Rites of spring

Carlos Izcaray

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Chorus and Children's Chorus conducted by Carlos Izcaray
What: Music of Steve Reich and Carl Orff
When: May 1–4, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall

[Find out more about the music with the symphony program notes and my symphony preview post.]

The St. Louis Symphony has a long history with Carl Orff's 1936 “scenic cantata" "Carmina Burana," from its first performance back in 1961 with Edouard Van Remoortel on the podium to David Robertson's nicely balanced performance back in May of 2011. There's even a fine 1994 recording with Leonard Slatkin and an all-star lineup of soloists that is apparently still available both in disc form and as an MP3 download from amazon.com.

The "Carmina Burana" we're getting this week from the young Venezuelan conductor Carlos Izcaray—which his web site describes as his "US symphonic debut"—ranks right up there with that of Slatkin and (my favorite) David Amado back in 2003. Like Amado, Mr. Izcaray takes a highly theatrical approach to this material without in any way compromising the music.

Nmon Ford

That's thoroughly in keeping with the composer's intentions. Based on an 1847 collection of secular poetry celebrating food, drink, gambling, and (especially) sex by anonymous authors from the 12th and 13th centuries that turned up in 1803 in the Benedictine monastery in Beuren, Germany, "Carmina Burana" was envisioned by Orff as the basis for a choral cantata with some mimed action and “magic tableaux." And, in fact, the first performance in Frankfurt in 1937 was fully staged, with dancers, sets, and costumes. It's usually presented strictly as a concert piece these days (although the Nashville Ballet gave us an impressive staging of it here this past February), but the composer's theatrical intentions are evident both in the music and in his writing about it.

The three soloists this week all have solid opera credentials. So, as you might expect, their performances were acted as well as they were sung—and they were sung quite well indeed.

Orff gave some of the strongest solos to the baritone, and Panamanian-American singer Nmon Ford made the most of them. His "Omnia Sol temperat" was filled with sultry longing. He radiated a fierce, frustrated rage as the despairing sensualist in "Estuans interius" ("Boiling inside with violent anger, in bitterness I tell myself: I am made of dust") and his Abbot of “Cucaniensis" (which I've seen translated as Cuckoominster or Cockaigne, among other things) had an element of inebriated comedy that I hadn't seen before but which played quite well.

Juliet Petrus

Soprano Juliet Petrus captured all the barely suppressed eroticism of "Amor volat undique" ("Love flies everywhere") and "Stetit puella." "There was a girl in a red tunic," runs the translation. "If anything touched that tunic, it rustled. Ah!" That final "ah" is sung to a long, melismatic line suggesting an ecstatic release, and that's exactly the way Ms. Petrus delivered it. She also managed that absurdly difficult upward glissando in "Dulcissime" with ease.

The staging of "Dulcissime" was a nice touch as well. As Ms. Petrus sang "Dulcissime, totam tibi subdo me!" ("My sweetest, I give all of myself to you!") she and Mr. Ford turned towards each other. They joined hands and stayed in character all the way through the following "Blanziflor et Helena" chorus, with its glorification of the titular lovers. It was a simple but very effective bit of theatre.

Ryan Belongie

The tenor soloist has only one number ("Olim lacus colueram"), but it's a corker—a macabre little piece about a roasted swan seen from the bird's point of view. The melodic line lies at the top of the tenor range, often forcing the singer up into his falsetto. This time around the role went to countertenor Ryan Belongie (the first time I've seen it cast that way) who was, as a result, able to sing it in his natural voice. He threw himself completely into the role, even going so far as to wear a black and white suit and dying his brown hair silver. Vocally and physically he was that swan. The impact was chilling and even heartbreaking. It was best interpretation of that piece I've seen, bar none.

If you know "Carmina Burana," of course, you know that the soloists are a relatively small part of it. The bulk of the music is carried by the chorus, which has to sing in Latin, Middle High German and Old Provençal. The Symphony Chorus and Children's Chorus (who appear only in the "Court of Love" section, singing lyrics which would make conservative moralists blanch if they knew about them) were all in fine voice when we heard them Thursday night, with clean attacks and crisp enunciation.

