The other composers on the program — Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven — aren’t exactly slouches, but Rayl chose them because they all influenced Bruckner.

“None of the other pieces have the same kind of overwhelming grandeur that the Bruckner has,” Rayl said. “It’s a very powerful and spiritual work.”

Somewhat ominously, Rayl said the Bruckner is “not impossible for the chorus.”

“The most challenging thing about it is the range and the tessitura,” he said.

Think of tessitura, the average vocal range of a piece of music, as a readout of the RPM required from the pink little gears inside the singers’ necks. For this music, the needle is stuck in the red.

“The sopranos have to sustain a high G sharp forever, high A forever, and then they have to sing a couple of measures of high C, which is pretty much unheard of in choral music,” Rayl said.

Bruckner’s disregard for human limitations may be explained by the Austrian composer’s background as an organist. While taking in the “Te Deum’s” mighty blasts, it’s not hard to picture a 100-foot-tall bald guy, playing the chorus as if it were a giant keyboard, leaning on the high notes to his heart’s content.

“He doesn’t care how hard it is,” Rayl said. “He certainly treats the wind instruments like a big organ. They play big, sustained chords, and when he adds brass, it’s just like pulling out organ stops.”

The experience can be exhausting for the singers. So far, Rayl has had to pace the chorus-only rehearsals carefully. Performance is another matter. Adrenaline and High C make a fine cocktail.

“When you get the orchestra underneath you and you sing it straight through and don’t have to stop and start and repeat things, it’s not tiring,” he said.

For the audience, a rare, live performance of a massive work like “Te Deum” offers the kind of visceral experience no record can equal.

“Recordings never struggle,” Rayl said. “There’s something about the physicality of singing and playing you don’t get when listening to a recording.”

From “Te Deum,” Rayl worked backward to program music by composers who influenced Bruckner, beginning with Beethoven. Muffitt helped Rayl put the program together.

Beethoven’s popular chorus, the “Hallelujah” from “Christ on the Mount of Olives,” seemed a natural opener. Unsurprisingly, it’s the most densely orchestrated piece on the program and, as Rayl said, “an attention grabber.” Strangely, Rayl has never conducted it before, even though it’s among the most often performed orchestra-and-chorus works.

As a foil to the gargantuan Bruckner, Rayl chose Franz Schubert’s tender, lyrical Mass No. 2, usually heard with only chorus and strings.

Recently, an authentic set of trumpet and tympani parts were discovered for the Schubert, and Rayl will add those to the mix for the first time in his career.

“I’m sure that Bruckner, growing up, knew that piece,” Rayl said. Listeners Saturday will be struck by the way Bruckner picked up one of Schubert’s favorite harmonic turns, an unorthodox combination of notes, which Rayl described as “like turning the lights on in a room.”

“We were just in rehearsal today, struggling with a little place where he does that,” Rayl said. “It’s not a shock, just more of an ‘Oh.’” Bruckner lived and worked in Linz, Austria, so Mozart’s “Linz” symphony seemed an apt palate cleanser between the heavier courses.

“It’s a little livelier than the Schubert,” Rayl said. “On the other hand, it’s a nice foil because it’s a typical (scaled-down) Mozart orchestra.”

Saturday’s vocal soloists draw from the ever-widening spill of talent infiltrating the nation after graduating from Michigan State University’s music programs.

Soprano Elizabeth Toy Botero, a recent grad, is remembered by local music lovers for several coruscating performances for the MSU Opera Theater.

Mezzo-soprano Meg Bragle, a graduate of the University of Michigan’s vocal and violin programs and MSU’s choral conducting program, has gone on to very big things. She has sung with many top conductors and orchestras, including John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists. (A critic from BBC Music Magazine called her aria in Bach’s B Minor Mass “spine-tingling.”)

Andrew Crane, another MSU choral conducting grad, sang several oratorios during his time in East Lansing. Bass soloist Dan Ewart, a doctoral student at MSU, was a robust Marcello in “La Bohème” last spring. But can this able crew of soloists do justice to the gentle Schubert and the stormy Bruckner? Rayl said it’s not as much of a stretch as it may seem.

“You’d think you’d need big, loud, honking voices in the Bruckner, but everything the soloist sings is quite simply orchestrated,” he said. “There’s no need for big, Wagnerian voices. They can have the lyricism they need for the Schubert and be just fine in the Bruckner.”

Rayl paused a few seconds. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said ‘honking.’”

Lansing Symphony Orchestra

MSU Choral Union, University Chorale, State Singers David Rayl, conductor Elizabeth Toy Botero, soprano Meg Bragle, mezzosoprano Andrew Crane, tenor Dan Ewart, bass-baritone 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 1 Wharton Center Cobb Great Hall $15-50

(517) 487-5001, lansingsymphony.org