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Album review: A Taiwanese Carmina Burana of military precision and unexpected intimacy

By John Terauds on November 13, 2012

Thanks to its primal, visceral power, Carmina Burana is is one of the great crossover works of 20th century art music. Composer Carl Orff sustained the strength in a two-piano-and-percussion arrangement, which is what the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir presents tomorrow at Koerner Hall.

Conductor Agnes Grossmann, best known in this city as the founder of the Toronto Summer Music festival, made a recording of Carmina Burana with the Taiwan National Choir shortly after being named its artistic director and conductor in 2007.

It’s taken five years for that performance to be released on disc, by Montreal’s Analekta label, in time for the choir’s North American tour this fall.

Orff’s 1956 arrangement for concert performance leaves the solo and choral parts untouched. The orchestral percussion parts (including timpani) also remain the same. The remaining orchestration is reduced for two pianos. Because the focus throughout is on rhythm and simple block harmonies, no one will miss the orchestra. If anything, this arrangement brings an additional crispness to the music.

Carmina Burana comes from a collection of 250 largely secular medieval songs discovered at a Bavarian abbey in the early 19th century. Orff picked 24 songs and poems out of this pile, shaping them into a loose narrative depicting the fickle hand of fate, introduced in the famous opening chorus, “O Fortuna.”

Grossmann does the three-part “scenic cantata” full justice, avoiding several little stylistic tics that have crept into its performance tradition since the Frankfurt premiere in 1937. This is the real, rigorous original deal, where it is Orff’s rhythmic invention — not a conductor’s whim — that establishes pacing, breathing and a sense of speeding up and slowing down.

The choir of 44 largely university-aged singers is impeccably balanced and military in precision. They are joined by the lily-white voices of the Miaoli Jianguo Elementary School Children’s Choir of Taibei.

The soloists include wonderfully flexible German baritone Christian Miedl and Canada’s own star countertenor Daniel Taylor, who conveys power and pathos as the roasting swan in “Olim lacus colueram” (“Once I dwelled on lakes, once I had been beautiful, when I was a swan. Poor wretch! Now black and well roasted!…”). Taibei native soprano Yuh-Chyi Jou is excellent.

The two Taiwanese pianists — Hsien-Jung Hsieh and Chien-Yung Yang — are also impressive in their power and absolute adhesion to Grossmann’s baton.

There are dozens of fine recordings of Carmina Burana out there. My favourite sections of this effort come in Part III, which turns its sights on love. The percussion-free piano accompaniment that introduces this section gives the music an attractive intimacy — and showcases Jou’s pretty-yet-powerful voice.

For more details on this album, click here.

The Taiwan National Choir performs at Koerner Hall on Nov. 23 in a programme far removed from Orff’s primitivism, featuring sublime motets by Anton Bruckner and Johannes Brahms’ Zigeunerlieder, among other treats. You’ll find the details here.

Here is the choir in action, singing “O Fortuna”:

John Terauds

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