Carmina Burana: Cantiones Profanae has already been performed for 20 years on the stage of our theatre. The first performance of this scenic cantata for soloists, choir, orchestra and ballet in Krasnoyarsk took place on January 8, 1999.

The concert version of it was presented to the audience of the Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theatre earlier in 1997. A bit later Honoured Artist, choreographer Alexander Polubentsev from St. Petersburg created the stage edition for the first time in Russia. In 2000, Carmina Burana was nominated for the Golden Mask.

The cantata’s author Carl Orff was not just a composer, but rather “a man of a theatre”. Therefore, his masterpiece combines music with vocals, dance with pantomime, scenery with light, like it was in medieval mystery plays. It includes 24 poems mostly in secular Latin verse, with a small amount of Middle High German, Old Provençal, and Old French, ​​belonging to the poets-errant of the High Middle Ages. The Krasnoyarsk stage embodiment of the cantata was the very first one in Russia. Despite the old literary basis, Carmina Burana is really as modern as ever are the themes of life and death, love and loneliness, joy and suffering.

You can watch this spectacular performance this weekend - January 19 and 20, beginning at 6:00 pm.