MEDIA RELEASE
CHORALWORKS
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Carmina Burana is akin to early 20th-century rock music and the classical music world’s answer to Bohemian Rhapsody.
ChoralWorks, Collingwood’s classically oriented chamber choir, presents the work with its haunting medieval chants set in a spine-tingling manner. Carl Orff’s Carmina is one of the most easily recognizable pieces in all of music history. It comes to Collingwood for the first time on May 11.
ChoralWorks will be joined by the Midland Children’s Choir and Vivo. The soloists are well experienced with the work and will make the performance even more thrilling. Jeffrey Carl has sung the featured baritone role many times, most notably last spring at Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral in Montreal. Tenor Benoit Boutet, in addition to singing with some of the most notable orchestras, has toured the work with Les Grands Ballets Canadiennes. Anna Bateman, who ChoralWorks patrons will know from Messiah and other performances, brings her floating ethereal soprano to the work. It will be a reunion for the soloists as they have performed ‘Carmina’ together before.
Orff’s musical spectacle was first performed in Frankfurt in 1937 and is based on 24 of more than 200 secular poems and dramatic texts which compose the Codex Buranus, the work of wandering monks and scholars who became known as the Golliards and who traversed around Europe with a reputation for being unruly. The manuscript had been lost until its rediscovery in a monastery near Munich in the early 1700s. The poems, while mainly in Latin also include some in Middle High German and bits of Old French.
As one music director put it, “The words paint this picture that we’re all just stuck on this big wheel of life, and life’s good fortunes or bad fortunes zap us almost without rhyme or reason.” Much of the lyric poetry is highly sensual, especially the soprano solo. Then there’s the tenor depicting a dying swan being roasted on a spit. This aria is one that audiences wait for with bated breath.
Carmina Burana is indescribably popular. People love to hear it and people love to sing it! And because of the bawdy nature of some of the texts, it is sometimes referred to as ‘Of Monks and Drunks.’
Director Brian Rae brings the singers together with the astounding keyboardists Joshua Tamayo and Victor Cheng plus an array of percussionists including double timpani and more. It will be nothing short of an outstanding performance bringing down the roof of First Presbyterian Church at Maple and Third Street beginning at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 11. Tickets are available at ChoralWorks.ca and from choristers.
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