How the Edinburgh Festival Chorus tackled Carmina Burana by remote control

A mosaic of voices: The Edinburgh Festival Chorus

“O Fortuna!” The opening words from Carl Orff’s brilliant dramatic cantata Carmina Burana could so easily be a cipher for our global predicament today: where fate’s cruel blow strikes indiscriminately, no-one escapes “its whirling wheel… poverty and power, it melts them like ice.”

Had fortune dealt a kinder hand, and Covid passed us by, these words might have rung out joyously in the Usher Hall this month from the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, whose 120-strong membership were scheduled during this Edinburgh International Festival to be singing Orff’s ecstatic, profane and erotic work with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra. What an occasion that might have been.

The good news is, the chorus has not been completely silenced, having produced a short, socially-distanced film performance of two of Orff’s Carmina movements for the Edinburgh International Festival’s YouTube channel, forming part of the EIF’s My Light Shines On... initiative.

“As you can imagine, it was a real blow for the chorus to lose the one opportunity it has in any year to present its work,” says chorus director Aidan Oliver. “The Festival is what we spend months preparing for. Not only that, but these local singers are, more than anything, the physical embodiment of the Festival in the community. I felt it was incumbent on us to do something.”

That was never going to be easy. With well over 100 singers keen to get involved, and no question of packing them into a single enclosed recording space, the only option for Oliver was to ask every chorister to record his or her own part at home, which would then be studio mixed by record producer Philip Hobbs. “Then came the fun bit, when we asked them to video themselves lip-syncing to the music while doing something typical of lockdown, such as ironing or stroking the cat,” says Oliver.

As for the massive orchestral challenge - anything up to 100 players are generally required - Orff’s own pared-down arrangement for two pianos and percussion provided a ready-made solution. But even then, Covid-enforced minimalism came into play. “We got one pianist and one percussionist from the Scottish Opera Orchestra to multitrack what should really be played by two pianists and six percussionists.”

Will all this really be enough to make up for the loss of the performances of Mahler, Brahms, Holst and Wagner which the chorus should have been undertaking during the coming weeks?

“I was unsure how it would go down, but in fact the response was extraordinary,” Oliver tells me. “To have had all their performances cancelled for a whole year was something that was clearly going to leave a massive hole in people’s lives. Because of that, I think, they got stuck in, regardless of the struggle many felt in setting up the gubbins at home to record, and in practical things like silencing the dog.”

Carmina Burana was chosen, he says, because it was the one performance the choir was really looking forward to. “At a study day we held in January I showed them a few clips from an extraordinary 1975 film version [by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle] for West German television - it’s completely over the top - as I wanted the project to have a sense of fun. Which is also why the chorus’s filmed project offsets the forebodings of “O Fortuna” with the fifth movement, Ecce Gratum, which is all about emerging from the harshness of winter into the joys of spring and summer, and the resumption of jolly things.”

Or, as Orff’s medieval source text puts it, “A wretched soul is he who does not live or lust under summer’s rule. Ah!”

The Edinburgh Festival Chorus’s filmed extracts from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana launch on the Edinburgh International Festival YouTube Channel on 8 August at 9.30pm. Full details on www.eif.co.uk

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