Dance and Music Turn Fate`s Wheel in Carmina Burana

O Fortuna! Nashville Ballet and Nashville Symphony Chorus, presented by Dance St. Louis – photo by Marianne Leach
MISSOURI ARTS COUNCIL ▪ OCTOBER 2012
Dance and Music Turn Fate’s Wheel in Carmina Burana
by Barbara MacRobie
Carl Orff had no idea in 1934, when he decided to set two dozen obscure medieval poems to music, that
he was creating a classical rock star.
Nor could he have dreamed that the opening movement of his work would provide the soundtrack for Ozzy
Osbourne concerts, New England Patriots games, and commercials for York Peppermint Patties, Capital
One credit cards, and Gatorade.
But Orff’s Carmina Burana for multiple choruses, soloists, and orchestra has become one of the most
popular pieces of music ever written. The very way that the thunderous shouts and hissing whispers of
O Fortuna have saturated popular culture is a testament to the music’s visceral appeal. Says Charles
Bruffy, artistic director of the Kansas City Symphony Chorus, “There’s a magnetic hysteria about those
guttural rhythms that just gets people to their core.”
Charles Bruffy is one of the Missouri artists who are creating what has turned out to be a mini-festival of
Carmina Burana during the 2012-2013 performing arts season. Over the next five months, there are three
very different live performances of Orff’s masterwork: Kansas City Ballet in October, Kansas City
Symphony in November, and Dance St. Louis with Nashville Ballet in February.
Furthermore, in the past few years Carmina Burana has been performed in Missouri three other times,
each with a unique twist. This past February, the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music
and Dance turned to an arrangement for wind ensemble to partner choreography by Paula Weber. The St.
Louis Symphony and Chorus rocked Powell Hall in 2011 with Orff’s original full-throttle orchestration. And
in 2009, the Columbia Chorale added the nearly 3,400 pipes of the organ of Columbia’s Missouri United
Methodist Church to an arrangement Orff had made for percussion and two pianos.
What does it take to put on such an ambitious program? What makes Carmina Burana such a perennial
hit? We talked with more than a dozen choreographers, conductors, chorus directors, and performers to
find out. But first, we had to travel back in time.
Street poets and the Empress of the World
Carmina Burana’s journey to Missouri started five thousand miles away
and a thousand years ago with a bawdy band of vagabond poets
nicknamed the Goliards—“big mouths.” Students and young clerics,
they roamed the universities of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries,
singing of drinking, gambling, springtime, love, and lust.
But even while they lauded these earthly joys, the poets mourned how
fragile the joys were. How often was all happiness obliterated in an
instant by the whims of fate—personified by the goddess Fortuna and
her relentlessly turning wheel. Fortuna was of ancient Roman birth, but
she still had a powerful hold on people’s imaginations in the Christian
Middle Ages. “O Fortune, changeable as the moon, ever waxing, ever
waning…monstrous and empty.”
Sometime around 1230, somebody wrote down a few hundred Goliard
poems on leaves of parchment. About 100 years later, those pages
along with eight added illustrations were bound into a book. Somehow
the book wound up in the library of Benediktbeuern, a Benedictine
monastery in the Bavarian Alps. And there it sat, for hundreds of years.
1467, detail of Fortune’s wheel
from On the Fates of Famous Men
by Boccaccio
In a twist typical of Lady Fortune, if it hadn’t been for the French Revolution, Missourians would not be able
to experience Orff’s masterwork because he would never have written it. The turning point in the events
that brought the poetry into his hands occurred in 1803, when under pressure from France, whose armies
had been trampling the armies of the many German states for a decade, Benediktbeuern and thousands of
other monasteries fell victim to “secularization.” The German governments gave or sold the monks’ lands
to local bigwigs and carted off their treasures. Most of the monastery libraries of Bavaria wound up in the
Court Library in the capital city of Munich. It was while Court curator Johann Andreas Schmeller was
cataloguing the looted manuscripts that he found the book
he dubbed the Codex Buranus. He published it in 1847,
complete with the medieval illuminations, giving it the Latin
name Carmina Burana—“Songs from Beuern.”
Flash forward 87 years. On Holy Thursday 1934, Munich
composer and pioneering music educator Carl Orff started
reading a copy of Schmeller’s 1847 edition that he had
bought from a rare book dealer. He was instantly enthralled.
