“Carmina Burana” at the Chekhov Festival. Review

The largest project of the Chekhov Festival ended on the stage of the Zaryadye Concert Hall. Carl Orff’s oratorio “Carmina Burana” (“Beuern Songs”) was presented by the Cuban Contemporary Ballet Theater with the participation of Russian singers (Maria Buinosova, Yaroslav Abaimov, Pavel Yankovsky), the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Moscow Philharmonic, the Moscow Chamber Choir, the Chapel. Sudakov and the children’s choir “Vesna”. They tell Yulia Bederova And Tatiana Kuznetsova.

When in the 1930s Carl Orff composed a cantata cycle based on selected vagant texts from the medieval Beuern Codex, what he imagined was not a weighty philharmonic choral genre, but a purely experimental model of innovative synthetic theater. “Secular songs for singing by singers and choirs, together with instruments and magical images” was Orff’s first attempt at projecting the “art of the future” using an archaic musical vocabulary. But their fate was unhappy. The extremely popular cycle, to the accompaniment of a huge orchestra, two pianos and percussion, about the vicissitudes of fate, spring, love (and also about how a roasted swan cries and a fake abbot preaches all sorts of nonsense) sounds a lot in an academic, exaggeratedly monumental manner, with a thick choral touch, in a forced dynamics with empire balance.

Likewise, in the current version of the orchestral and choral fresco with soloists, as if carefully feeling their melodic and emotional path through the thick of sounds, it was not easy to hear the archaic stature and modernist grace, the formulaic style and constructivist instrumentation in the score, which in 1937 after the premiere was called one “ Negro music” (for vulgar jazz intonations), others – the embodiment of the collective national spirit: for a lot of “forte”, the scale and dexterity of a mixture of neoclassicism with neofolklorism.

And Moscow expected more from the Cubans. The venerable Theater of Contemporary Ballet is almost the same age as the Cuban revolution, its repertoire is colossal, its tour routes are extensive, and the dancers of the Island of Liberty are famous for their physical talent. However, “Carmina Burana” turned out to be similar to a physical training parade: mass (up to forty people) strength synchronized rhythmic exercises with large amplitude and an aggressive manner of presentation. The dance pattern did not differ in variety: frontal ranks predominated, with formations in columns.

Intending to “glorify man and his stay on earth,” choreographer George Enrique Cespedes did not delve into the content of the texts and the genre diversity of Orff’s music – he thought globally. The inextinguishable and somewhat abstract pathos of the choreography was illustrated by an equally vague video film. Intentionally dim, mostly black-and-white footage flashed on the screen of a huge “porthole” showed cataclysms of various scales: from ocean storms and shell explosions to cockfights and insect fights. The dances, including those of the female corps de ballet, looked just as militant, full of the will to resist: in one of them, the ladies moved on their hands, practically without leaving the “lying down” position, steadfastly holding the “bar”, putting their legs on each other’s shoulders and thus forming smooth “cells of society.”

The famous “drunk” songs were marked by somersaults, forward and reverse somersaults, ineptly performed “Bedouin” wheels and frighteningly active facial expressions. The only duet that could be called “love” was distinguished by extreme chastity: the man and woman managed to do without touching at all, so it remains a mystery how humanity was able to survive with such asceticism.

The finely chopped, old-fashioned choreography, which mechanically danced every note of the musical text, was not saved by the artists by either plasticity, technicality, or even originality of performance. So the timid hope that Cuban choreographic thought and physical originality would help the national ballet survive in the era of isolation dissipated like smoke: it turned out that the cultural blockade could dry out even such a super-dancing people.