Carmina Burana at the Royal Festival Hall

Carl Orff’s ever-popular work, which sets medieval songs to music of barbaric splendour, together with two Vaughan Williams pieces

With the Trafalgar Sinfonia and the boys of Dulwich Prep & Senior

Barts Choir presents three twentieth century classics. The concert opens with Toward the Unknown Region, setting words by Vaughan Williams’s favourite poet, Walt Whitman, and concluding triumphantly with a blaze of choral and instrumental sound.   This is followed by his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, where the composer takes the original Tudor hymn tune and transforms it in music of transcendant beauty and power.  Carl Orff’s most popular work was inspired by the composer’s discovery of a collection of medieval songs in Latin and Old German – as he wrote later, “The goddess Fortune must have been smiling on me when, as if by chance, she put a copy of a catalogue [listing Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren)] in my hands”.  Setting these revolutionalised Orff’s own musical style, with simple tunes, driving rhythms, repeated bass figures and brilliant and percussive orchestrations, which influenced much later music, particularly for film and television.