What a stark contrast between the visual and the aural at last Thursday’s concert at the Hollywood Bowl. On stage was the 79-year-old conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, appearing frail as he shuffled towards the podium; the gauntness of his features accentuated by his suit which hung loosely from his frame. Yet the din of sound, the elemental fury and ecstasy which he roused from the combined forces of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Master Chorale in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana saw the fragile exterior give way to youthful passion and strength undimmed by aging’s relentless tread.
For Frühbeck Carmina Burana has become something of a calling card. In 1965 he made what could arguably be called the definitive recording of Orff’s raucous celebration of wine, women, and song with the New Philharmonia Orchestra of London, a recording which remains available in CD format—with countless performances following in the intervening half-century (he’s scheduled to conduct it again on September 6 in Copenhagen). To his performance at the Hollywood Bowl, Frühbeck brought a distillation of a lifetime’s experience married to a sense of spontaneity that further highlighted the lustful merriment of the score.
It was a flexibility of approach that at times seemed to threaten to derail the music, to say nothing of his singers, chorus, and orchestra. But Frühbeck—with a wizened, aristocratic profile that could have emerged from a dream by Cervantes—managed to give the impression of total abandon within a tight framework of control.
From the orchestra Frühbeck coaxed the full spectrum of Orff’s near-Technicolor orchestral display. The blend and juxtapositions of winds, brass, strings, percussion and voices were as much cries of desire and cosmic joy as they were snapshots of a composer at the height of his powers; able to conjure colors and set to music the score’s medieval texts with knowing sophistication.