Carmina Burana 2019Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Read more about the opera Carmina Burana
The big choral display piece for the RSNO in mid-winter was Carl Orff's popular masterpiece, Carmina Burana. Sometimes dismissed as kitsch, largely because of the composer's failure to avoid associations with the Nazi regime at the time of composition. It is, nevertheless, a superbly effective and exhilarating work in performance, displaying Orff's great talents as an orchestrator.
The three soloists, with their difficult exposed solos, are familiar names, though the conductor Kensho Watanabe was less well-known here.
While opera companies in Germany have been known to stage the songs from Benediktbeuren like a real opera, with varying degrees of success, a concert presentation can provide quite enough of a theatrical experience. The main difficulty for concert promoters is to decide what to pair it with, as the monster piece for big chorus and orchestra is likely to swamp most companions. Here the RSNO started the evening with something from a completely different soundworld, but certainly another solid masterpiece - Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, in which the soloist was another new name, Can Çakmur.
