Over a million people world-wide had already flocked to Art Concerts' record-breaking presentation of Carmina Burana, Carl Orff's choral masterpiece, before it finally made it to England for the first time in January 2009. Conceived as a 'Monumental Opera' in 1995 to commemorate the composer's birth, it has been performed more than 150 times in 36 countries to great acclaim. Demand for the epic has been so great that an extra night was added at London's newest venue, the O2, enabling thousands more to witness its debut here.
       Orff completed Carmina Burana in Munich in 1936. He based it on an edited selection of texts from a (13 Latin chronicle found amidst the ruins of a secularised Bavarian monastery at Benedictbeuern. Serendipity had led the composer to a printed edition of the Codex in an antiquarian bookshop's catalogue. The lyrical poetry of its songs and poems entranced him - despite a medley of Late Latin, some Middle High German, and a little Old French; memorably defined as 'kitchen, dog and church' Latin, interlaced with early vernaculars. He arranged them for voice and instrument in what is still a unique, arousing musical amalgam: the confluence of liturgical plainchant and medieval dance, alongside sonority and syncopation.
       The work's magical images ('imaginibus magicis') celebrate life and death, fortune and fall, pleasure and pain. Staged, they present a lavish miracle play glorifying the profane joy of earthly delights in three parts; devoted respectively to the stimuli of, spring, wine and love. Extraordinarily, Orff's sybarites were actually history's first hippies: a colourful cast of clerical drop-outs and rebels (drunkards, lechers, paupers and itinerants) who lived outside society. A motley, marginalised crew of holy fools and orgiastic celebrants, their communes pre-dating our own by centuries.
       Art Concerts chose to add new stage effects, choreography and lighting to the O2 stage show, and very impressive it was too. From the moment a cloaked, torch-bearing choir filed on stage to the sound of church bells, prior to launching into a spine-tingling rendition of O Fortuna, accompanied by fireworks, flames and a display of stilt-walkers, acrobats and unearthly figures, we suspended disbelief. Wrapped in sheeting, the central monolith unveiled a scaffolded wheel of fortune. Periodically, automatons circled its heights as if upon a giant cuckoo clock marking time. Each and every character proved larger than life. Thirty dancers delighted with 300 costume-changes drawn from myriad sources - esoteric visual allusions to Bosch, Breugel and the Tarot abounded. Talented soloists added to the enchantment; happily, they were grand-standed above the stage, unlike the rest of the company, who would have benefited from greater elevation. In the main, acoustics were fine, necessarily augmented by amplification across the vast auditorium.
Carmina Burana is a controversial and challenging composition which has rarely seen the light of day in its entirety. Chapeaux to the producers for daring to stage it in unorthodox, visionary terms that even Orff might have approved of. Truly, a once in a lifetime phenomenon.
Caroline Kellett Fraysse