Hold your horses ... Is the O2's Carmina Burana over-the-top? Photograph: PA
So Carmina Burana is set to perform in a mega-staged production at the O2 Arena? Good luck to that - it might turn out to be the ideal venue for it.
Filling 18,000 seats is not such a tall order when you remember that the opera festival given at the Roman amphitheatre in Verona each summer since 1913 often sells out its 25,000-a-night capacity over its 10-week season. Admittedly the operas are the most popular in the repertory - Aida, Carmen, Tosca and the like - but they are still great pieces and Verona finds great voices to deliver them.
As for Carmina Burana, the title is the most recondite thing about the piece. It means Songs of Beuern, after the Bavarian monastery where its source, a 13th-century manuscript containing a random collection of medieval songs, was discovered. The songs are a mixture of sacred and profane, though mainly the latter, some in Latin, others in German: philosophical, satirical, bibulous, amorous - a bit of everything, in fact, written down by clerics and students from material that was current at the time. Carl Orff set 24 of the texts to his own music and the result was staged in Frankfurt in 1937. Despite its regrettable provenance in Nazi Germany, there's nothing politically suspect in the work itself. Carmina Burana has proved popular everywhere - though for some reason it has migrated from the stage to the concert platform. For a while every choral society in the country seemed to be putting it on, though of late they've moved on (down?) to Karl Jenkins.
A subtle piece it isn't. Musically, it's basic, simple and extremely repetitive, though undeniably lively in its propulsive rhythms and football-stadium tunes. Orff had clearly been listening to Stravinsky's Russian wedding cantata, Les Noces - a far better piece - but he picked up on its vitality and ran with it. Carmina Burana remains as the only regular survivor from Orff's output, much of which is excruciatingly tedious. (Try Antigonae or De Temporum Fine Comoedia; or rather don't.)
As for the O2's promised "fireworks, giant puppets, cannon, bungee sequences and erotic scenes with naked girls imitating an orgy" (hey, why no naked boys?), they don't seem out of kilter with the (c)rude and earthy spirit of the original. Bring it on.
