Opera Extravaganza Carmina Burana in Ljubljana in December
Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, the most frequently performed work of the 20th century, will visit Ljubljana on 10 December as part of an international tour of the show by German composer, conductor and director Walter Haupt.
The director and conductor of the peroduction had known Orff personally when he was young. Even though he has staged some of his work, he managed to realise the composer's wish to stage Carmina Burana only seven years after Orff's death in 1982.
Carmina Burana is a scenic cantata that through 24 texts tells stories of love and death, fortune and misfortune, birth and mortality in an ever turning cycle of life. The texts were taken from the Middle Age manuscript by the same title, that Orff found in a monastery close to Munich.
The director told the press at Tuesday's press conference that the individual songs were initially not connected, but that the author told him "Carmina Burana must be placed into the Middle Ages and represent the joy of life. It must speak of eating, drinking and whores, over all of which Fortuna, the goddess of chance, keeps watch".
Haupt nevertheless introduced a lot of his own ideas into the extravaganza. He placed special emphasis on the visual aspect of the performance, using special effects, pyrotechnics and fire as a symbol of life and destruction.
Carmina Burana, according to Haupt, represents the music of genius, which achieves the maximum effect by using minimal instruments. In the past nine years, it has been extremely successful with the audiences in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, Lisbon, Oslo, Lebanon and Paris, and has attracted a million spectators.
The extravaganza, produced by Germany-based Art Concerts company, will be brought to Slovenia by the company Vinyl. It will be performed in Ljubljana's sports hall Hala Tivoli.
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