“Right when I opened it, on the very first page,” he recalled,
“I found the long-famous illustration of ‘Fortune with the
Wheel,’ and under it the lines: O Fortuna velut Luna statu
variabilis…The picture and the words seized hold of me…
A new work, a stage work with choruses for singing and
dancing, simply following the pictures and text, sprang to life
immediately in my mind.”
The front page of the Carmina Burana manuscript
that so captivated Carl Orff: Fortuna reigns within
her wheel.
That very day Orff sketched out his music for O Fortuna.
After a sleepless night in which the poems refused to leave
him alone, he set another. “I mourn the blows of Fortune with
flowing eyes, because her gifts she has treacherously taken
back from me.” With these two poems he had completed his
cantata’s first section, which he would name Fortuna
Imperatrix Mundi—Fortune, Empress of the World.
Three years later, on June 8, 1937 at the Frankfurt Opera,
Carmina Burana had its world premiere.
Stereophonic Spectacular | Kansas City Ballet
Kansas City Ballet, artistic director, William Whitener
Choreography by Toni Pimble
Conducted by Ramona Pansegrau
Kansas City Symphony, music director, Michael Stern
Kansas City Symphony Chorus, artistic director, Charles Bruffy
Singers from the Liberty High School Vocal Music Program, director, Dr. Rika Heruth
Soloists Sarah Tannehill, Chris Carr, and Casey Finnegan
October 12-14; October 19-21
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, Muriel Kauffman Theatre
From the moment the idea for Carmina Burana sprang into Orff’s mind, he planned the work to be staged
as total theater in what he called Theatrum Mundi, in which music, words, and movement combined to
produce an overwhelming effect. That is exactly what will happen in the first of the 2012-2013 Missouri
performances. Kansas City Ballet opens its second season in the spectacular new Kauffman Center for
the Performing Arts with a production new to the ballet company and to the city, with choreography by
Toni Pimble, artistic director of Eugene Ballet in Eugene, Oregon.
“Toni had done a beautiful piece for us in 2010 called Concerto Grosso—in fact we’re bringing it back
this March,” said Artistic Director William Whitener. “I saw Toni’s version of Carmina Burana on DVD and
determined it would be the right scale for our new theater.”
In 1996, 1998, and 2002, Kansas City Ballet had performed a more intimate Carmina Burana, created by
Paula Weber, chair of the dance division of the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music
and Dance. “Carmina Burana has a variety of choreographies; there isn’t a definitive version,” William
Whitener said.
Going all out presents special musical challenges. To a full orchestral complement of strings, woodwinds,
and brass, Orff adds two pianos, a celesta, and a vast array of percussion including several kettledrums,
a bass drum, a snare drum, a gong, a ratchet, a xylophone, three glockenspiels, and even more. Vocally,
he calls for a large mixed choir of women and men, a smaller mixed choir of women and men, a children’s
choir, and three soloists. Even with just the instruments, “It’s a little snug there in the pit!” said Ramona
Pansegrau, Kansas City music director. So where to put all those singers?
Toni Pimble’s choreography calls for 24
choristers to be onstage in costume and to
interact with the dancers. For the rest,
Ramona thought of a way to use the
architecture of the Muriel Kauffman Theatre
to create “an amazing sense of antiphonal
stereophonic sound.”
The Kauffman Theatre, one of the two
major performing halls within the multi-part
Kauffman Center, is shaped like a
horseshoe. The stage, framed by a
proscenium arch, and the orchestra pit run
horizontally across the horseshoe’s open
end. Flanking the stage on each side are
three tiers of box seats. That is where
Ramona wanted to place the chorus.
Muriel Kauffman Theatre – photo by Tim Hursley
From a business aspect, this was tricky. The boxes are owned by individual donors and companies, and
are not part of Kansas City’s seating inventory. “We had a long discussion with the theater. The Kauffman
was kind enough to block them off for our use,” Ramona told us.
“So we’re stacking the chorus three stories high on each side of the stage,” she said. “With different
sounds coming from different places, I’m hoping it’s an absolutely stupendous effect!”
