Recording from 26. Sep 2024

Orff: Carmina Burana

One day in 1934, the German composer Carl Orff encountered set of vivid poems charting the outlandish japes of the Golliards - a group of hedonistic monks and students from the 1200s. Orff was utterly captivated.

These vivid texts found a perfect home in the ritualistic, Stravinsky-influenced style the composer had been honing - a style full of motoric rhythms, driving energy, percussive power and cinematic orchestration.

Orff’s Carmina Burana has since become one of the most iconic and recognizable works in musical history, loved as much by the huge orchestras and choirs it demands as by movie directors and advertising executives. Alongside its furious rhythms and stern texts, Carmina has haunting tenderness and biting humour. Aziz Shokhakimov conducts it here.