ODESA NATIONAL ACADEMIC OPERA AND BALLET THEATRE

Who isn’t familiar with Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana? This piece most surely has never had such a multidisciplinary staging. Here different artistic disciplines are combined: a large orchestra plays for the dancers, two choruses, with adults and children, sing while in back video installations are screened. Over 135 people are involved in this performance.

Responsible for staging, choreography, and scenery is Gerard Mosterd, a dancer, choreographer, and producer active in the Netherlands and worldwide.

The scenic cantata CARMINA BURANA is based on 24 poems from a middle age poetry anthology of the same name. The authors were monks and students who traveled the world writing down their thoughts in Latin, Old German, and Old French.

The contrasting vocal and orchestral numbers show different world views: some celebrate the joys of life, happiness, unbridled gaiety, the beauty of springtime and passionate love while others tell of the hard life of the monks and itinerant students, looking with irony at their own lives and hoping for a propitious future. At the heart of the piece is the philosophical consideration that people with all their little pleasures and concerns are merely toys at the hands of capricious Destiny, symbolized by a constantly turning wheel of fortune.

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