The Knoxville Symphony and Knoxville Choral Society delivered a sensational, sensuous performance of Carl Orff’s 1937 masterpiece “Carmina Burana” at the Tennessee Theatre this week. But it wasn’t the only sterling music performance on the program.
The concert began with Gustav Mahler’s “Blumine,” written in 1888 as the second movement of Mahler’s “Symphony No. 1,” but removed by Mahler before the symphony’s publication and now played as a free-standing piece when performed.
Few composers write more beautiful music for trumpet. KSO principal trumpet Phillip Chase Hawkins’ playing of Blumine’s trumpet theme was gorgeous and crystalline. A suite from Kurt Weill’s 1928 “The Threepenny Opera,” that followed, featured Hawkins again.
But in both pieces there were also beautiful playing by principal flute Hannah Hammel, principal oboe Claire Chenette, principal clarinet Gary Sperl, principal horn Jeffery Whaley, principal trombone Samuel Chen, and concertmaster William Shaub.
The performance of Orff’s “Carmina Burana” was among the most sensuous and, at moments, erotic, as I’ve heard.
The Knoxville Choral Society obviously enjoys singing this music. It was as crisp and sharp with Carmina’s Latin as one expects it to be. So were the three soloists, soprano Rochelle Bard, tenor Andrew Skoog and bass-baritone Daniel Johnson-Webb.
But it was the English translations, projected above the stage, that set this performance apart.
Orff set only parts of an enormous collection of poetry and writings by 13th century German monks for his trilogy of cantatas known as the “Trionfi:” “Carmina Burana, Catulli Carmina, Trionfo di Afordite.”
Only “Carmina Burana” is usually performed and even then with cleaned-up translations that color the overt, erotic sexuality in terms presentable to polite society.
No so with this performance, more in keeping with the frankness of Demirjian’s presentation of Thomas Adès’ “Powder Her Face” earlier in the season, the sexuality of “Carmina” is there for all to see.
Even Skoog’s wonderful, lightly comic, stratospheric-range vocal impersonation of the swan, a classical metaphor for Eros, about being turned on a spit and served on a platter, had its sexual overtones.
And late in the cantata, so did Johnson-Webb’s falsetto lines as he sang to Bard’s character.
But it was the translated lines of Bard that made it clear.
“My Feelings alternate between erotic love and chastity” and “My virginity excepts. My modesty holds me back” left little doubt as to what her Latin words were.
And then, those high notes, just before the choral theme of fortune returned, could have been nothing else but a musical orgasm.