Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
I Carmine Burana to the Sferisterio: destiny, desire and that crowd that believes to dominate the world.
by Marialuisa Veneziano
Macerata 10 August 2026
Before the orchestra attacks, ♪ is already in everyone's memory. It passed through cinema, advertising, stadiums, talent shows and even some motivational videos where humanity seems to be about to conquer the universe before lunch. Few pages of the twentieth century have been so much loved, used and abused. Yet, when the first agreement breaks into the Sferisterio and the chorus pronounces the name of the goddess, that music still manages to accomplish its own fate: it tears the song to the caricature of itself and gives it back to the fear from which it was born.
Because Carl Orff's Fortune is not a benefactor. It is a wheel: lifts, overthrows, crowns and humiliates with the same indifference. In the great maceratese space, the Carmine Burana have become the mirror of a civilization that claims to control everything and then discovers that it cannot govern even its desire.
On the podium of the FORM– Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana, Ramón Tebar led choirs and soloists in a vast organism, in which the difficulty is not producing power, but giving it shape. Making noise is easy; turning it into destiny requires a musician.
A Middle Ages that never existed
The title originates from the manuscript dating back to the Bavarian Abbey of Benediktbeuern. Orff chose, with the advice of the philosopher Michel Hofmann, texts in medieval Latin, middle German and ancient French: songs of spring, wine, game, eros and caducity. He did not put in music the historical Middle Ages. He invented a new one: archaic and modern, made of obstinate, firm harmonies, pearly syllables and coral masses.
The score, composed in 1936 and represented in Frankfurt on 8 June 1937, proceeds by blocks. The repetition does not impoverish the speech: it makes it inexorable. Here the rhythm does not accompany the idea; it is the idea. Percussion and pianos do not dress the words: they sculpt them.
Between the two apparitions ♪ flow spring, dance, drunkenness and desire. Life blooms, drinks, loves, brags; then the wheel returns to the beginning. Man calls progress what Fortuna just considers a turn.
Tebar: the gesture and the need
Ramón Tebar faced the score without exchanging the monumentality for heaviness. He looked for the rhythmic nerbo and safely ruled the imposing apparatus: net attacks, supervised transitions, tight tension even where writing risks to be reduced to a magnificent mechanism.
The greatest merit was not to let ♪ He divorced everything. I Carmine Burana I am not a famous refrain with an hour of anteroom, but a theater of the human condition, also made of irony and fragility.
Sometime would benefit from a longer shadow before the explosion. If every climax is definitive, fate takes on the manners of a television presenter: it always enters with the lights to the maximum. However, Tebar has kept course and clean. In Orff precision is not good orchestral education; it is dramaturgy.
FORM and sound body
The FORM responded with compactness, readiness and discipline. The percussions gave the evening the ritual skeleton without turning into a demolition department; brass and wood have engraved color, the arches have preserved mobility and pianos acted by authentic rhythmic engines.
In the open space of the Sferisterio, which amplifies the gesture but can disperse the detail, the FORM supported the vastness without losing cohesion. Not a soundtrack under the choir, but the ground on which word, body and rhythm met.
True protagonist was the Choir Lirico Marchigiano "Vincenzo Bellini", prepared by Christian Starinieri: compact in the backgrounds, precise in the scans, able to pass from the invective to the dance. In Carmine the Latin must not smell of incense; it must know of land, wine and sweat. The coral mass understood it.
The Pueri Cantores "D. Zamberletti", directed by Gian Luca Paolucci and prepared by Annarosa Agostini, introduced a different light. White voices do not soften the picture: they remember that each wheel of Fortune ends up being inherited by someone.
- Video
Three soloists against the wheel
Karen Gardeazabal brought in the part of the soprano brightness, line control and sensuality devoid of pleasure. In the most suspended passages, the voice was removed from the mass without opposing, until that Dulcissima where technical dizziness and abandon coincide. Not an acute to perform, but the point where desire remains alone.
Ruzil Gatin faced Olim lacus colueram, the lament of the roasted swan, with theatrical courage and incisiveness. In this short and ruthless part singing "good" is not enough: it is necessary to accept the grotesque. Gatin returned the sarcasm of a creature that remembers being beautiful while serving at the table. The Middle Ages had not yet invented good manners, but he already knew metaphysics.
Grisha Martirosyan showed a baritone firm, stamped and communicative. From Omnia Sol temperat to Estuans interius and Ego sum Abbas, has differentiated accent and temperature. The baritone of Orff must be singer, actor, drinker and tavern philosopher — category often more sincere than many academic conferences.
Luca Agnani's videos have expanded magic images provided by the subtitle of the work. In the best moments they have spread the space; elsewhere they have touched the illustration, because such a physical music does not need to explain how to be grandiose. With the wall of the Sferisterio it is necessary to dialogue: to decorate it would be almost an impertinence.
The masterpiece, success and our alibi
♪ has become a global sound commodity: a few seconds is enough to promise catastrophes, cars or toothpastes from the unsuspected epic. But it's not about music. Depressing Carmine Burana because they like many is snobbish; to love them only because they shake the steps is consumption. Either way you avoid listening to them.
The birth of the work in Germany in 1937 also imposes seriousness. Separating it from one's own time would be naive; transforming its rhythmic force into an ideological, rapid test. The relationship of Orff with the regime remains a problematic page, to be studied without assumptions or sum processes.
The evening returned the work to its ambiguity: party and threat, eros and caducity, discipline and fever. All exhausted shows that the public will come in front of a strong experience. But conquering it with what it already recognizes must be the beginning, not the goal. Culture must prepare listening also for masterpieces that we still do not know how to love.
At the end ♪ He returns identical, and yet he is no longer. After spring, wine, meat and love, he speaks of us: of success hunger, the illusion of meriting every ascent and inability to imagine the fall.
The wheel turns. The sound turns out against the wall. For an instant the public remains still, as if he had recognized in destiny not a medieval goddess, but his face. This is what a great execution has to do: not only overwhelm us. Give us the responsibility of silence after the straw.
Macerata Opera Festival 2026 – Carmine Burana. Music by Carl Orff. Director Ramón Tebar; soprano Karen Gardeazabal; tenor Ruzil Gatin; baritone Grisha Martirosyan; FORM– Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana; Choir Lirico Marchigiano "Vincenzo Bellini", master of the choir Christian Starinieri; Pueri Cantores "D. Zamberletti", master of the choir of white voices Gian Luca Paolucci; vocal trainer of Pueri Cantores Annarosa Agostini; video Luca Agnani. Arena Sferisterio, Macerata, 7 August 2026.
Leave a comment