Word: carmina
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Incantatory Drones. Ever since he wrote his first major work, Carmina Burana (1936), Orff has steadily pared away the body of Western musical devices-themes, counterpoints, harmonic progressions and so on-to arrive at a skeletal idiom of powerfully primitive, repetitive sounds. In Prometheus, what little melody was left was expertly sung by U.S. Baritone Carlos Alexander as Prometheus and Australian Mezzo Althea Bridges as the tormented lo. The other singers, obscured by grotesque masks and headdresses, declaimed the drama in incantatory drones, while the orchestra rolled along in seemingly endless ostinato figures or erupted with brash punctuations...
...half of the program were set aside during intermission. The orchestra assembled on the stage with fewer strings than usual, with a mammoth tuba lurking at the rear of the brass section, and with several megatons of percussion prominently displayed. This artillery was lined up to attack Orff's Carmina Burana, at best a second rate piece of music but unfailingly successful as a spectacle...
...program calculated to drive the audience into an unholy frenzy. The first half featured delicate works by Elizabethans William Byrd and Thomas Tallis and neo-Elizabethan Benjamin Britten. But after intermission the choir was joined by the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra in a performance of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, a bacchanale celebrating the headiest side of springtime...
...both music and text Carmina Burana is about the body, and it rarely even pays lip service to the soul. Under Forbes' vigorous direction, chorus and orchestra turned every available muscle to the task and produced violently contrasting dynamics and bruising rhythmic drive. The choir commanded a seemingly inexhaustable supply of volume which swept in wave upon wave, a high powered form of the "Bolero" crescendo. The attacks of the chorus and orchestra were explosive and for the most part precise...
...three soloists in the Carmina were all praise-worthy. Unconditional raves go to James Jones. His voice is an incredibly flexible instrument capable of producing a full, rich, often truly beautiful tone as well as a wide variety of expressive registrations. He is a gifted actor as well and a thoughtful application of both these talents produced the most genuinely exciting performance of the evening...