The vocal/orchestral balance can be a problem with this music—the instrumental ensemble is large, with a big percussion battery—but it sounded fine to us up in row D of the dress circle. The soloists were less audible up there, but I have come to realize that this is more of a Powell Hall acoustics issue than anything else.

A few intonation issues in the brasses not withstanding, the orchestra sounded wonderful. The opening and closing "O Fortuna" had all the power it required, and both Mr. Izcaray's disposition of his forces and his interpretation of the score brought out some instrumental highlights that I hadn't heard quite as clearly in previous performances of this music. The flutes and piccolo in "Veris leta facies," for example, really stood out, as did the little duet with flautist Mark Sparks and timpanist Shannon Wood in the dance the opens the "Uf dem Anger" ("On the green"). Some of his tempi were surprisingly fast—most notably in the big drinking song "In taberna quando sumus"—but not so much so that they posed a problem for the orchestra or chorus.

The concert opened with Steve Reich's "The Four Sections," a 1987 work in four movements, each of which highlights a different section of the orchestra—strings, winds, brass, and percussion. Reich and the other minimalists owe, I think, an obvious debt to the stripped-down melodic and harmonic language of "Carmina Burana" and many of Orff's other works, so pairing Reich's music with Orff's make sense from that perspective. Unfortunately it also makes it obvious just how limited Reich's palette is by comparison.

With a restricted range of dynamics and tempi and an obsessive use of repetition, Reich's music sounds more like something composed for a machine than for an orchestra of human beings. Minimalism is certainly capable of producing music of great emotional power and resonance as (say) John Adams and Philip Glass have often demonstrated. "The Four Sections," though, felt like little more than a dry academic exercise to me. The contrast with the full-blooded "Carmina Burana" could not have been more stark.

The concert will be repeated Friday Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, May 2–4, at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. The Saturday performance will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM, HD 1, and via live Internet stream.

Next at Powell: David Robertson closes out the season with Britten's "Les Illuminations," along with Tchaikovsky's "Symphony No. 5" and the St. Louis premiere of Marc-André Dalbavie's "La Source d'un regard" Friday and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, May 9-11. The soloist is tenor Nicholas Phan. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

If music be the food of love...

Nashville Ballet's Carmina Burana

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The St. Louis Symphony brings its season to a close this weekend and next with a pair of concerts featuring big, audience-pleasing works.

This week it's a piece for chorus and orchestra that has been performed often by the symphony (most recently in 2011 with David Robertson on the podium) and is a perennial favorite with audiences world wide: Carl Orff's 1936 “scenic cantata” "Carmina Burana."

The celebrity of "Carmina Burana" is, in part, an illustration of the power of the sliver screen. Once described by British critic Richard Osborne as “the best known new composition to emerge from Nazi Germany”, "Carmina Burana" was something of a cult item in this country until John Boorman's 1981 epic "Excalibur" appropriated bits of it for the soundtrack. The resulting upswing in popularity was not unlike that experienced by Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (or the first two minutes of it, anyway) after the release of "2001: A Space Odyssey."

It's a pity that the other two parts of the trilogy of which "Carmina Burana" is only the first entry—the occasionally pornographic "Catulli Carmina" of 1942, based on poems by Catullus, and "Il Trionfo di Afrodite" from 1951—haven't seen an analogous rise in their fame. I'd love to see the Symphony Chorus take a shot at the intense drama of "Catulli Carmina" in particular, even if translation of some of the lyrics would pose a problem for the symphony's more conservative patrons.

Still, a movie can only pique public interest. "Carmina Burana" has sustained it because its rhythmic drive, its colorful orchestration and the immediate emotional appeal of the secular medieval poems that serve as the text are well nigh irresistible.

Carl Orff by Jens Rusch

Orff envisioned this material as the basis for a choral cantata with some mimed action and “magic tableaux.” And, in fact, the first performance in Frankfurt in 1937 was fully staged, with dancers, sets, and costumes. It's usually presented strictly as a concert piece these days (although the Nashville Ballet gave us an impressive staging of it here last February), but the composer's theatrical intentions are evident in every note.

