The Original Review

Orff Carmina Burana

Janowitz sop Stolze ten Fischer-Dieskau bar Schöneberger Boys’ Ch, Deutsche Oper Berlin Chor and Orch / Eugen Jochum

Deutsche Grammophon

Last month Trevor Harvey pointed out that this work ‘only gets by’ in a really good performance. Such a one is the present issue. It is beautifully recorded, with a crisp, bravura choral contribution and absolutely tireless vivacity. The moments of delicacy, in the Cours d’amour section particularly, are beautifully touched in, light, mischievous – fey is not too fancy a word in the circumstances – and the three soloists are concerned to get the very best out of their roles. If I were coming new to the work I think this performance in sum might bowl me over (as indeed it so often does when sprung on even a fairly conservative audience). But the question arises – in connection with the gramophone – how often does one want to hear it? People vary greatly in this matter. I knew some fond parents who used to encourage their offspring to play what they liked on the piano. If this meant Pop goes the Weasel 110 times in an hour, smiles were still extended. Others can play Ravel’s Bolero a whole morning through and never weary. I find some of this music, allowing for a certain freshness, exhilaration and fun (the text is ‘fun’ too with its hodge-potch of dog-Latin, old French and German), carries the seeds of a certain exasperation within it: the kind of impatience felt for the too innocent, for the wilfully childish, for the slightly suspect ‘simplicism’. But if it gets the unprejudiced off the banalities and frenzied repetitive limitations of ‘pop’, so much the better. Philip Hope-Wallace (7/68)

Mark Pullinger What fickle fortune! Although Philip Hope-Wallace liked this recording of Carmina Burana (Eugen Jochum’s second DG account), it’s interesting that in 1968 there was already a certain critical snobbery towards the work some years before ‘O Fortuna’ splashed into wider public consciousness via its Old Spice advert association. Alexandra, what do you make of the underlying tone of his review?

Alexandra Coghlan It’s a real stinger of a review, isn’t it?! While generously acknowledging that the performance is excellent, he takes serious issue with the music itself, and the last sentence, his pay-off line, is the definition of damning with faint praise. What strikes me as particularly interesting is the notion that Orff’s ‘simplicism’, his creation of music that’s too obviously gratifying, must be treated with suspicion. Do you reckon we’ve ever really moved past that with this piece? Have concerns about Orff’s political affiliations become the modesty blanket more recently for a sustained distaste for Carmina Burana?

MP I think it’s still seen in some critical circles as a bit naff, not something for ‘serious concert-goers’ – whoever they are! And, yes, perhaps Orff’s personal politics are a convenient means of dismissing it. I’m conscious that I rarely go out of my way to hear a performance, although Birmingham Royal Ballet’s staging was fun a decade ago, with its seedy sex and drunken debauchery. But when I do listen to this music, even by accident, it’s usually highly enjoyable. For a long time my only recording was André Previn’s with the LSO in 1974, the Penguin Guide recommendation. I only came to the Jochum recently – a charity shop LP find.

AC My first encounter with it was at school: an all-girls’ choir meant the sopranos actually got the good bits, though I don’t think there has ever been a more decorous drinking song!

MP Oh, that sounds like huge fun! But perhaps Carmina Burana should come with a parental guidance warning …

AC That’s when I bought the Jochum, and I remember being pinned to my seat by the drama of it: the sense of large-scale momentum and (frankly) glorious vulgarity. Previn’s greater extremes of tempo within individual movements strike me as less satisfying than Jochum’s single arc. And the dance episodes in the Jochum are just so vivacious and energised by comparison with the heavier-footed Previn. Listening to it now I still feel that itchy rhythmic and emotional (even hormonal) urgency. What do you make of the Deutsche Oper orchestra’s playing? That brass is really something.

MP Gloriously vulgar sums it up. The orchestra is so vividly recorded, as opposed to Jochum’s mono recording (3/55), where the Bavarian RSO is murkily distant. The brass and timpani here really burst in at the start of ‘O Fortuna’, and you can tell in the propulsive ‘Ecce gratum’ that the players are clearly having a blast. The dance that opens ‘Uf dem Anger’ demonstrates these qualities well: ripe horns and a slightly inebriated, tottering flute before a sense of abandonment cuts in. I didn’t really have Jochum down as a raver, but this is infectiously unbuttoned, isn’t it?

AC It really is. And it all seems to build so naturally towards that climactic chord on ‘Blanziflor’ in the ‘Ave formosissima’ – that’s just the ultimate, orgasmic release.

