<< Previous Recording <<                                                                                          >> Next Recording >>

Click here to download a video clip of SK singing 'Estuans Interius' from Carmina Burana

 

Carmina Burana (CD)

Composer

Carl Orff

Conductor

Christian Thielemann

Performers

Christaine Oelze

David Kuebler

Simon Keenlyside

Berlin Children’s Choir

Choir and Orchestra of the Deutschen Oper Berlin

Label

Deutsche Grammophon

Code

289 453 587-2

Released

June 7, 1999

Number of discs

1

ASIN

B00000JSAM


 

 

See also Orff: Carmina Burana, DVD, DG4695209, 2003

 

  

What the critics say

Opera News, December 1999

http://www.metoperafamily.org/operanews/_archive/1299/recordings.1299.html

“…Things do pick up considerably with Simon Keenlyside's robust, well-characterized rendering of "Estuans interius," which opens the "In taverna" section. He also provides a sweet and soulful rendering of "Omnia Sol temerat," his first solo. In addition, Christiane Oelze sings with a loveliness that is both pure and full-bodied, and tenor David Kuebler brings vibrant comic suffering to the fiendishly high "roasting swan" song.

George Hall, BBC Music Magazine

Performance: 5 out of 5 stars
Sound: 4 out of 5 stars

For those wary of the more raucous aspects of Orff’s scenic cantata in many of its recorded manifestations, this new account might provide the answer. With a discography currently focusing on the high-minded German repertoire of Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann, Strauss and Pfitzner, Christian Thielemann here shifts to what some see as music’s equivalent to the Munich Beer Festival. Though this might seem an odd move, his approach remains considered and his interpretative skills meticulous, his careful observation of accents, dynamics and other niceties whose presence one had scarcely expected in the piece paying rich dividends.


Top quality soloists, too, with Simon Keenlyside’s baritonal interventions regularly things of wonder in terms of the sheer beauty and power of tone, and expressive of the text too. David Kuebler sounds exactly right in the strangulated tessitura Orff asks of his tenor to depict the roasted swan, and Christiane Oelze’s clear, true tone and unaffected delivery enhances the soprano music.

Precision and rich sonority mark the playing of the Orchestra of Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, and if the singing of the company’s chorus is a good deal more polite than one sometimes hears in the work it’s a fault on the right side. Full and resonant sound, with plenty of perspective.