From The Times
April 30, 2008
Ben Hoyle, Arts Reporter　



There will be naked dancing girls, bungee ropes, a four-storey tower wreathed in fireworks and the theme from the Old Spice adverts amplified so that 18,000 people can hear it.

Puritannical music lovers should probably run for the hills: the stadium classical music gig is coming to Britain. O2 , the concert venue in the former Millennium Dome, announced yesterday that it will stage a monumental production of Carmina Burana next January.

It plans to follow Carl Orff’s frenetic and instantly recognisable work with productions of Carmen, Aida and The Nutcracker. A musical adaptation of Ben-Hur has also been mooted.

In the ten months since it opened, O2 has won a stack of industry awards and hosted the Led Zeppelin reunion concert, the Rolling Stones, world championship boxing and Strictly Come Dancing. However, presenting classical music as mass entertainment on this scale represents a significant new gamble.

The promoters, Harvey Goldsmith and Raymond Gubbay, have had mixed commercial fortunes presenting operas in Earl’s Court, Wembley Arena and the Royal Albert Hall over the past two decades. But not since 1926 and the end of the triennial Han-del Festivals at the Crystal Palace, six miles away across South London, has such a large indoor venue in Britain hosted classical music.

That event peaked in 1883 when a choir of 4,000 and an orchestra of 500 performed Messiah to an audience of 87,000.

This production of Carmina Burana has already played to 150,000 on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro and more than a million people in 13 years of worldwide touring. It has not visited Britain before.

Franz Abraham, the German impresario behind the production, described his Carmina Burana as “the antiboring classical spectacle”.

Musical theatre as imagined by Cecil B. de Mille seems to be the general idea, with 250 performers – including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Brighton Festival Chorus and Youth Choir, as well as dancers, actors, and singers – involved in the British staging.

A huge, moving central tower provides a backdrop to the sort of overblown spectacle that Orff originally envisaged for his music. There will be fireworks, giant puppets, cannon, vast light projections, masks the size of a man, bungee aerial sequences and “erotic scenes with naked girls imitating an orgy”, Mr Abraham said.

“Carmina Burana is about drinking, food and sex, next to the spiritual aspect of course.”

The work has its origins in a collection of often bawdy 13th-century poems discovered in a Bavarian monastery in 1847 by Johann Andreas Schmeller, a musicologist. They reflected the monks’ preoccupations with earthly pleasures and the overbearing burden of fate.

Schmeller turned the poems into songs that in turn became the basis for Orff’s epic orchestral and choral work, perhaps the most celebrated artistic achievement to come out of Nazi Germany. The whole composition lasts about an hour in performance although it is best known for the O For-tunachorus in the opening and closing movements, which was for many years the soundtrack to adverts for Old Spice aftershave.

Walter Haupt, a student and friend of Orff, created the production coming to the O2 and will conduct it.

“This is not only the most monumental version of Carmina Burana,” Mr Abrahams said. “It is the most authentic version. Orff’s widow came to the premiere and had tears in her eyes.

She said that this is what he dreamed for his masterpiece.”

The music industry is now intrigued as to whether there are enough classical music fans to fill the O2 .

James Inverne, editor of Grama-phonemagazine, said that the concerts could grow the audience for classical music if they were done with flair and sensitivity. “There are a lot of people who will go to something because it’s out of the ordinary and if it’s good there’s nothing to say they won’t then seek out the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican for more.”

But another industry insider with experience of arena concerts said: “They are never going to get 18,000 people for one performance. I’d put money on it. There just isn’t the audience.”

Tickets go on sale this Friday at 9am from www.theo2.co.uk



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© Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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