Oakland Symphony’s Carmina Burana and Two Black Churches Pack a Powerful Message
Naughty lyrics enhanced by enthusiastic choral joy provided by the Oakland Symphony Chorus and the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir filled the Paramount Theater with the familiar music of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on Friday, November 8th. If you have not yet had the chance to hear this performed live on stage, then, you haven’t really heard it at all: More than a hundred voices accompanied by a full orchestra came to demand our presence and gave our souls a sense of elation that we didn’t know was missing from our lives.
Oakland Symphony Music Director and Conductor Kedrick Armstrong led a stage full of talent that provided a night of remembrance and healing for the election-sore hearts of Oakland.
Carmina Burana has a habit of crashing around popular culture. Search for parodies of the opening “O Fortuna,” and you will be rewarded with misheard lyrics aplenty. Written in 1935 and 1936, this work is based on drinking ditties and folk tales from the 11th and 12th Centuries. Though composer Carl Orff was not a Nazi himself, Carmina Burana was originally rejected, and then embraced, by the government of Nazi Germany once it became popular. Despite these questionable ties, its crowd-pleasing abilities are not to be denied.
How then did this collection of bawdy drinking songs and racey love scenes leave an audience on their feet in a standing ovation with tears in their eyes? Well, we first have to talk about the piece that came right before it: Shawn Okpebholo’s Two Black Churches, co-commissioned by the Emerging Black Composers Project & Oakland Symphony.
The piece wove together the tragic tales of the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham Alabama and the 2015 shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, into two movements. Okpebholo managed to remind us of the past and be wary of the future. Baritone Will Liverman’s voice rang out as he sang the two poems recounting the events. A collective whisper ran through the audience as we heard the words “When the Reality of Racism returns.” The first line in The Rain by Marcus Amaker sets the tone for the night. It hit hard.
The 25 sections of Carmina Burana came storming in after this, complete with welcome subtitles. It begins with the familiar strains of O, Fortuna. After that, surprisingly sexy songs about lusty youth and blasphemous innuendos abounded in the season of Spring. We also heard from a roasted swan, a woman who lacked a lover and two youths are alone in a room (insert wink here). All the joys that could befall a peasant were giddily present.
Despite this, the performance began and ended with the words of those powerless in the hands of fate: “I bemoan the wounds of Fortune, with weeping eyes, for the gifts she made me, she perversely takes away.”
Meechot Marrero (soprano), Ashley Faatoalia (tenor), and Will Liverman (baritone), placed strategically among the orchestra, choir, and youth chorus, made for a full stage. Under Armstong’s guidance, we were led from the dire opening into a light-hearted tale of youth looking for love, finding love, and at last, making love. After the final orgasmic note from Marrero we did not get a moment before the choir plunges us back into the bleak warning that fate is always waiting in the wings to whisk all of the happiness away on her whim. Every performer and musician brought their power to the stage and we as the audience were powerless in the message and the music.
It was an inspiring second show to what looks like an exciting season for the Oakland Symphony. To find out more about their upcoming events visit https://www.oaklandsymphony.org/event-category/tickets-available/
The article originally appeared on Midbrow.org
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