Carmina Burana exists in the form of a late thirteenth
century Bavarian manuscript. Written in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
and mostly in Latin, with a few High German and Old French interpolations,
few of the poems have musical notation and those that do require the
use and evaluation of other source material to make sense of them. This
forces the matter onto the performers themselves; to what extent should
projection of the text be paramount; what is the nature of the subsidiary
musical accompaniment; how rich or spare should be the musical patina;
is flourishing and grandiloquent accompaniment permissible in the light
of our increasing knowledge and current performing practice; does the
music sound right at the given tempo and with the accompaniment provided.
There are doubtless many more questions that can be legitimately asked
of a performance of Carmina Burana but the principal ones – the primacy
of the works and the appropriateness of tempo and musical forces are
surely the most pressing given the vast amount of unknown and unknowable
information now lost to us.
A significant amount of reconstruction goes on in every
performance of Carmina Burana – Philip Pickett demonstrated this on
his recent disc and many others have as well and so do the ensembles
that so joyously begin their recital on this Naxos disc with the imperishable
invocation of Bache, bene venies. This is raucous and triumphant,
the singers supported by recorder, fiddles, hurdy-gurdy, bagpipe, tambourine
and Landsknechtstrommel (no, I’m not sure either and the notes don’t
tell me). The decision-making processes can be appreciated in the next
song, the withdrawn Axe Phebus aureo where the mysterious opening
leads to increasing declamation and a gradual return to more sparse
support, the curve and meaning of the text properly supported by the
musical material. Clauso Cronos is a jovial instrumental that
frames Katerine collaudemus, an intense spare and beautiful reading
with two voices chanting separately or entwined, overlapping at phrasal
endings or remaining detached from the other, succeeds in illuminating,
reflecting and amplifying the text to a remarkable degree. The unison
Clause lumen (But light is not shut out) in the fifth verse is
a particular example of the sensitivity with which this Carmina divina
is set. The other three groups of Carmina are moralia (moral
or satirical), veris et amoris (songs of spring and love songs)
and Carmina lusorum et potatorum (songs about drinking
and gambling).
Tempus transit gelidum another instrumental
is appropriately reconstructed; the astringent ice melts are reflected
by the chilly fiddles and the gains in amplitude are soon blossoming
under the hurdy gurdy and drum as the spring bursts providentially into
life. The complexities of the High German Ich was ein chint so wolgetan
– a quite explicit lament of betrayal and rape – is reconstructed
to reflect the isolation of the girl and the rapacious gusto of the
crowd. The serious tread of Ecce torpet probitas (Look, honesty
sleeps), a Carmina moralia that fuses a sense of inevitability
with a simplicity of declamation all the more powerful for it. The drum
beats at a slow tempo and the tolling bells intone their own timeless
reflections on greed and the wilful abjuring of truth. The Spartan lines
of Vite perdite (Of an abandoned life) reflect the interiority
of the poem’s drama of penitential reflection.
The sonorities, both instrumental and vocal, are wedded
to the sinew of the text in generally expressive and intelligent ways.
Colour exists in profusion but related to the drama of the poetry and
not incautiously or needlessly imposed from without. Decisions have
been made with care and musical understanding. Much of the scoring is
spare and restrained; some is – appropriately – more raucous. Enjoyable
and touching in equal measure.
Jonathan Woolf
Ensemble Unicorn directed
by Michael Posch