Orff: Carmina Burana and Trionfi Cycle – Jochum

Somewhere back in the fog of the LP era, a certain kind of record collector developed the peculiar habit of hunting down anything Orff supposedly blessed with his personal attendance, as if proximity to the composer guaranteed musical revelation. It rarely did. Orff signed off on nearly every German studio session of his music that came along in the 1950s and ‘60s — a genial man, by most accounts, and not a terribly discriminating one when publicity was on offer.

This Jochum Trionfi cycle carries exactly that pedigree, and exactly that asterisk.

Start with the problem child, Carmina Burana itself, a work so ubiquitous now that it takes real effort to remember it once needed champions. Jochum was one of the earliest and best of them. His advocacy in the concert hall in the postwar years did as much as anyone’s to launch the piece into the repertory mainstream it now dominates, slightly to its detriment; familiarity has worn some of the shock off “O Fortuna,” though live it can still raise the hair on your arms. Here, though, in 1953 mono, the sound simply will not cooperate with his intentions. The engineers plant the voices at the lip of the stage and shove the orchestra into another room entirely. Try finding the trumpet calls in the second movement. They’re there, presumably, but you’ll need to take it on faith. Orff’s orchestration depends on exactly this kind of brass glint and percussion snap for its theatrical effect, the sleigh bells and glockenspiel providing that carnival glitter the piece needs to avoid sounding merely bombastic, and none of it registers. The men’s chorus sounds thin to the point of anemia — a dozen voices, maybe, doing work that wants forty.

Then there’s the matter of tracks 15 and 16, which someone at some point in the mastering chain simply reversed, so that the Abbot’s drunken complaints follow the drinking song rather than lead into it. The insert lists everything correctly. The disc does not.

Elfriede Trötschel’s soprano — sweet-toned, girlish, exactly the sound Orff wanted for the seduction sequence — runs short of breath in the long held note of “Amor volat undique,” an unforgivable moment to stumble given how exposed the line sits. Hans Braun, as the Abbot, garbles his diction in “Ego sum abbas” badly enough that the Latin turns to mush. Neither failure is fatal on its own. Together, with the sonic deficiencies, they sink the rendition.

Catulli Carmina fares considerably better, and here the disc earns its keep. The reduced scoring — pianos and a battery of percussion, nothing else — suits the album’s cramped perspective far more comfortably than the full orchestral apparatus of Carmina Burana does. Jochum finds real spring in the rhythms, that propulsive, almost primitive drive Orff wanted, all ostinato and hammered chords stripped of Romantic upholstery. The choir, still undersized for the big climaxes, sings with cleaner attack and better ensemble in the extended a cappella stretches at the work’s center. No small achievement: those passages expose every flaw in intonation and blend mercilessly.

Trionfo di Afrodite, the third and final panel of the triptych Orff eventually insisted be performed complete, remains an orphan. Four recordings total, by the last count I saw, against nearly ninety of Carmina Burana alone. The performance here is genuinely fine, well-shaped, committed. The piece itself, for all its ritualistic wedding-chorus grandeur, never quite justifies its length or its ambitions; it wants to be an ecstatic culmination and comes off more as an extended coda.

So: a historical document, worth owning if you collect Jochum or care about the genesis of this repertory, but not a version anyone should reach for first. Collectors wanting the complete Trionfi triptych have much better modern options. The piece deserves an engineer who trusts the orchestra as much as the voices.