For the children’s chorus, the Kansas City Symphony Chorus will be joined by young women from Liberty
High School. “We have two casts of about 20 voices each, which is great because it gives more gals the
chance to perform,” said Rika Heruth, Liberty’s director of choirs.
Conducting for dancers is different from
conducting only for music, Ramona said.
“I enjoy it so much to use the music the
way it’s intended to be heard, yet to be
able to adapt it to the needs of the
dancers so they can perform to their
fullest capability,” she said. “Also, Toni
choreographed with specific tempos in
mind, so I have to stay with her vision.”
Toni Pimble spent three weeks in August
teaching the Kansas City Ballet dancers
her work, which she had originally created
in 1992 for her Eugene Ballet. “I videotape
all my ballets and work off the video,
because I don’t remember every single
step myself,” she told us. “It’s great for the
dancers, too, because they’re looking
Josh Spell & Travis Guerin in Carmina rehearsal – photo by KCBalletMedia
at the original cast and how they performed
it. I’ve changed some things, though, to make it work for the Kansas City Ballet dancers because all
dancers are different. There’s always some finessing that goes on.”
Toni said that although the movement quality of her choreography was very contemporary, dramatically
she followed the structure of the five scenes that Orff built into his work: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, Primo
Vere (“In Spring,” which includes Uf dem Anger, “On the Green”), In Taberna (“In the Tavern”), Cour
d’Amours (“The Court of Love”), and the turn of the wheel back to
O Fortuna: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.
“For ‘In Spring,’ I use the dancers almost like creatures coming out
of the earth…the longing one feels in the springtime, the desire to
mate. Then it becomes more human. There’s a medieval village
dance. For just the ladies, I do a little bath scene. In the tavern
scene, the men onstage are sitting at tables drinking and
gambling. It’s very energetic and lively—it’s a lot of fun for the
guys to perform!
“The court of love is more formal, but still very romantic and full of
sensual tension. Then it comes full circle to O Fortuna.
“I think so many choreographers have loved doing the piece
because it’s so rhythmically interesting,” Toni said. “The challenge
is there are many repetitions, because all the music is songs and
there are many verses. You need to make each verse different
and interesting but still connected to the whole.”
Springtime, from the original manuscript
Kansas City audiences are fortunate in 2012 to be able to experience two choreographers’ visions. Paula
Weber mounted her version on her students on February 12—making another circle, as she had originally
created her work for her students in 1994 before revising it for Kansas City Ballet in 1996. “The version
I did on our kids in February was the same I did for Kansas City Ballet, and they performed really well
considering the difficulty,” Paula said.
The UMKC students also performed at
the Kauffman Center for the Performing
Arts, but in a different hall. Unlike the
Muriel Kauffman Theatre, which is the
performance home not only of Kansas
City Ballet but of the Lyric Opera of
Kansas City, Helzberg Hall is designed
primarily for instrumental and vocal
music. There is no proscenium arch and
no stage curtain, and the stage extends
into the audience in the egg-shaped
auditorium. Behind the stage are the pipe
organ and the rows of seats that make up
the choral loft.
“The choir was up in the loft, but the
orchestra and the soloists were on the
stage floor with the dancers,” said Paula.
“It sounded fabulous. Helzberg is an
incredibly gorgeous hall.”
UMKC dancers Brittany Dusky, David Cross, Branson Bice & Megan Squires,
Conservatory Choirs and Wind Symphony behind them – photo by Mike Strong
The orchestra was the Conservatory Wind Symphony—brass, woodwinds, and percussion. They played
an arrangement of Carmina Burana written in 1994 by Spanish composer Juan Vicente Mas Quiles, where
he replaced the string parts with woodwinds but kept the rest of the orchestration including the two pianos.
For Paula’s choreography she created a story of flirtations, courtships, betrayals, and reconciliations.
“The music is incredibly powerful,” she said. “Yes, the O Fortuna moment is special because it starts and
ends the piece, and of course you hear it in commercials and movies so everyone knows it. But when you
listen to all the other music, there’s not a piece in Carmina Burana that isn’t significant.”
See previews of Kansas City Ballet’s Carmina Burana
▪ The company’s YouTube site features a teaser trailer, an interview with Toni Pimble including footage of rehearsals, and
interviews with principal dancers.
