O Fortuna Carmina Burana Prom 69

O Fortuna ! As the Wheel of Fortune turns...... The BBC Concert Orchestra is Cinderella in the stable of BBC orchestras, relegated to workhorse gigs, TV dramas and the resolutely anti-intellectual fare the Proms (and the BBC in general) seem to be descending into. Then along comes Carl Orff Carmina Burana (1936) at Prom 69.  Real music, and vividly realized. Carmina Burana is a strange beast, a pseudo-medieval extravaganza mixing vulgarity with piety. Everyone knows Carmina Burana, even if they think it's the sound track to TV ads and satires like THIS. 

Because it's so familiar, responses  are coloured by "TV thinking", superficial, ill informed and kneejerk, like the cliché that Orff didn't oppose the Nazis, except in his dreams. But Orff was a conundrum, a complex person who concealed his inner life even - and perhaps especially - from himself. The joyous barbarism appeals on a primitive  level, connecting to primal emotions. One could draw a direct line between Carmina Burna and what was, arguably, Orff's greatest gift to mankind, his Schulwerk and legacy of expressive music-making in circles way beyond the western classical music mainstream.

Carmina Burana is brutal, because the Middle Ages were brutal. If you were lucky you got high on ergot and died by the age of 40. Dionysian riot probably meant even more to grim lives. The picture left is Breughel, The Battle between Carneval and Lent. Eat, drink and be merry for Lent is coming and with it, hardship. And you might not be around by Easter. Orff was no intellectual, but on an intuitive level he may have made the connection between the dark side of the Middle Ages and the madness of theThird Reich. There was a lot of "medievalism" in music in this era.  Think Frank Martin, Walter Braunfels, W A Hartmann and Arthur Honegger. Perhaps we too are living "at the End of Time", fighting off the Apocalypse with mindless hedonism.

And so, back to Prom 69, the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Keith Lockhart. This performance played to the BBC CO's strengths, bringing out the cinematic qualities in the piece. The "big numbers" could have come straight out of Hollywood, the brass blazing and the big drums booming. I was even more impressed, though, by the faux-lyricism of the quieter sections where the orchestra played quietly, and the choruses twittered the "meadow" songs prettily, like birds in a Rudolf Ising cartoon. A poisoned Spring! This was far more chilling in many ways than simply forcing the rhythms for effect. Delightfully vernal "antique" trumpets, and violins sounding like lutes.
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 Best of all, though, was the singing. Benjamin Appl sang the baritone part  withe brightness and natural colour: a genuinely interesting voice intelligently used. I learned the piece from Fischer-Dieskau, who was wonderful but a bit uncomfortable . Drunken boor wasn't his style. Thomas Walker sang the Olim lacus colueram well. By the end of the Tavern sequence, everyone's pissed, singing parodies of "normal" song.  Just the right touch of inebriation. After that, can we take the Minnelied courtliness at face value? And what are Communion bells doing here? What is being consecreted or sullied, as the case might be?   Orff's pulled another fast one.  "Tempus est jocundum". Lovely singing by Olena Tokar, but the moment doesn't last. Yet again we're thrown back on the "mob", the brusqueness of the music for baritone (not a "boy") and massed male voices. "Venus, Venus, Venus" they called, a testosterenoe fix heralded by the big timpani and the return of O Fortuna. The wheel has turned. with a chill.  The BBC Symphony Chorus and the London Philharmonic Choir did the honours, assisted by the Southend Boys' and Girls' Choirs.

Before Carmina Burana, Guy Barker's The Lanterne of Light. Everyone writes for Alison Balcom these days because she plays so expressively, but the piece itself is a bit pointless; perhaps if it had stuck to one or two Deadly Sins or done them all with more compression?  Not really enough to sustain for  too long.

Carl Orff in Cowboy Country: Dr. Robert Olson Brings “Carmina Burana” to Longmont, Colorado

From David Woodward in Longmont, Colorado :

Carl Orff’s perennial musical spectacle Carmina Burana again manifests itself, this time in the small northern Colorado town of Longmont. This coming Saturday evening March 1st, Dr. Robert Olson will lead three Colorado soloists, lyric soprano Kara Guggenmos, tenor Dr. Todd Queen and baritone Thomas Erik Angerhofer and the Longmont Symphony Orchestra and Chorale in a concert performance of the work, on Sunday 1st March 2014.

