Hard-Working Angels

At Manhattan's Town Hall one night last week, Conductor Eduardo Caso called his chorus into a backstage huddle. The big New York critics were out front, he said. "They can make us or break us. It's do or die."

The chorus, 28 well-scrubbed boys (9 to 15) from Tucson, Ariz., nodded solemnly, got into their costumes: choral robes in three shades of blue, covering western denims and cowboy boots beneath. Onstage, they froze their eyes on their austere boss and began singing. They piped sweetly, if a little uncertainly, through such concert showpieces as Stradella's Pieta Signore, Bach's Suscepit Israel and Mozart's Alleluia. Then they shed their robes. For the rest of the program, the boys sang one song each of Debussy and Handel, a group of folk songs and westerns punctuated with coyote calls and calf bawls, wound up an hour later in a high-gear, breathless arrangement of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.

When it was over, the audience gurgled like a bunch of doting mothers. Gushed one matron: "Angels--all of them!" Director Caso had polished the Arizona Boys Chorus well. They were as well disciplined as paratroopers. And their voices, like their faces, were shiny and pure.

British-born Eduardo Caso, 50, moved to the U.S. in 1930, sang on the radio for a while, then came down with tuberculosis and went to Tucson for the cure. Says he: "For two years I did nothing. And then I decided I had to make money. I opened a singing school and rounded up the best boys I could find and began training them. At first the town wasn't very cooperative, but they're coming around now." Caso gives his boys six hours a week of rehearsal, stresses one thing above all: "Discipline. Discipline first, relax later."

In Manhattan the boys finally got a chance to relax. First stop: the Statue of Liberty.

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