How an Artist and an Orchestra Build a Concert Together
- Rafael Piccolotto de Lima
- Jul 7
- 10 min read
What happens when a singer who is used to performing with guitar, electric guitar, and percussion steps onto the stage alongside eighteen or fifty musicians?
What changes when a song created for small ensembles begins to interact with strings, woodwinds, brass, and new orchestral sound textures?
These are some of the questions that arise behind the scenes in concerts that bring popular artists and orchestras together.
The audience sees the final result, but what rarely appears is the artistic process required for that encounter to happen. The collaboration between a popular artist and an orchestra does not begin onstage. Between the first conversation about a project and the moment the music reaches the stage, there is a network of decisions involving artists, arrangers, music directors, conductors, copyists, producers, and dozens of musicians.
This article brings together reflections shaped by the experience of participating in several projects of this kind in different roles, including arranger, music director, and conductor. Each project requires its own choices, each repertoire asks for different solutions, and each encounter produces a version of those songs that did not previously exist.
A Song Is Not Born Ready for an Orchestra
Much of the music we hear was created within a specific musical context, whether voice and guitar, a band, or another kind of ensemble. That context influences not only the instrumentation, but also the way the work comes to exist for the public.
Throughout the process of creation, arrangement, recording, and performance, the music acquires its own sonic identity, built through particular timbres, textures, forms of interaction among the musicians, and interpretive choices.
When that same work is presented by an orchestra, the context changes completely. Dozens of instruments appear, along with new timbres, new contrasts, and other possibilities for musical development.
That is why I like to think of this process in a way similar to adapting a book for the screen. The story remains recognizable, but it begins to exist within another medium, with new expressive resources and new narrative possibilities.
The goal is to discover how that work can exist within a new artistic context.
Reducing the orchestra to a background for the artist means wasting much of the potential of that encounter. When a project works well, the orchestra stops functioning merely as accompaniment and begins to participate actively in the musical construction, almost like a new character within the story.
Who Builds This Encounter?
Audiences often associate this type of concert with the meeting between an artist and an orchestra. In practice, however, there is a much larger network of people involved in building that encounter.
The artist brings their musical identity, their repertoire, and their relationship with those songs. The arranger receives that material and imagines how those songs might exist within a new ensemble. The music director helps build the artistic coherence of the project as a whole, the conductor brings that work into performance, and, finally, the orchestra transforms all of those decisions into sound.
Each role participates in a different stage of the process. In some projects, these responsibilities are distributed among several people; in others, the same person may occupy more than one of those positions. Throughout my career, I have experienced these different configurations.
A good example of this dynamic was the concert with Mãeana and Orquestra Urbana within the Contemporary Concerts Series, a project conceived and curated by producer Glauber Amaral at Sesc Pinheiros. In that project, I worked simultaneously as arranger, music director, and conductor, in an experience that illustrates quite clearly how these collaborations are often constructed.
A Concert as a Case Study: Mãeana and Orquestra Urbana
The purpose of the series was to bring guest artists and Orquestra Urbana together in performances that encouraged encounters between different musical languages.
In the case of Orquestra Urbana, the concerts were divided into two parts. In the first, we presented the orchestra’s own original instrumental repertoire. In the second, we shared the stage with the guest artist of the night and their repertoire.
When Mãeana was invited to participate in the project, the repertoire had already been defined jointly by her and the series curator.
My role was to reimagine that repertoire through the language of the Big Band and coordinate its development through to the concert. In this project, I worked as arranger and music director.
Most of the arrangements were written by me, while others were developed by invited colleagues. As music director, however, my responsibility went beyond writing each individual piece.
Every concert has its own identity. Part of the work consists of creating coherence between the different arrangements without sacrificing the variety needed to sustain the program’s interest.
That meant thinking about how those different arrangements would relate to one another throughout the concert.
This work also involved considering the specific characteristics of the musicians in the ensemble. Some have a strong presence as improvisers, while others bring very particular sounds, experiences, and musical personalities. At the same time, each piece had different needs. This meant that the construction of the concert was guided by questions such as:
How should we decide which pieces will include space for improvisation?
Which musicians will be invited to participate as soloists?
What kind of contrast will be created from one moment to the next?
How can we avoid allowing certain ideas to repeat too much throughout the performance?
Why is this song being presented with an orchestra?
What can this collaboration reveal?
What paths emerge when that repertoire begins to interact with a new palette of timbres, new textures, and a larger group of musicians?
Those questions guided the entire creative process with Mãeana.
One of the songs that left the strongest impression on me during that process was Tapete Voador. The original recording combined relatively lean instrumentation, a steady pulse, and references to the worlds of piseiro, brega, and contemporary Northeastern Brazilian music with a harmonic palette and an atmosphere that, at certain moments, evoked imagery associated with Romani music and sonorities reminiscent of flamenco.
These elements opened up fascinating possibilities for the arrangement.
The language of the Big Band made it possible to explore new combinations of timbres, stronger contrasts, different layers of texture, and other possibilities for musical development.
The main structure of the song remained virtually unchanged. Its form was still immediately recognizable, and Mãeana’s performance remained at the center of the experience, but the musical environment surrounding her had been transformed.
What had originally been supported by a smaller instrumental setting now interacted with a much broader sonic palette.
The result was a new interpretation built from the meeting between the singer’s artistic universe and the possibilities offered by the language of the Big Band, seen through my own perspective as an arranger. Rather than simply expanding the instrumentation, the arrangement sought to discover what new musical possibilities could emerge when those songs began to interact with an orchestral ensemble.
