Carmina burana

Carl Orff wanted to see some sort of staging of his musical score, Carmina Burana. I'd like to think he would have approved of this one. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle films Carmina among stage pieces that often take the viewer where no theater audience could go. The effect is a bit like entering a Bosch painting.

This is the same method Ponnelle used with a number of operas, but here he is more free to create a fantasy world of images; here he has only a series of poems; no plot structure to furnish. If a few of the effects look a bit primitive, others are magical. And sometimes the whiplash from comedy to horror was so swift that I found myself questioning the smugness that led me to question this or that image, and I quickly found myself immersed in the work again.

The DVD has English subtitles for the Latin. How wonderful finally to be able to follow the text all the way through! However, I urge you, watch WITHOUT TEXT the first time through. The musical performance is good enough that, if you like the work, you'll happily go back. Orff chose to set Latin because he wanted us to take the meaning from the music. Trust that the outrageous things occurring on stage grow from the text, and submit to the pull of sounds and images. Words will clog the process, and the images will surprise and delight best on that first encounter if you're not busy reading. I'm a fan of subtitled movies, but we process words differently from sound.

I bought the DVD of this for the movie, but any movie of Carmina would be of passing interest if not well sung and played. This one is excellent. I have long admired Lucia Popp's Queen of the Night for Klemperer, and she is as good here. The rest of the cast and the orchestra is also up to the competition.

Alas, to my knowledge the DVD has never been issued in the US. I got my copy from England and play it in the US on my laptop which knows nothing of region codes and is equally happy playing PAL as NTSC. With laptop connected to my sound system I had a front row seat. No extra software was required for this on my Mac. I've been trying to see this production for 30 years. It says a lot that I wasn't disappointed.

My high school period was dominated by Carmina burana. And after decades, the affection for this great work of Carl Orff remains the same.

This adaptation is absolutey fantastic, from cothes to voices, from atmosphere to the beautifu reflection of symbols.

It is more than inspired opera adaptation but a precious gift as trave across a wor who you feeled , in many occasions, so familiar and who obtains the fantastic refection.

At its end, the gratitude for the effort and genius of Jean - Pierre Ponnelle is the only fair reaction.

In short, just a great film , fantastic in each aspect , impressive at whole.

I am an incorrigible music lover, and classical music has accompanied my life for as long as I have known myself. However, I didn't fully explore this piece, by Carl Orff, until I was eighteen years old. I've heard it countless times. I virtually memorized the lyrics (especially the Latin parts). Later, I saw it live. Much more recently, I became more in touch with the original texts and poetry of the Codex Buranus and with sung versions that are closer to the medieval sound, which was in line with my activity as a medievalist. And I have no doubt that I have not read or heard it all.

When creating this symphonic work, at the beginning of the 20th century, Carl Orff selected some poems and gave them music. Although we often hear the various sections of his work separately (especially "O Fortuna", which turned out to be the most famous section), I feel that this is a work that needs to be heard in its entirety to become understandable in its message. There is a coherent logic in the choice of poems, and in the order in which Orff places the various sections, transforming this work into an ode to human nature, the cycle of life and the hopes and anxiousnesses of Man. It is no coincidence that it begins and ends with "O Fortuna", the song that best describes the ups and downs of luck and chance in our lives.

Jean-Pierre Ponnelle took an excellent initiative when directing this recording, where nothing is done in a thoughtless way either. Orff himself, when visiting the film set, was impressed and satisfied with the entire production, which indicates that we can see, in this footage, something that will closely resemble what the composer imagined in his mind. I especially liked the inclusion of the various allegorical figures (the Angel, the Devil, Justice, Faith, Temperance, Time etc.) because I feel they fit well into the big picture, along with the various allusions to medieval art, to cathedrals, to medieval environments and scenarios. The various popular and noble costumes also deserve praise. An excellent staging work.

The recording has excellent actors, starting with the various soloists. John Van Kesteren is a tenor that Orff respected a lot, and it's great to hear him here. Lucia Popp also deserves a round of applause. At this stage of her career, she was becoming one of the most beautiful and solid coloratura sopranos of her time, and she offers us here an excellent vocal work and a great resourcefulness on stage. I don't know Hermann Prey that well, he stopped singing long before I remembered to pay attention to him, but I like what I hear on the various existing recordings, and this one is no exception. Also, he really knew how to fill the screen and steal our attention. Invisible to the eye, but omnipresent, the Munich Radio Orchestra does an excellent job.

Flat, dull, shot on video, populated by lots of ugly men and women. This is a wonderful piece of music set to boring visuals. What was the point. If they had hired some real actors or dancers with any skill, it could have been something. But as it is, we have the local amateur theatre of some small town in Bavaria, and a director with very little imagination. Forget the other reviews. I watched this because I wanted to see something more than a concert performance. But this definitely not it. Forget the other reviews. One even calls it an 'a capella' piece! DUH! Does he even know what the term means. It refers to a chorus without orchestra. In Orff's piece it is the orchestra that makes the performance. Well, anyway, at least he used a decent recording of the work (conducted by Eugen Jochim, if I remember right), so it isn't a total waste of time. Next time the director needs to at least find some performers that are good to look at, if nothing else, or better yet hire a ballet troupe.

Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's interpretation of Orff's brilliant piece of music is a visual orgy of iconic images and art history references, a tribute to the sacred, the profane, the celestial, the mundane, and all that makes art art. It transcends the boundaries of the sacred and profane, showing how they both make up what it is to be human. One of the reviewers of this rare piece of European cultural and cinematic history remarked that this version of Orff's masterpiece of the sacred and profane was hard to find in Germany. Not so strange, it was banned there for decades, most likely because of its almost literal interpretation of the texts Orff put music to. I first saw this when I was 12-13 years old at the Goethe Institut i Bergen, Norway, with my father, sister and mother. Someone had managed to get hold of an 8mm film roll with it and had a secret screening. This was in the 1980s and, believe it or not, there were strong forces opposed to what the considered blasphemous content in films. The mixture of Christian and pagan imagery is completely consistent with the lyrics, which were found in a monastery, and are a mixture of sacred and profane songs, but were obviously too tough to swallow. Copies of the film were destroyed, but luckily, art prevailed.