Love it or loathe it, Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" (1937) is the most commercially successful classical composition of the 20th century. Its primal tunes and pounding rhythms, once encountered, are impossible to forget: The opening chorus, "O Fortuna," has been used incessantly in film and increasingly on the dance floor, and if you have a friend who owns exactly one classical CD, if it isn't Handel's "Messiah," chances are that it is "Carmina Burana."
Yet admiration for "Carmina Burana" is far from universal in musical circles. Its frank paganism, combined with its origins in Hitler's Germany, have led some detractors to dismiss it as an exercise in musical brutalism (although Orff was never sympathetic to the Nazis). For others, "Carmina Burana" is little more than dumbed-down, popularized Stravinsky, and whatever pleasures it may offer are guilty ones indeed.
"Carmina Burana Monumental Opera" contains many puzzlements, including this 60-foot bit of machinery complete with whirling cogs.
(Courtesy Of Baci Show)
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I continue to find "Carmina Burana" both viscerally exciting and remarkably ahead of its time. But it is hard to imagine even the score's most rabid foe wishing upon it the treatment received Thursday night at MCI Center, when a troupe called "Carmina Burana Monumental Opera" turned it into the classical music equivalent of "This Is Spinal Tap."
Imagine, if you can, a 60-foot blob in the middle of the arena that looked now like the iceberg that wrecked the Titanic, now like the machine, complete with whirling cogs, that ate Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times." A bell gonged gloomily while choristers, clad in black and carrying torches, mounted the stage slowly and reverently, as though this all meant something.
When the music finally started, conductor Walter Haupt led the Metropolitan Orchestra and Chorus of Greater Montreal and his three vocal soloists off to a corner of the stage, while 30 dancers (in what were promised as 300 different costumes) pranced through mystifying pseudo-psychedelic monkeyshines.
Hobbits on parade? Shakespeare for mimes? No, according to the program (which cost a cool 12 smackers for any patron who might have wanted to learn what was going on), we were watching 24 "magical images" telling "stories of life and death, of fortune and misfortune, becoming and fading under the continuously turning 'wheel of life.' "
As Cheech and Chong might have put it -- "Oh wow, man!"
Here's one of those stories, rendered precisely in the program's deathless English: "Representing clerical power the abbot of Cucania appears. In his sermons he first wants to draw attention to the sinfulness of gluttony but in the end he is overcome by lust himself and joins the merry crowd. Even church cannot vanquish human feelings and cravings. Together they lively indulge their craving for alcohol."
Setting aside the hideous amplification -- the MCI loudspeakers made it sound as though "Carmina Burana" were being played through the world's largest cell phone -- the purely musical presentation was not at all bad. Haupt knows his Orff and led his somewhat tattered forces in a tautly propulsive performance. He was joined by soprano Ramona Eremia, who sang with a fierce sweetness; baritone Nikolai Nekrassov, who was ardent and mostly suave; and tenor Nikolaj Visnjakov in the vivid, freakish role of a soon-to-be-roasted swan.
If the score looks back toward Stravinsky in certain movements, it also looks forward to a number of compositional trends that were yet to be born. The orchestral dance "On the Lawn," for example, might have come from Aaron Copland's "Americana" phase; the piano syncopation in "Veni, Veni, Venias" is right out of "West Side Story"; and the lush, gorgeous soprano solo "In Trutina" prefigures Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki's Third Symphony by four decades. Moreover, Orff's chiming, reiterative orchestration anticipates the minimalism of Steve Reich. Nobody but the most antiseptic musical snob need apologize for enjoying -- and admiring -- "Carmina Burana."
"Carmina Burana Monumental Opera" is something else again.
The program began with a tepid selection of five works for orchestra and chorus by Giuseppe Verdi: A hapless spokeswoman announced this as "Viva Verdi," pronouncing the words as if she had no idea what either of them meant. The restive audience suffered through this with the edgy tolerance that used to be accorded opening acts in the heyday of arena rock. (You want to hear Pink Floyd, kid? First you get to hear Kansas.)
The same announcer went on to proclaim that "Carmina Burana Monumental Opera," which has been presented throughout Europe and Canada since 1995, was now in the midst of a "victory march throughout the world!" In context, such triumphalism sounded a little sinister, as though an invasion of the Sudetenland was in the offing.
