Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana was all the rage in my student days. It was first performed at the Frankfurt Opera of June 8, 1937. Its premiere was so successful that Orff instructed his publisher to destroy all of his earlier compositions. It may have facilitated the composer’s denazification process following World War II, since all of the texts dated from the thirteenth century in Medieval Latin, Old French, and Middle-High German. As the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) program note by René Spencer Sailer (written for the St. Lous Symphony) observed, those texts are “stubbornly secular, often bawdy verses touch[ing] on the corruption of the clergy, the benefits of intoxication, the sorrow of love, the glories of nature, and the pitiless wheel of fortune that determines our destinies.”
Attitudes towards this music have been on a roller-coaster ride since the Sixties, when it began to emerge on long-playing records. For the better part of my mature life, it has been dismissed as little more than trivial, if not downright infantile. However, time tends to assuage arrogance as well as healing wounds; and it would be fair to say that we now live in an age that is not afraid to have fun with both the text and Orff’s raucous instrumental settings.
Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, visiting conductor David Robertson was never shy in having fun with this music. Indeed, that fun was shared by not only the full forces of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) but also the SFS Chorus (directed by Jenny Wong) and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, prepared by Artistic Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe. The vocal soloists were soprano Susanna Phillips, tenor Arnold Livingston Geis, and baritone Will Liverman; but their solo work was quite modest compared to the demands Orff made on the full chorus and subsections of it. While the overall instrumentation was massive, there were also more intimate passages, including a dance episode for the duet of flute and timpani and several engaging solo passages by Concertmaster Jeremy Constant. For me, the high point of the performance came with Geis’ delivery of the swan being roasted for a feast (“Olim lacus colueram”).
As I sat down with my program last night, I anticipated that the high spirits of Carmina Burana would be complemented by the world premiere performance that would precede the intermission. This was John Adams’ piano concerto entitled “After the Fall” and composed on an SFS commission. The soloist was Víkingur Ólafsson, for whom the work was written. My first encounter with Adams was at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, when I attended a program entitled Meet the Minimalists. The final work on that program was “Grand PIanola Music;” and I was hooked from the very beginning to the final cadence. Sadly, those vivid memories may have been to my disadvantage, because “After the Fall” came across as little more than a weak shadow of what Adams had been doing some forty-odd years ago. The music lasted for about half an hour but had pretty much made its point within the first fifteen minutes.
On the other hand, the raucousness of Carmina Burana was much better complemented by the opening selection on the program. This was Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question.” The work is scored for only four flutes, one trumpet, and strings. The role of the trumpet is to “pose the question,” which it does with a single brief phrase. Each time we hear the question stated, the flutes try to reply. However, they never provide a satisfactory answer and grow more and more irritated in the rhetoric of their responses. Finally, the trumpet asks the question one last time; and this time there is no attempt at an answer. Robertson could not have done a better job in capturing the serenity of this enigmatic composition. Ives composed this work in 1906. Did Orff come up with an answer thirty years later?
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