BUZZon - Vitality and Verve

It’s one of those perfect July evenings, the sun as it sinks westward shining with blinding brilliance through a large window into the William Harris church at Indian River. The beautiful, now deconsecrated, wooden church has recently been refurbished and brightened up to serve as a permanent home for the Indian River festival. The 2011 season has its official opening tonight with a performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

Waiting for the performance to begin I can’t help but be struck by the irony of this abandoned hundred year old Roman Catholic church being home to Orff’s pagan cantata. The text of Carmina Burana is drawn from a cache of mediaeval poems written in the twelfth and thirteenth century and held in a German monastery. They were written in the period when the creed’s assertion of belief in unam sanctam catholicam Ecclesiam was still an accurate account of Europe’s universal church, but the poems indicate that within the bounds of that belief, there was expressed in the private world of poetry a passionate, ironic, pagan vision of a world governed by the wheel of Fortune, driven by the yearly cycle of birth and death, bursting out in drunkenness and desire.

Orff’s cantata is only an hour long, and the first section of the program was an unadvertised series of works for choir, piano and percussion. Robert Kortgaard described it as “eclectic,” and at moments it seemed to be based on the Oh Why Not school of programming, but it was often exciting and gave an indication of the resources available for the main work.

After intermission the large choir, the two fine pianists, and six intense percussionists set off with a tremendous drum beat and a loud choral proclamation into the most exciting and convincing version of Carmina Burana that I’ve ever heard. It has often been observed that live performance is a different thing from what’s been recorded and edited, and the Indian River version of Carmina illustrated the point with all the vitality and verve that anyone could ask for. In one of the early choruses, it struck me that the choral entries were so prompt as to be almost ahead of the beat, and the energy of the piano and percussion helped sustain the choir’s astonishing rhythmic pulse. The singers’ concentration held up and even appeared to increase over the hour of performance, and when it was over the members of the audience were on their feet and cheering.

The large choir was made up of two smaller choirs, one from Moncton, one from PEI, and if the performance was ever less than perfect, it hardly mattered as the driving rhythm and the emotional commitment carried the work toward its conclusion. From early on there wasn’t a second’s lapse of energy. The live performance riveted the attention.

Did Carl Orff hate soloists? He does terrible things to them in his solo writing. The tenor is given only one short haunting piece in which he is sent to stratospherically high notes. Stand up, strain your voice, sit down. However Graham Thomsom gave the strange tune about the roasted swan a convincing sense of boozy bafflement and sang the high Cs and Ds with notable courage. The baritone soloist, in this case Andrew Love, has the most work of the three, and he proved consistently convincing, with a wonderful high register exhibited in “Estuans interius.” I have heard and admired Sally Dibblee in some of her previous performances on the Island, and her pure voice and passionate attack gave a fine embodiment to the soprano’s sexy lyrics, including the top-of-the-range orgasmic outburst of “Dulcissime.”

After that solo, the work plunges into a great hymn of praise to Venus and then with one heavy drumbeat into a dark reprise of the opening chorus about the domination of the world by Fortune. And so it came to an end and the audience leapt up and shouted.

Who to praise for such a vital performance? Well, everybody I suppose. Pre-eminently the conductor Monique Richard, who somehow kept this freight-train of a work on the tracks and at full speed. Perhaps also Michel Deschênes, the lead percussionist, who helped dance the work into being. And Christine Gallant, the PEI choir trainer.

And all the singers who gave their hearts and souls, and sent us out joyful into the country night.

Bravo for Bravado ←		The Voice of Hope →

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Carmina Burana Indian River Festival

Review by David Helwig

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Carmina Burana
Indian River Festival