After the stunning
success of Carmina Burana in
1937 Orff took scissors to his past
and insisted that henceforth it should
be known as his Op.1. He made only one
exception, allowing his own settings
of Monteverdi to be performed – the
Lamento dell’Arianna and Ballo
dell’Ingrate. Orff augmented his
orchestra with two basset-horns and
three double strung lutes and it’s in
this manner that Orff pays some noble
homage to the stile espressivo
of Monteverdi. The Lament of Ariadne
(Lamento dell’Arianna) is
a surviving operatic fragment and written
for Mantua. It was followed a week later
by the Ballo dell’Ingrate, though
this was destined for a wedding feast.
In this way Orff constructs the laments
and Ballo in an arc from despair to
light.
These 1974 recordings
were conducted by Kurt Eichorn and supervised
by Orff in what we can suppose are pretty
much definitive performances as to his
intentions with regard to the orchestral
colour, the vocal stresses and the emotive
temperature. The German text of Klage
der Ariadne is by Orff himself and
the companion work has a free realisation
by his colleague at the Munich school
of dancing in the 1920s, Dorothée
Günther. The apportioning of the
roles is well nigh perfect but even
amongst the stellar quartet it’s perhaps
nowadays the least well remembered,
Rose Wagemann, who makes the most moving
impression – and not simply because
she bears the emotive burden of the
Lament of Ariadne on her own.
Centred and dramatic hers is a voice
that commands immediate admiration.
Her voice suits Orff’s frankly romanticised
declamation with remarkable precision
and she makes a cumulatively moving
impression – allied to which the voice
is beautiful. The most intense point
is Träume, selige Träume
where Orff’s bass accents and stark
romanticism conjure up the shade of
Monteverdi without either pastiche or
reinvention.
The auburn hued instrumental
string passage in Hört, werte
Damen, part of the Tanz der Spröden,
breaks up the recitative in a peculiarly
impressive way. Ridderbusch sings with
gravity, depth and dignity though it’s
the passage Wie unerträglich
anzusehn, that devoutly entwined
arioso, where the bass reveals his strengths
in melismatic singing. Later on, in
the dance, we hear the pizzicati and
harp and lute sonorities that are part
of Orff’s rich instrumental tapestry
– rich but certainly not glutinous.
The chorus has its moment late in the
work – the engineers recess its sound
deliberately to give an impression of
spatial separateness. We also hear the
clear, immaculate Lucia Popp as Amor
and the spinto mezzo of Hanna
Schwarz.
The restoration sounds
excellent; it has used that much touted
24 bit – 96 kHz system. Notes are in
German, English, French and Italian
– the texts are in German only. This
forms part of the Orff series on Arts;
the timing is short and in the context
of the composer’s development it may
not seem an essential purchase. But
it’s finely done, rewarding – and moving.
Jonathan Woolf
Chor der Bayerischen Rundfunks