Magical Images of the Mind | Kansas City Symphony
Kansas City Symphony, music director, Michael Stern
Conducted by Nicholas McGegan
Kansas City Symphony Chorus, artistic director, Charles Bruffy
Soloists Cyndia Sieden, Marc Molomot, and Michael Kelly
November 16-18
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, Helzberg Hall
A month after the Kansas City Symphony and Chorus perform with Kansas City Ballet, they move out of
the orchestra pit and boxes of the Kauffman Theatre onto the stage and choral loft of Helzberg Hall to put
the music of Carmina Burana in uncontested pride of place.
“I’m intrigued about the
difference,” said Charles
Bruffy, who is preparing the
chorus for both the Kansas
City Ballet program and the
Kansas City Symphony’s
own program. “When you
are watching the activity of
the stage and absorbing
the music at the same time,
your perception of the work
is more prescribed. With
only the sound of the
music, people can remain
open to wherever and
whatever their mind and
spirit take them.”
Kansas City Symphony in Helzberg Hall – photo by Chris Lee
Orff left this possibility wide open in the subtitle he gave his work: Cantiones profanae, cantoribus et choris
cantandae, comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis—“Profane songs for singers and choruses
accompanied by instruments and magical images.”
“It’s like a radio play—you can use your own imagination to see how it might look in your mind’s eye,” said
Nicholas McGegan, who is guest conducting the Kansas City Symphony performances.
Carmina Burana is one of many scores originally written for dance where the music is so strong that it has
gained an independent life in the concert hall—such as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Debussy’s Afternoon of
a Faun, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Prokofiev’s suites from Romeo and Juliet.
“Carmina Burana has a really clear sense of melody with tap-your-feet rhythm,” said David Robertson,
music director of the St. Louis Symphony, who conducted Carmina Burana as the season finale May 5-7,
2011 (filmed in full by the Nine Network of Public Media and now on its website). “Orff stayed away from
counterpoint, where different lines of music go their various ways, in a way that connects up with folk
songs and lots of kinds of popular music—dance music, pop tunes, campground songs, nursery songs.”
The music is in fact so accessible that Orff’s skill is
easy to miss, said James Richards, professor of music
and interim dean of the College of Fine Arts and
Communication, University of Missouri-St. Louis.
He is conducting the Dance St. Louis performances in
February. “As a work of art, Carmina Burana is a finely
thought-out and crafted piece,” he said.
David Robertson praised Orff’s deliberate craftsmanship
as well. “All the pauses, all the tempos, that Orff asks for
need to be carefully observed,” he said. “Otherwise you
get lots of nice moments but the overall feeling of the
piece does not have this extraordinary circular arc.”
St. Louis Symphony – photo by Scott Ferguson
The music makes an impact even when shorn of its
orchestra. In 1956, so that more people could perform his work, Orff approved an arrangement by Wilhelm
Kilmayer that reduced the instrumentation to percussion and two pianos. This version was performed on
November 14, 2009, by the Columbia Chorale at Missouri United Methodist Church, conducted by Alex
Innecco. (In 2011 Innecco returned to his native Brazil; the Chorale is now directed by Dr. Marci Major.)
The Chorale made one splendid addition to Kilmayer’s arrangement: the church’s mammoth 1930 E.M.
Skinner pipe organ.
Cheryl Brewer, principal secretary at Blue Ridge Elementary, has been singing as an alto with the
Columbia Chorale for 20 years, and she remembers “it was a big sound—majestic—magnificent!” Creating
the organ part was up to Rochelle Parker, M.D., a hospitalist in internal medicine at University Hospital and
the associate organist at the church. She followed the vocal and piano score—and improvised.
“I listened to a recording
of Carmina Burana and
tried to duplicate the
orchestra sounds,” she
said. “The capabilities of
that organ go from barely
audible to the full power
with the 32-foot pedal
stops.”
That echoes James
Richards’ comments
about Orff’s use of the
powers at his command.
“While the musical forces
may be huge, Orff’s
Columbia Chorale at Missouri United Methodist Church with Skinner organ; photo by Joel Anderson
emphasis is as much
on the variety as on the grandeur,” he said. “Large orchestras do not always play loudly. The sound can be
robust, but the bigger value is that there are all these different colors to combine in so many ways. There
may be 70 people sitting in the pit but only six playing. Then a few pages later, everyone is playing all-out.”
