Friday, December 30, 2005
This has nothing to do about books exactly ...
... but I'm going to blog about it anyway. WRTI-FM here in Philly just finished broadcasting a performance of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. It was on when I came back from shopping, so while listening to it I had no idea who the performers were. It didn't especially impress me. For one thing I thought the tempos were too consistently fast. This was particularly the case when "O Fortuna," which opens and closes the piece, returned at the end. I still think Ormandy's version of Orff's cantata is the best (when released, one reviewer called it the best choral-orchestral record ever made). Ormandy seems to understand, as Rattle obviously does not, that the "O Fortuna" music is a parody of the "Dies irae." So his "O Fortuna" is menacing and dramatic, not simply frenetic like Rattle's.
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Hi, Frank.
ReplyDeleteYour post brought back a flood of memories ... as a youngster, some of my earliest memories of classical music come from performances of the Philadelphia Orchestra, under the baton of Eugene Ormandy ...
"Carmina Burana" is a favorite work of mine ... and you're right ... there are tempos that work, and tempos that don't ...
It's also well-known to movie-goers, though they may not recognize the name of the work, or it's composer ... 'O Fortuna' provides a stirring accompaniment as a revived and revitalized Arthur leads his last, loyal knights to their final battle in "Excalibur" ... the same selection was used in trailers for "Glory" and Mel Gibson's "MacBeth," as well (in the actual film, "Glory," a variation of "O Fortuna" is used in the background as Col. Gould leads the 54th Massachusetts in their fatal assault on Fort Wagner) ...
I miss Ormandy, as I miss others from that era ... predecessors like Stokowski, and contemporaries like Szell, Solti and Bernstein ...
Frank, you really got me going, here ... your posts have a way of doing that !!! Thanks for listening :-)
Hi Jeff,
ReplyDeleteI grew up with Ormandy myself, of course, and think he was treated shabbily in his later years -- not least by my paper. I think he is an under-rated conductor (except in Japan): He played the music, he didn't play Ormandy I liked the others you mention, too -- once saw Bernstein do a breath-taking Mahler Ninth at the Mann Music Center.