Orff: Carmina Burana – Ormandy

Some recordings age like Beaujolais nouveau, all fizz on release and flat within the year. Eugene Ormandy’s Carmina Burana has aged like something else — a good vintage burgundy, maybe, still throwing sediment but tasting of the earth it came from.

I first heard this disc on a hand-me-down LP, the sleeve gone soft at the corners. Even then I thought Ormandy understood something a lot of conductors miss about Orff’s cantata: it isn’t really about subtlety. It’s about the body. The thwack of the bass drum in “O Fortuna,” the way the Philadelphia brass dig into their chords like a shovel into wet clay. This is music that wants to be felt in the sternum before it’s understood by the mind. Ormandy, who could be a maddeningly literal Brahmsian on his off days, throws literalism out the window here and just goes for the jugular. Smart man.

The real news, though, was the Rutgers University Choir. Chorus master F. Austin Walter drilled these singers within an inch of their lives, and it shows. Listen to “Ecce gratum”: the consonants come off like gunfire, each syllable given its own little guillotine. There is a ferocious, almost gleeful precision to “Were diu werlt alle min.” You can practically see the singers’ jaws working. And the tongue-twisting patter of “Si puer cum puellula” is dispatched without a single blurred syllable, which is more than can be said for choruses twice as famous singing this same passage on rival discs. I won’t name names. You know the ones.

Janice Harsanyi’s soprano sits high and cool above all this Sturm und Drang. Her “In trutina” has an almost startling purity, a girl weighing love against chastity and sounding genuinely undecided, not just decoratively conflicted. Rudolph Petrak’s tenor, forced up into that cruel falsetto for the Roasted Swan’s lament, screams and cracks exactly as it should. This is a passage where exquisite singing is beside the point, and Petrak knows it. Harve Presnell — yes, the Harve Presnell who later became a Hollywood character actor, oddly enough — brings a swaggering, saloon-baritone bravado to the Abbot’s music that some will find crude. I rather liked it. Orff wasn’t writing for connoisseurs of bel canto.

Then, tacked on almost as an afterthought, we get eighteen minutes from Die Kluge, Orff’s sly, folkloric answer to the fairy-tale opera, premiered in Frankfurt in 1943 under circumstances history has not been kind to. Wolfgang Sawallisch conducts the Philharmonia here with a lighter hand than Ormandy brings to the cantata, and the results are charming if not quite indispensable. Paul Kuen’s Peasant, Hermann Prey in radiant early voice, Gustav Neidlinger sounding predictably granite-jawed: it’s a starry cast for a fragment, and the rhythmic snap of “Als die Treue ward geboren” confirms the family resemblance to Carmina Burana, that same driving ostinato DNA. The transfer here is less kind to the source tape than elsewhere on the disc; there’s a passage of audible strain, a kind of digital wince, right at the top of that number. Someone at the mastering desk should have caught it.

Where does this leave us, against the field? Jochum’s classic DG account still has an unbeatable theatrical snarl to it, and more modern digital versions — Muti, Previn, the various German radio-orchestra entries — offer cleaner sonics and choruses drilled by people who grew up speaking the texts’ medieval Latin and Bavarian dialect as something other than a decathlon event. But cleaner isn’t always better. Ormandy’s Carmina has blood in it. It has swagger, and a chorus that sounds like it means every word, or at least every consonant. Fifty-some years on, it still sounds like a rendition, not a museum piece. For this particular score, that’s exactly the compliment that matters most.