When that explosion of sound does happen, there’s nothing like it.
“Nothing prepares you for the overwhelming force of that many musicians,” said David Robertson.
“The closest anyone comes is a wall of amplifiers at a rock concert—and it beats that.”
Romantic and Spiritual Journey | Dance St. Louis
Dance St. Louis and University of Missouri-St. Louis
Dance St. Louis artistic & executive director, Michael Uthoff
Nashville Ballet, artistic director and choreographer, Paul Vasterling
MADCO, artistic director, Stacy West
UMSL University Orchestra, conductor, Dr. James Richards
UMSL University Singers, director of choral studies, Dr. Jim Henry
Bach Society of St. Louis, music director, Dennis Sparger
St. Louis Children’s Choirs, artistic director, Barbara Berner
Soloists Stella Markou, Tim Waurick, and Jeffrey Heyl
Conducted by Dr. James Richards
February 21-24
Touhill Center for the Performing Arts, Anheuser-Busch Performance Hall
Michael Uthoff had wanted to mount Carmina Burana ever since he took up the reins of dance presenting
organization Dance St. Louis six years ago. His original dream was to restore the choreography created by
his father, Ernest Uthoff, which he had already presented when he directed Hartford Ballet and Ballet
Arizona. The musicians would be from the University of Missouri-St. Louis; the dancers would be from St.
Louis-area dance companies. But a destructive flood at the warehouse where the sets and costumes were
stored put an end to those plans. “The restaging would have been prohibitively expensive,” Michael said.
By that time, however, the UMSL musical team was so excited about the project that he decided to look for
a pre-existing dance production. “It wasn’t easy,” Michael remembers, “because of course I was spoiled by
what my dad had done. When I encountered Carmina Burana in Nashville, though, I was delighted. Paul
Vasterling deals with the work in a far more abstract way than my father, but he keeps a very dramatic
process, and he captures the grandeur of the piece.”
The artistic director of Nashville Ballet since 1998, Paul
Vasterling made his Carmina Burana in 2009 and revived the
popular production in 2011. “The music is lovely and fun,” he
said. “It has this innate simplicity—dance can wind around it.
“I started to look at the history of the Codex and where the
source material for the words came from. That brought me
back to this idea of the original documents. I started to think
about what parchment is—how because it’s made of animal
hide it can be written on and erased several times. My
imagination was that this Carmina Burana represents an idea
of human development. The music takes you on this journey.
Sadie Bo Harris & Jon Upleger: love in balance,
in costumes evoking parchment
– photo by Marianne Leach
“There’s a redemption at the end. Many of my ballets are
about redemption—many choreographers have a couple of
themes they go back to during their careers. The court of love
becomes about heaven. There’s this gorgeous poem, In trutina
(‘in my mind’s wavering balance’), about the balance we find in
a romantic love relationship. There is a final pas de deux that
deals with the moment of balance in the context of all this stuff
we’ve been through—and then we go back to the circle, the
circle of life, back to the wheel, back to the beginning.”
The chorus is on stage with the dancers, ranged on risers behind them. “The symphony is in front of us. So
it’s a shared experience. There’s a surround of the dance; it’s smack in the middle. It feels like a ritual, and
that’s perfect for this ballet.”
The performances open with Michael Uthoff’s own Bach
Cantata #10 performed by MADCO, the professional
dance company in residence at the Touhill Performing
Arts Center. “It’s great for us to be working on projects
with dancers from somewhere else,” said MADCO Artistic
Director Stacy West. “It makes us better artists
to have collaborations with people we’re not used to.”
All the stops are being pulled out to make the event a
highlight of Dance St. Louis’ season and one of the
premier events in the campus’ 50th anniversary. The
student chorus is being augmented by the St. Louis
Children’s Choirs and the Bach Society, St. Louis’ oldest
continuous choral society. “We are drawing on our faculty
to be the principal players in the orchestra,” said James
Richards. And for the first time in the 10-year history of
the Touhill, the full orchestra pit is being used.
Monica Alunday & Jason Flodder, MADCO, in Bach
Cantata #10 – photo by Steve Truesdell
“We have never actually had the orchestra pit all the way open because the size it is now accommodates
most orchestras of about 50 pieces,” said Jason Stahr, the Touhill’s director of operations and stage
services. “We have to pull out the first two rows of seats. The seats are sitting on platforms that are
removable, but in the whole 10 years we’ve been here, those platforms have never been touched.
