Christian von Gehren - Carl Orff: Ein Sommernachtstraum (2011)

Carl Orff's "play with music" Ein Sommernachtstraum is based on a German translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's a work with a troubled history, based nearly as much on the dubious political circumstances surrounding its creation as on its inherent musical value. Orff had written music for parts of the play as early as 1917, but it wasn't until 1938 when he accepted a commission from the National Socialist mayor of Frankfurt to write incidental music to replace Mendelssohn's contaminated Jewish score that he created the full work. (The version recorded here is a 1964 expansion that the composer produced to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.) Regardless of Orff's motivation for colluding with the malign intent of the Nazi Party, the piece is of scant musical interest. It consists of the entire text of the play with very sparse, fleeting injections of music, most of which come and go before they can make much of an impression. Most of the music that lasts long enough to register in the listener's consciousness involves direct quotes from the composer's earlier works, which may have succeeded in their original contexts but often come across here as miscalculated, or, in the case of the too-frequently iterated "Rüpelszene" (lifted from Die Kluge), as excruciatingly trivial. There are a handful of effective musical moments such as the end of the love scene with Titania and Bottom and the opening of the last scene. Even for Orff's most ardent fans, his paltry level of invention makes this a work unlikely to generate much enthusiasm.

Since the recording has so little music and consists primarily of the play itself, its effectiveness depends largely on the quality of the acting. The performances are generally so passive and uninflected that, were it not for the fact that the recording was taken from a certified live performance, the listener might reasonably be excused for assuming these were members of an amateur theater group doing a first table-reading of the script. Several of the actors occasionally sound like they are getting worked up, but to little ultimate effect. Most egregious is the affectless performance of the actor playing Bottom, who for most of the play sounds like he is reading a shopping list, or maybe a recipe. There is little in the actors' delivery, or the pedestrian music, or the tepid response of the audience, to indicate that this is, after all, a comedy.