Carmina Burana (Codex Buranus, Original vesion) – Clemencic Consort – Oehms

by | Aug 3, 2009 | SACD & Other Hi-Res Reviews | 0 comments

Carmina Burana (Codex Buranus, Original vesion) – Clemencic Consort – Oehms Multichannel SACD 635, 71:58 *** [Forte Distribution]:

This release proved difficult for me. There have been other attempts at recording pieces from this collection—not Orff, mind you—that Wikipedia eloquently puts as ‘Latin for "Songs from Benediktbeuern", is the name given to a manuscript of 254 poems and dramatic texts from the 11th or 12th century, although some are from the 13th century. The pieces were written almost entirely in Medieval Latin; a few in Middle High German, and some with traces of Old French or Provençal. Many are macaronic, a mixture of Latin and German or French vernacular.’ Bravo for the good summary.

This recording, put together by the estimable Rene Clemencic, gives us 24 of the selections, hardly complete by a long stretch, which is something I doubt we will ever see—or would want to, for that matter. Those wandering into these shark-infested waters should be forewarned that this is not the Orff in any way, shape, or form. These are bare-boned highly medieval pieces of very religious to very bawdy provenance, with the music done in a fashion I find questionable. While the melodies to some of these pieces can be engaging and even enchanting, and Clemencic uses the texts in a non-censured manner exactly as he found them, the musical interpretation is based on the theory that the songs are all of such international origin and practice that this mixed stylistic bag is one that holds a lot of water. In fact, the songs as presented here come off as so stylistically disparate that one would never guess they were from the same collection or could possibly have been written in only three languages.

Add to this the recreational aspect of the recording in trying to present us with a rendition as if we were sitting at that particular time period and listening to an ad hoc presentation of the piece, and you get a recording that is valuable as one possible interpretative viewpoint, but hardly anything definitive. Plus several of these pieces have the participants sounding like drunkards speaking a sort of medieval Sprechstimme in a raucous voice that was probably lots of fun to do in the studio but ends up sounding stupid and irritating on the fourth hearing.

The sound is very nicely done, and this will have some value to certain people. Whether I am one of them is still open to debate.

— Steven Ritter

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