But the other side’s there too, for my money: in the fragrant delicacy of so much of the ‘Cour d’amours’ music. That soft flute blend over string haze in both ‘In trutina’ and ‘Amor volat undique’ (although the rather pert, mannered delivery of the Schöneberger Sängerknaben isn’t a patch on the gutsy, puckish boys of the Southend Boys’ Choir with Riccardo Muti in 1979) is pretty ravishing; and there’s the fresh piquancy of ‘Stetit puella’ – musical flirtation teetering right on the brink of surrender in those expressions of ‘Eia’.

MP In his brief comments on the recording itself, Hope-Wallace also loved the delicacy of that ‘Cour d’amours’ section. Jochum really had the measure of this work. You can understand why Orff gave this recording his personal stamp of approval.

AC We’ve not mentioned the soloists so far – it’s a pretty starry trio: Gerhard Stolze, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gundula Janowitz, all in their prime.

MP It is a very starry trio. I’m not generally Fischer-Dieskau’s biggest fan – I find much of what he does quite mannered, especially in Italian opera – but here I like him a lot. His pious tone in ‘Omnia sol temperat’ is buttery soft, and his inebriated ‘Ego sum abbas Cucaniensis’ truly reeks of beer! Perhaps he overstresses accents in ‘Estuans interius’, but his sense of animation is vivid. How do you get on with him?

AC Ah, we seem to have hit a bump of disagreement! I’m really not sure about the fit of the casting in this instance. I can see the potential in the friction of Fischer-Dieskau cast so much against type, but his best vocal qualities seem a bit wasted as the boozy abbot. ‘Ego sum abbas’ doesn’t have the staggering heavy-footedness (we’re back to vulgarity again) and exaggeration it demands – it’s too beautiful! His floated ‘Wafna, wafna!’ is more Schubert than Orff, and that very inward ‘Omnia sol temperat’ – barely on the voice at times – strikes an odd note in context: this is still earthly love, even if more restrained than some of the physical declarations coming up later. By contrast, I find the rather manic, overaccented ‘Estuans interius’ more convincing as a portrait of a priest who has given himself over to ‘a life of vice’.

MP More Schubert than Orff! That made me chuckle, but it’s a valid point.

AC Too much beauty isn’t really a problem for Stolze, on the other hand, is it?! That slow-roasting swan is the stuff of nightmares – gloriously hideous and androgynous, bending vowels and pitch …

MP Stolze’s swan is terrifying, very much the first cousin of his Mime for Georg Solti with its mix of falsetto crooning, guttural swoops and near-Sprechgesang. But the highlight for me is Gundula Janowitz in fresh, dewy voice – she had just turned 30 at the time of the recording sessions in October 1967. Her ‘In trutina’ is heartstopping, with such purity of tone. How do you find her?

AC Janowitz was such a revelation for me on this recording, and coming back to it now, it’s hard to feel any differently. I think there are more even, technically lovelier accounts of the soprano solos (Arleen Auger on the Muti recording is impossibly lush and plush, Sally Matthews is immaculate in 2004 for Sir Simon Rattle in Berlin), but if you favour youthful fragility – that sense of a girl on the brink of sexual awakening – then I think Janowitz nails it: the painful sweetness of that first upward leap in ‘Dulcissime’, the pinprick precision of the top D later on, such a tender ‘In trutina’ – that infinitely expressive hesitation into ‘lascivus amor’ – and the freshness of ‘Stetit puella’, which really dances and skips.

MP That upward leap in ‘Dulcissime’ is a thing of wonder! Which brings us to the Deutsche Oper Berlin Chorus. No disrespect to choirs like Previn’s London Symphony Chorus, but I think there’s an advantage in having an opera chorus hurl themselves full pelt at this. The opening – and closing – ‘O Fortunas’ run at full throttle, and they don’t hold back in ‘Fortune plango vulnera’. Do they do it for you?

AC Emphatically, yes! It’s such a character piece, and I think that additional abandon – not to say sheer firepower – of an opera chorus turns it from one of those gorgeous medieval illuminations that you have to peer at in the margins into a vast canvas: Brueghel, or even Bosch. Even mid-piece, the chorus still takes you by surprise: the roaring eruption of ‘Swaz hie gat umbe’ after that rather muted, decorous little dance in the orchestra; the glowing wall of sound in ‘Ave formosissima’.

Astonishingly, we’ve got this far without mentioning the pub! The ‘In taberna’ is another highlight for me: a great balance of precision and personality here too, with a wonderfully exhilarating accelerando through the ‘bibit’ section. How about you: are you grabbing your stein and heading alehouse-wards with them?

MP I’d be very happy to head to the pub with Jochum and company! This really is a recording that deserves its ‘classic’ status, but is also one that – to close with another TV advert reference – refreshes the parts that other Carmina Buranas don’t always reach.

AC I’ll drink to that!