“CD jackets and album covers for Carl Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’ often reproduce Hieronymous Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights,’ which shows sinners in various states of debauchery,” writes Patrick Neas in Saturday’s (3/23) Kansas City Star. “It’s an apt image…. The Kansas City Symphony will present ‘Carmina Burana’ in all its sonic glory … beginning March 28… ‘Carmina Burana’ is the ‘Game of Thrones’ of classical music. Its bombastic medievalism is liberally laced with plenty of sex and carousing. Orff based his text on poems taken from a medieval collection of poetry found in 1803 in the Benedictine monastery of Benediktbeuren. … Mostly they’re songs of love, mockery and gaming…. There’s never a dull moment in the entire work…. Ryan McAdams … will guest conduct the Kansas City Symphony … the Kansas City Symphony Chorus [and] the Lawrence Children’s Choir…. Opening the concert will be two works by two contemporary American composers: ‘Something for the Dark’ by Sarah Kirkland Snider and ‘EOS: Goddess of the Dawn’ by Augusta Read Thomas. Thomas writes that EOS exhibits ‘rhythmic syntaxes, radiant colors, and resonant harmonic fields.’ Snider’s ‘Something for the Dark’ was inspired by the poetry of Pulitzer Prize-winning Philip Levine.”
Posted March 27, 2019