Nobody until now has pushed the envelope!”
How to roast a swan
Orff’s music has the power to elicit completely different
but equally compelling responses from choreographers.
For instance, In Taberna begins not with a jolly drinking
song but a chilling lament. A solo tenor, singing painfully
high in his range, is the voice of a dead swan roasting
on a spit. The swan cries: “Olim lacus colueram…Once
I lived on lakes; once I was beautiful. Now I am black
and roasting fiercely. I cannot fly—I see bared teeth!”
The three choreographers to whom we talked roast their
swan in distinctive ways.
Paul Vasterling sees this scene, he says, as “a vision
of hell.” It is the low point on the spiritual journey of his
ballet. His white-clad ballerina is whipped about by
flames made of painted silk.
Toni Pimble puts her ballerina literally on a spit. “She’s
wearing a belt that is suspended from this huge spit,
so she goes through all these contortions while the
Alexandra Meister, Nashville Ballet – photo by Heather Thorne
men of the onstage chorus are sitting at tables eating
and drinking. It’s a lot of fun! Though the role requires a really good inner ear. You can’t be like me and
get seasick. I wanted the dancer to be comfortable, so I asked the ladies to audition for the role only if
they wanted to. They all tried out! We had one who could
manage it. Jill Marlow is great—she handles all the spinning
very well.”
Paula Weber has no literal swan. Instead, she stages a
scene of manipulation and seduction, as a woman toys with
man after man and then drops them. “She eats them up,”
Paula said, “and spits them out.”
Paula is captivated by the idea that the manuscript lay
hidden from the rest of the world for hundreds of years in a
monastery, so she begins her O Fortuna with the monks.
“Right there before our eyes we see the poems come to life
in the minds of the monks,” she said. The wheel is subtly
referenced by the circular patterns of the monks’
movements.
Jill Marlow, Kansas City Ballet – photo by KCBalletMedia
Toni Pimble, on the other hand, has a physical wheel, “with
a man extended on it, kind of like the DaVinci drawing.” And
for Paul Vasterling, Fortuna herself makes it onstage, with
her wheel symbolized by her enormous skirt.
Words for the music
The poems of Carmina Burana are written in medieval Latin, Middle High German, and Old French. So one
of the first decisions for any performance is how the words should be pronounced.
“One of the ways we think we can tell how an old language was pronounced is by looking at the sounds
the poets rhymed that don’t rhyme any more in the modern languages,” said Dr. Dale Simpson, head of the
English department at Southern Missouri State University in Joplin, who specializes in medieval literature
and linguistics.
Spelling is also a clue, especially because it was not standardized during the Middle Ages. “Latin was used
very consistently into modern times, and the spelling reflects changes in pronunciation over time,” said Dr.
Johanna Kramer, assistant professor at University of Missouri-Columbia, whose focus is medieval and
Renaissance studies. “Scribes will actually write words based on how they pronounced them.”
A Missouri resource for the past 20 years is the pronunciation guide created for the St. Louis Symphony
Orchestra by language coach Lola Rand in preparation for the 1994 recording. “She did a phonetic
transcription of what she felt was historically accurate, and that’s what we are still using,” said Amy Kaiser,
director of the St. Louis Symphony Chorus since 1995. Amy has shared her materials with Dr. Jim Henry,
director of UMSL’s University Singers, for the Dance St. Louis performances.
The availability of genuine
scholarship published on
the internet has been an
invaluable resource, said Charles Bruffy. Like the St. Louis Symphony and UMSL singers, his Kansas City
Symphony Chorus will use Germanic pronunciation of the Latin rather than modern Church Latin.
The Dance St. Louis team faces the additional challenge of three choirs who will not rehearse together
until the week of the performances. Both Dennis Sparger, music director of the Bach Society, and Barbara
Berner, artistic director of the St. Louis Children’s Choirs (which also sang for the St. Louis Symphony
performances), are working closely with Jim Henry to ensure that everyone will be on the same page. “Jim
and I sat down together for two hours and went through the score measure by measure to double-check on
pronunciation, phrasing, where we breathe and where we don’t,” said Dennis Sparger.
