Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, performed Thursday night at Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and chorus, with guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier, is easy to criticize—but hard to resist. Traditionalists and academicians disdain the relentless rhythms and facile harmonies, but American audiences have consistently loved the piece for over half a century.
And with good reason. The texts, drawn from medieval lyrics rediscovered in the nineteenth century, describe lust, love, desire for alcohol, despair, and rage against the establishment in terms that are simple yet poetic. Orff managed, with the most obvious gestures, to express all of those ubiquitous human moods in musical terms. Though he never again reached the same level of success as a composer, he demonstrated, in Carmina Burana, a magical sense of timing and momentum with a simple, unfailingly effective structure; the crashing fall from ecstasy to despair at the climax is one of the finest goose-bump moments in all of music.
There is another criticism leveled at the composer. Orff has been accused of collaboration with the Nazi regime, and Carmina Burana, which premiered in 1937, was widely accepted in Germany at the time; however, there’s no specifically Nazi material in the words or music. Indeed, the ability to produce a piece of choral music in Germany in 1937 that didn’t specifically bolster Hitler’s cause was something of an accomplishment. Given that none of us can say for certain how we might respond to the pressures of a terror-driven government, it’s best to give Orff a pass on that point, and judge the music on its own merit.
Although subtlety is not the point of Carmina Burana, conductor Tortelier occasionally allowed the noise to overwhelm the music; the chorus, grand and radiant, wasn’t quite as precise as usual. Still, when the big moments arrived, everything was in place. Soprano soloist Talise Travigne and baritone soloist Weston Hurt successfully navigated Orff’s sometimes excruciatingly difficult vocal writing; tenor Christopher Pfund turned the notoriously ungrateful aria of the roasting swan into a crowd-pleasing interlude.
The concert had opened with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, with Orion Weiss, a new figure on the concert circuit, as soloist. The placement of this delicacy next to Orff’s rollicking cantata invites speculation: was the programming motivated by a desire for extreme contrast—or, maybe, to point out the intriguing shadows that color the joy of both works?
At any rate, Weiss performed with remarkable sensitivity and a beautiful, appropriately controlled tone, with Tortelier and the orchestra providing a solid foundation. The middle movement, serene and aria-like, proved to be the high point of the evening.
Photo: Yan Pascal Tortelier (Courtesy IMG Artists)