“Carmina Burana” derives its title from an 1847 collection of secular poetry by anonymous authors from the 12th and 13th centuries that turned up in 1803 in the Benedictine monastery in Beuren, Germany. As befits their “vulgar” status, the poems celebrate not the theoretical joys of heaven but rather the practical ones of earth: spring, sex, food, sex, drink, gambling, and sex. They also recognize something that we moderns have lost track of, to our detriment: the heavy influence of blind chance on our lives. The setting of “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi” (“Fortune, Empress of the World”), which opens and closes the work, reminds us that the wheel of fortune is always turning and that none of us should get too cocky, as the universe has a tendency to dope-slap the excessively smug.

A number of guest conductors have had their way with Carmina Burana here over the years. This time around it's Spanish-Venezuelan conductor Carlos Izcaray, making what his web site describes as his "US symphonic debut." It's not his St. Louis debut, though; he was last seen here directing the Opera Theatre orchestra in a dramatically flawed but musically impeccable "Carmen" back in 2012. Mr. Izcaray's resume includes extensive operatic engagements, so I'd expect him to make the most of this work's overtly theatrical elements.

Although "Carmina Burana" is mostly about the chorus, there are some great moments for the soloists. Highlights include "Olim lacus colueram"—a macabre little piece about a roasted swan seen from the bird's point of view—which pushes the tenor soloist up to the very top of his tessitura; “Dulcissime,” which opens with an absurdly difficult upward glissando for the soprano; and “Estuans interius,” a dramatic baritone aria that boils over with the rage and frustration of the disappointed sensualist.

The singers this week—all making their SLSO debuts—are soprano Juliet Petrus, baritone Nmon Ford, and Ryan Belongie. Mr. Belongie is a countertenor (a man who sings in the mezzo or alto range), so he'll probably be pretty comfortable with the swan role.

If you're curious as to what the "Carmina Burana" poems might have sounded like when they were written, there are a number of collections out there by early music groups that are worth checking out. The Boston Camerata and the René Clemencic Consort both have fine recordings out there and the Ensemble Unicorn has a disc that looks interesting enough to entice me to buy it.

Steve Reich in 2006

Opening the program will be "The Four Sections," a 1987 work by American composer Steve Reich. Reich was one of the first of the minimalists, a group of composers who (to quote Paul Schiavo's program notes) "abandoned the abstruse harmonies and tangled rhythms that had become the hallmark of late-modern music and pared their compositions down to a few essential elements: neutral, static harmonies; brief repeating melodic figures; and clear rhythmic patterns within a steady pulse." Other notable members of that school include Philip Glass, John Adams, and Terry Riley (whose 1964 "In C" is widely regarded as one of the first minimalist pieces).

"Reich explains that the work's title has multiple connotations," Mr. Schiavo continues. "It refers to the four families of orchestral instruments (strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion). It also references the four movements that comprise the piece. Finally, the title alludes to four harmonic sections within each movement."

In his Composer's Notes at the web site of his publishers, Boosey and Hawkes, Mr. Reich notes that since "each of the movements focuses on one or two of the orchestral sections, one might be tempted to think of it as a concerto for orchestra. However, the focus here is on the interlocking of voices within the sections rather than displaying their virtuosity against the rest of the orchestra. Those familiar with other pieces of mine will recognise this interlocking of similar instruments to produce a contrapuntal web filled with resulting melodic patterns."

"The Four Sections" calls for a fairly sizeable orchestra—nearly 100 players, including two pianos and two synthesizers (SLSO regular Peter Henderson and Nina Ferrigno with two keyboards each) and looks like challenging stuff. I look forward to seeing what our ensemble of virtuosi does with it.

The essentials: Carlos Izcaray conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Orff's "Carmina Burana" and Steve Reich's "The Four Sections" Thursday through Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, May 1-4, at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.