All three 2012-13 performances are providing the complete lyrics in the original languages and English.
“We hope the audience will get there early enough to peruse the lyrics and the translation so they get a
rough idea of what each song is about,” said Jim Henry. “But it’s not critical, because the way that Orff set
the actual sounds of the words just works aurally independent of the actual meaning of the text. The
language is the percussion of the piece.”
What to perform before the wheel turns?
At about one hour in length, Carmina Burana is not a full concert program, so other works must be chosen
that will create a harmonious and illuminating experience.
For the St. Louis Symphony’s 2011 performance, David Robertson played a bold stroke: the world
premiere of Symphony No. 3 by American composer Christopher Rouse. The new work was a match for
Orff on Carmina Burana’s own terms—as Chuck Lavazzi of KDHX-FM wrote, it was “an aggressive mix of
wild cacophony and surprising lyricism.” Audiences gave the new symphony standing ovations.
For the Kansas City Symphony’s November performances, Nicholas McGegan has also chosen a fulllength symphony. This one, however, is from the 18th century repertory for which this guest conductor is
best known—Franz Josef Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony No. 94, the epitome of classical clarity and wit.
By coincidence, Haydn’s music also begins Act I for Kansas City Ballet with Mercury by Lynne TaylorCorbett. “With five movements from different Haydn symphonies, it’s a bright and vivacious opening,” said
William Whitener. “Then we shift the mood with End of Time.” The music changes to a cellist and a pianist
(who is conductor Ramona Pansegrau) and to the Romanticism of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata in
G Minor. Instead of the full high-flying ballet company, there are only one man and one woman—imagined
by choreographer Ben Stevenson as the last people alive on earth. “End of Time is quiet and poignant.
Now the stage has been set for the dark opening of Carmina Burana.”
Michael Uthoff’s Act I choice contrasts both musically and spiritually. Instead of the straightforward songs
of Carmina Burana, J.S. Bach’s Cantata #10 twists its melodies into intricate contrapuntal patterns, The
text is a German expansion of the Magnificat, the Virgin Mary’s song of praise—“My soul doth magnify
the Lord.” Says Michael, “It’ll give you a more angelical view.”
Full circle
"Fortune smiled on me when she put into my hands a Würzburg second-hand bookshop’s catalogue, in
which I found a title that drew me in with magical force,” said Orff. Fortune is certainly smiling on our state
during this 2012-2013 performing arts season.
O Fortuna! Nashville Ballet – photo by Heather Thorne
From the first notes—“when I feel like I’m throwing the switch and lighting up the entire nation’s power grid
with a single downbeat,” says David Robertson—to the final chord, Missouri audiences are being treated to
a work that, as William Whitener says, “has the ability to dig deep into the soul.
“People are not only touched individually, but in live performance we have a shared primal response,”
he says. “That’s part of the reason for the work’s tremendous appeal.”
Robin D. Fish, Jr., executive assistant at Good News Magazine who has performed with the St. Louis
Symphony Chorus since 2005, summed it up this way on his blog after singing the performances in 2008.
“It is music that revels in an excess of food, drink, love, and other amusements; music that celebrates
spring, youth, and pleasure; and music in which all these things are held between two shattering
statements on changeable and changeless fate. It is seriously pagan music preserved for centuries in a
monastery; it is seriously primitive music that survives, like the text before it, as a great work of art; and
it is seriously fun music that, quite understandably, draws huge crowds to this day.”
Learn more about Missouri arts groups
▪ Bach Society of St. Louis
▪ Columbia Chorale
▪ Dance St. Louis
▪ Kansas City Ballet
▪ Kansas City Symphony
▪ St. Louis Children’s Choirs
▪ University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance
▪ University of Missouri-St. Louis College of Fine Arts and Communication
Dance and Music Turn Fate’s Wheel In Carmina Burana was created in October 2012 for the Missouri Arts Council, a state
agency and division of the Department of Economic Development. The Missouri Arts Council provides grants to nonprofit
organizations that meet our strategic goals of increasing participation in the arts in Missouri, growing Missouri’s economy
using the arts, and strengthening Missouri education through the arts. For information, contact moarts@ded.mo.gov.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Please feel free to share and distribute. Attribution: Courtesy of the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.