Longmont is a diverse, well-educated community of about 90,000 folks located 40 miles north of Denver and 15 northeast of Boulder. Each of these three locales is home to a symphony orchestra, as well as many excellent instrumental and choral ensembles, among them the self-directed Sphere Ensemble and the virtuoso Ars Nova Singers from Boulder. Many of us were fortunate to hear the Wilhelm Killmayer two-piano/percussion arrangement of Carmina Burana in two wonderful Boulder Chorale performances last October.

The Longmont Symphony was founded in 1966, and Dr. Olson has been its Principal Conductor and Music Director since 1990. He is also the Director of Orchestras/Opera at the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri - Kansas City. He is known for his legendary efforts on behalf of the Colorado Mahlerfest, a Boulder event of concerts and symposia held annually since 1988 and awarded the gold medal of the International Gustav Mahler Society in 2005. His performances of the Eighth Symphony and the Joe Wheeler reconstruction of the unfinished Symphony nr. 10 alone have made him one of Mahler’s most credible American interpreters.

Selecting a companion work to the Carmina Burana for the concert evening always presents an interesting challenge. Dr. Olson has honored a patron’s request and has programmed Anton Webern’s concise 1908 masterpiece, the Passacaglia Op. 1, a work that reveals a deeper dimension of archaism: a dark contrast to Orff’s spectacle.

The present writer’s excitement and anticipation of Saturday night’s concert has a personal element, as it is my first time singing in public. In mid - December, the Longmont Chorale, a fixture in the community for nearly 80 years, sent out a call for singers from the area. I answered the call, and have been rehearsing with the Chorale since early January . The Chorale’s director’s Scott Hamlin and Ray Harrison, have provided educated and enthusiastic guidance to the Chorale members, and have expertly communicated the work’s joyous and romantic spirit. In one of the men’s sectional rehearsals a few weeks ago, Ray found a textual error in the Schott score in the carmine “Veris Leta Facies” - he spotted a “Phoebus” where there should be a “Flora” instead! We have dress rehearsals with the orchestra tomorrow and Friday night, followed by our performance this weekend. At this hour, our performance has nearly sold-out. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana Express is rapidly approaching its stop in Longmont.

 Photo of Long's Peak above Longmont in the Colorado Rockies, credit Scott Bauer

Carl Orff - Die Kluge, Zurich Opera

Carl Orff's opera Die Kluge (The Clever One) premiered in February 1943, when the Russians routed the Germans at Stalingrad. The plot is based on a story from Brothers Grimm, so Orff could pass it off as recht and gut Fairy Tale. How could the Nazis object?  A tyrannical King appropriates a peasant's possessions, falsely imprisons people and makes insane judgements, such as believing that mules can give birth to foals. He threatens a peasant girl with death unless she can solvce his riddles, which she does, and he makes her his Queen. But no-one is safe from the madman, even at the top. The Queen is banished but yet again survives by being crafty. She convinces the King she loves him. "Nothing is more irrational than love".

Shirley Apthorp  saw the production at Opernhaus Zurich, but still follows the idea that Orff was some kind of Nazi sympathiser. Obviously Orff could not make the moral any clearer or he'd end up in prison like the peasant. Maybe some Nazis got it better than others. Apparently, Die Kluge was praised in Graz and condemned in Cottbus. Of course it's possible that some who applauded cheered because they recognized the double meaning.

The instrumentation and discography of Orff's Die Kluge can be found HERE
Wouldn't the message of Die Kluge have been more obvious had it been paired with K A Hartmann's Simplicius Simplicissimus?  Both pieces are relatively short and use similar unfussy orchestration. They're connected, too, as Hartmann knew Orff and dedicated the work to him.

