Wine, women and love seem an apt text to celebrate the Don Wright Faculty of Music’s 40th anniversary.
A gala performance of Carl Orff’s cantata for soprano, tenor, baritone, orchestra and choirs will be given Friday, March 27 at 8 p.m. in the George Weston Recital Hall in Toronto. The UWO Symphony Orchestra, UWO Singers, Choral and alumni soloists Sherry Steele, John Tessier and Kevin McMillan will present this stunning and popular work.
Leopold Stokowski, who introduced Carmina Burana to American audiences in 1954, said: “I believe that Orff’s genius – combining as it does so magnificently all the resources of traditional occidental music with vigourous new conceptions of lyricism, romantic intensity, gigantic architectonics, rhythmic audacity, an extraordinarily personal blending of pagan and modern feeling, and the mature simplicity achieved only by a master – will be recognized by future generations as a major departure in the development of the art of music.”
The text is a collection of songs about wine, women and love based on poems in Latin, Old German and Old French from a manuscript of 1280 found in 1803 a Benedictine monastery of Beuren – hence the title, which translates as Songs of Beuren. O Fortuna, the most well known of the songs, is heard in films (Oliver Stone’s The Doors) and advertising (Nescafe coffee). The text compares Fortune to the moon. Part of Carmina Burana’s appeal is the driving rhythm that sounds barbaric and pagan and very potent.
Also on the program are two works by Benjamin Britten – Peter Grimes: Four Sea Interludes and Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. The Interludes from Peter Grimes depict the struggles of men and women who depend on the sea and the nature of guilt and judgment. Orchestral beauty and what is sometimes called the 20th century’s most impressive tenor role combine to create a modern masterpiece.
The Serenade brings together two British traditions: an agile tenor and great horn playing – on Friday night by alumnus John Tessier, tenor, and faculty horn professor Ron George. The song cycle was written during World War II with a text of six poems about night. Prologue and Epilogue are set for horn alone, using the instrument’s natural harmonics which give a distinctive character.
The evening is an opportunity for the Faculty’s students to perform in a different venue, take their music to an audience in Toronto, including many alumni, and work with high caliber artists who graduated from Western.