Word: carmina
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Aside from this flaw, though, the Boston Ballet has come a long way from its previous performances and reputation. Carmina Burana is for anyone who wants to be dazzled and energized...
...Boston Ballet is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary season with just such a project--the revival of a revolutionary piece of dance and music called Carmina Burana. The work is a collection of poems celebrating spring, the bawdiness of tavern life and the complications of love, probably written by students, scholars and monks who roamed Western Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries. Carl Orff, a German composer, set the poems to music in 1937 and the score now includes choral and solo singing in Latin, German and French...
SUCH A DANCE must aim to hit a chord deep inside of every viewer. Carmina Burana transcends its time by becoming a tour de force, encapsulating a series of paradoxes. The dancers constantly intertwine themselves around each other's arms and legs, yet each person remains very distinct. The rhythm of the music intensifies, then plummets down to slow-motion tunes. Pushing and pulling against each other, the dancers seem to create curves like molded clay while posing in angular, geometric forms. Although Carmina Burana is definitely a lusty, almost carnal piece about the bodies and desires of human beings...
...Boston Ballet has, unfortunately, made one mistake in the program. Before Carmina Burana is a disappointing 25-minute Pas de Dix choreographed by George Balanchine. Taken from a full-length ballet called Raymonda, it is supposed to highlight the elegance and precision of classical ballet--a task which, even though accomplished, isn't worth the effort. Traditional, sappy, and restrained, the excerpt is uninspiring and seems to make the dancers less careful about their technique. Although they briefly spice up the atmosphere now and then by switching the dancers to Flamenco style, the general effect is nothing but cute...
DIED. Carl Orff, 86, German composer who turned his back on complex modern styles to fashion a highly personal idiom of folklike melodies and elemental rhythms; in Munich. In Carmina Burana, a 1936 cantata based on writings collected by a 13th century Benedictine monk, Orff used simple, vigorous tunes and choral chants to celebrate the joys of food, drink and love. He pared down to an even more stylized primitivism in his Antigonae (1947-48) and Oedipus der Tyrann...