Carmina Burana

[Todd Melnick]

"Washington Post staff writer" Tim Page contends in a review of a recent
performance:

"As we approach the millennium, Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" (1937), so
long reviled as simplistic and even downright reactionary by composers
and critics, now seems one of the genuine, path-breaking classics of our
century."

one paragraph later:

"It is sometimes said that "Carmina" isn't "as good as it sounds."  I
understand this criticism; this is a work that grabs a listener
immediately but does not necessarily reveal deep, cosmic truths upon
further encounters.  What you hear is what you get.  Also, even more than
with most pieces, it is necessary to be "in the mood" for "Carmina
Burana."  Still, when you *are* in that mood--and more than 2,500 of us
seemed that way--"Carmina" is a pulsing, visceral, exhilarating and oddly
cathartic musical experience.
     "We ought to bury the old "reactionary" charge once and for all.  To
be sure, Orff was in pretty much complete opposition to the accepted
avant-garde of his time--the dense, crabbed chromaticism of Arnold
Schoenberg and the so-called Second Viennese school.  But what will
impress a contemporary listener is how much was presaged in this piece. 
The orchestral dance "On the Lawn," for example, might have come from
Aaron Copland's "Americana" phase; the piano syncopation in "Veni, Veni,
Venias" is right out of "West Side Story"; the soprano solo "In Trutina"
could be a forgotten movement from the Gorecki Third Symphony.  Moreover,
the chiming, reiterative, motoric clockworks in Orff's orchestration
suggest the minimalism of Steve Reich."