Not Every Collaboration Works the Same Way
The concert with Mãeana represents a distinctive situation within my own career. In that project, I worked simultaneously as arranger, writing much of the material performed by the orchestra; as music director, coordinating the artistic decisions that gave the concert its overall unity; and as conductor, leading the rehearsals and shaping the musical interpretation during the performance.
In many other projects, however, these responsibilities are distributed among different professionals, which changes the dynamics of the work considerably. An interesting example took place during a concert presented by Brasil Jazz Sinfônica at Sala São Paulo.
The program was dedicated to the world of forró and featured Mariana Aydar, Chico César, and Mestrinho as guest artists.
That evening, three of my works were performed: an instrumental overture for the orchestra and two arrangements written for the guest artists.
This project represented a very different configuration from the one I experienced with Mãeana. While with Orquestra Urbana I followed the musical process from the arrangements through the music direction and conducting, with Brasil Jazz Sinfônica my involvement ended once the arrangements had been delivered. From that point on, responsibility shifted to the concert’s conductor, Gustavo Petri, who led the orchestra in bringing that material to life.
Up to that point, all of the work had taken place at home while writing the arrangements, imagining how that repertoire would gain a new sonic identity through the orchestral writing.
From there, another musician began interpreting that material. Many decisions would probably have been similar to those I would have made myself; others naturally followed different paths, and that is part of the collaborative nature of this kind of work.
The two arrangements I wrote for this concert illustrate particularly well how an arranger’s decisions emerge from the relationship between the song itself, its performers, and the ensemble for which it is being written.
Although they were part of the same concert, Espumas ao Vento, for Mariana Aydar, and Deus Me Proteja, for Chico César and Mestrinho, naturally led me toward very different approaches. In each case, it was the characteristics of the repertoire and the artistic identity of the musicians involved that guided my decisions throughout the arranging process.
In Mariana Aydar’s case, the arrangement of Espumas ao Vento became one of my favorite works among the many arrangements I have written for Brasil Jazz Sinfônica. It gave me the opportunity to explore the resources of the orchestra more extensively through changes in texture, stronger contrasts, moments of surprise, and instrumental passages that created different musical environments within the same work.
With Deus Me Proteja, performed by Chico César and Mestrinho, the orchestra played a different role. The strength of that collaboration lay in the interaction between the two artists, in the way their voices, instruments, and musical personalities interacted with one another. The arrangement sought to preserve that center of gravity, while the orchestra introduced new colors, highlighted important moments, and expanded certain passages without shifting the audience’s attention away from the performers.
These are different approaches. In some repertoires, the orchestra assumes a more active role; in others, it functions more discreetly. The decision depends on the repertoire, the artists, the context, and what that particular collaboration is trying to communicate.
What Changes When the Arranger Is Not the Music Director?
If working exclusively as an arranger offers a particular perspective on this process, the same is true when the situation is reversed.
Throughout my career, I have also participated in projects in which I served as music director and/or conductor without being the arranger.
One experience that illustrates this particularly well took place in concerts with Hamilton de Holanda and the Campinas Municipal Symphony Orchestra.
In this project, some of the arrangements already existed, while others were commissioned by the orchestra from another arranger. My role, however, belonged to a different stage of the process. I was invited to serve as the concert’s music director and conductor, while the development of the new arrangements remained the responsibility of another professional. My work was not to participate in the writing process, but to study the material as it was completed and lead its realization together with the orchestra and the soloist.
When I am writing an arrangement, I spend weeks making decisions. I choose directions, build formal structures, define textures, and think about how the different musical elements will relate to one another.
When I am responsible only for the music direction, I encounter the music at a different stage of the process. Rather than taking part in the writing itself, I begin imagining how that material will respond once it meets the soloist, the orchestra, and the practical realities of rehearsals and performance.
At that point, the music ceases to exist only on the page. The work shifts toward shaping the musical interpretation, refining the precision of the performance, and developing the relationship between the orchestra and the soloist.
Very often, the work also involves solving challenges that emerge only during rehearsals. A passage that seemed straightforward on paper may require adjustments, the balance between sections may need to be reconsidered, or a particular musical idea may prove more effective when approached differently once it reaches the stage.
This is one of the reasons why I see arranging and music direction as deeply complementary activities. The arranger imagines and builds the paths the music may take; the music director guides the realization of those decisions together with the musicians. They operate at different moments in the process, but both profoundly influence the final artistic result. There is a continuity between conception and performance that I find especially valuable, and participating in both stages remains one of the aspects of this work that interests me most.
Working exclusively as a music director, however, offers a different perspective. Instead of creating the material from the beginning, I seek to understand the choices made by another arranger and find the most convincing way to realize them onstage through the meeting between the soloist, the orchestra, and the practical conditions of each project.
What Makes a Collaboration Successful?
The most rewarding collaborations tend to emerge when both sides are genuinely interested in exploring the meeting between their respective musical languages.
When an artist chooses to collaborate with an orchestra, they bring their music into a musical context that is very different from the one in which it originally developed.
At the same time, the orchestra, the arrangers, and the music direction also enter the artist’s own musical world. It is within that shared space that the most compelling results usually emerge, producing interpretations of those works that did not exist before the collaboration took place.
When that collaboration succeeds, the goal is no longer simply to adapt a song for an orchestra. The result becomes a new musical interpretation, built through the meeting between the artist’s identity and the possibilities offered by the orchestral ensemble.
About the Author
Rafael Piccolotto de Lima is a composer, arranger, music director, and educator. A Latin Grammy-nominated composer and recipient of multiple international awards, including 13 DownBeat Awards and honors from ASCAP, he develops artistic projects that connect Brazilian music, jazz, orchestral writing, improvisation, recording production, research, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
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