Word: carmina
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CARL ORFF: CATULLI CARMINA (Columbia). Gee whillikers! Such classical music and such libidinous Latin! Actually Orff's version of The Songs of Catullus is one of the most fascinating pieces of music composed in this century (completed in 1943). Its explicit text by Catullus (847-54 B.C.) is a delightfully, powerfully pagan ode to the joys and heartbreaks of love and lust. Eugene Ormandy's Philadelphia Orchestra and the Temple University Choirs understand and communicate the wild spirit of the piece...
...what is musically interesting. Here Martin fails. The music of La Mystere de la Nativite consists of perhaps half a dozen simple motives and devices which are repeated one at a time and without significant alteration for nearly two hours. It was as if he had drained Orff's Carmina Burana of all its excitement and retained only the simple-mindedness, or took all the musical lines from Stravinsky's Agon, and instead of playing them concurrently, had them played one at a time...
Preposterous as the story is, it gives Ronnefeld a fine chance to exercise his talent for musical satire; the score glitters with echoes of half a dozen com posers, from Berg to Bartok. Carl Orff's cantata Carmina Burana is brilliantly parodied by an offstage male chorus singing a salty Latin text on the mating habits of ants; acidulous Stravinskyan brasses turn up in Act III. The real wonder is that despite the borrowing Composer Ronnefeld's score has a character of its own brash, melodramatic, full of rhythmic fire...
...background, no fewer than 20 different percussion instruments fired the cauldron with a tingling, thwunking cacophony. Anyone wandering into Stuttgart's Opera House last week would have quickly recognized, in both words and music, the style of Germany's most highly regarded living composer, Carl (Carmina Burana) Orff, 65. Less obviously, the dark, demonic and shatteringly effective scene was the opening of a Christmas pageant...
...Orff's Carmina consists of settings of two dozen medieval Latin and German poems on the subjects of fate, spring, drinking, gambling, and love. All the performers summoned plenty of vitality, and there was fine solo singing by Aletha Munro, soprano; Robert Patterson, bass; and Charles A. Campbell, tenor. The audience was wild in its approval. Personally, however, I found that this work does not wear well at all. It is monotonous, and its unvaried strophic repetitions soon become tiring. Only in the short, lyrical "In Trutina" (No. 21), for soprano solo, did Orff touch greatness...