O Fortuna ! Carl Orff, conundrum

Everyone knows Carmina Burana, even if they think it's the sound track to TV ads. Ironic then, that Carl Orff should be the subject of O Fortuna, the 2008 documentary by Tony Palmer. Because Carmina Burana is so familiar, responses to Carl Orff himself are coloured by "TV thinking", superficial, ill informed and kneejerk, like the cliché that Carmina Burana is a Nazi tract. But Orff deserves deeper analysis. He was a conundrum, a complex person who concealed his inner life even from himself. He's a conundrum. Yet his legacy benefits millions who don't care or know much about European music or history.

Palmer's documentary doesn't attempt psychological depth but presents material that might otherwise lurk in archives. Orff's daughter Godela appears, as do Orff's last two wives. At least one of them is dead. I don't know when the interviews were made, or by whom, but they're valuable sources.  The footage of the last wife, Liselotte, is vivid and moving, probably seen for the first time.

Michael  Kater appears too, to add perspectiuve. "Orff wasn't a Nazi, he hated what they stood for", he says, but Orff also didn't make life difficult for himself. He figured that when Pfiztner and Richard Strauss died he'd be the most important composer in the Reich. Big consideration. Always broke, he accepted money from the State, but that didn't automatically compromise him.  Ralph Vaughan Wiliams and Sibelius did so too. More worrying was that he didn't help Kurt Huber, whose White Rose cell resisted Hitler, yet later claimed he'd actively helped. It's relevant that Karl Amadeus Hartmann, who knew everyone involved, treated Orff with sympathy. Unless you've lived in a closed totalitarian state, moral ambiguities are hard to judge. Perhaps Orff felt survivor guilt and needed to convince himself. A warped way of making amends, but, as Kater says, "psychologically significant".

Orff's other legacy was Schulwerk, the concept idea that music was a fundamental source of expression. One of the most remarkable moments in the film comes when a Schulwerk teacher tells of a first year child in a war zone who came to school deeply withdrawn. Her family had been massacred in the night and the child didn't know what to do, so she went to school. Later, there's a clip of children with learning disabilities using the system as therapy. What the film doesn't do is connect the Schulwerk ethos to the wider issues of Orff's personality. By its very nature the concept eschews wealth, power and status. It's based on the simplest forms of expression, as simple as using the body. "Everyone has a voice within themselves" says another teacher.  "We don't listen to each other, we don't listen to ourselves.... but you cannot make music without listening. Orff teaches us to listen for more than notes, to listen to others and to the world around us in which we all live".

The film doesn't make the connection between what Orff's system teaches and who Orff was as a man, but I think they are inextricable. Godela Orff spoke about her father's childhood fascination with puppets and fantasy. Theatre is a form of expression through which you can explore feelings and ideas without necessarily putting yourself in jeopardy. Orff wasn't personally warm and giving, perhaps because he was quite vulnerable within. Hence the contradictions in his life. Yet he intuited how others could find themselves.  He couldn't deal with reality too well, but he recognized that the process of becoming a whole person was through expression.

Curiously the film hardly deals with Orff''s music at all. It's loosely based around a semi staged performance of Carmina Burana, but the music isn't integrated into the narrative. Yet, since it's the one piece everyone knows, it does need confronting. Listen to its angular rhythmic shapes and the violent surges of sound. These fool many into thinking it's a Nuremburg rally in music. But then listen carefully. The texts depict a medieval world where life was short and barbaric, where pleasure had to be grasped in an almost animalistic way before inevitable death. Strictly speaking not all that different from living in the 20th century. Godela claims that the piece was at first greeted with stunned silence until she cried out, "Listen you bastards!". Maybe she too muddled memory with wish, for young girls don't dare confront Party brass like that. Quite likely that the audience didn't know what to think as these brutal jagged rhythms do have an affinity with "primitive" non-white music. Orff had lived through the Weimar after all. Normally music like this might have been considered degenerate, but the audience was fooled by the fake Germanism. Remember Hartmann and Simplcius Simplicissimus.

What I really didn't like about the film was that it started with an ad and ended with an ad. Brand names prominently emphasized. We know the music is used in ads, but this is so blatant that it turns the film into a commercial. Orff was morally compromised because he took the easy way with the Reich. Is the film morally compromised since it has no qualms about commercial exploitation? Pretty tacky.  I'm sorry but this ruined the integrity of the film for me. Orff, for all his faults, wasn't crass.