Telarc Releases Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Recording Of Carmina Burana In SACD Format

Super Audio Compact Disc Features Conductor Donald Runnicles In His Inaugural Season With ASO

17-Jan-02

Telarc International, an industry leader in digital recording technology for more than two decades, announces the release of The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorusí recording of Orffís Carmina burana, under the direction of Donald Runnicles in his inaugural season as the ASOís new Principle Guest Conductor.The new SACD format, created by Sony and Philips, provides unprecedented sound quality in stereo and discrete multi-channel surround. To achieve its sonic performance, SACD employs a radically new digital encoding technology called Direct Stream Digital. DSD samples the musical signal at a phenomenal 2.8 million times a second - 64 times greater than traditional CD recordings. The result is an extremely smooth digital waveform with unparalleled frequency response and dynamic range. Telarc is now recording all of its projects using the DSD process.The potential benefits of SACD do not stop with its performance. The SACD format supports several disc configurations, including a Hybrid SACD designed to be completely compatible with the millions of CD players in the market today. Hybrid SACDs actually contain two complete layers of music information. One is the conventional CD layer, which can play on any standard CD player. The other, high-density layer contains both the original DSD two-channel recording as well as a DSD six-channel recording that can be played in the new generation of stereo and surround SACD players. Each of the six channels can be recorded separately with full 100 kHz frequency response and 120dB dynamic range across the audio band. Both the six-channel and the two-channel sound images have unparalleled resolution and transparency.This new layer of recording technology makes Orffís Carmina burana more dramatic and mesmerizing than ever. Joining the ASO in this powerful new recording are Hei-Kyung Hong, soprano; Stanford Olsen, tenor; Earle Patriarco, baritone; and the Gwinnett Young Singers.Carmina burana is one of the twentieth centuryís most widely performed works for chorus and orchestra. Premiered in 1937 in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, Carmina burana combines archaic poetry, simple, folk-like melodies, and motoric, primal rhythms to create images of the eternal springtime of the human soul. The poetry is taken from a collection of earthy thirteenth-century songs, written by students and vagrant clerics, and discovered in 1803 at the Benedictine monastery of Beuren in Bavaria. In 1847, J.A. Schmeller edited and published a number of the songs under the title Carmina burana (ìSongs of Beurenî). From this collection, Orff selected the songs for his secular cantata, setting the poetry to his own original music.The poems from Carmina burana are in two languages, described by one scholar as ìdistorted medieval Latin and Middle High German.î For this recording, the choruses and soloists have endeavored to perform the lyrics as closely as possible to the way their thirteenth-century authors would have pronounced them. Diction coach Jeffrey W. Baxter was aided by the expert guidance of Professor John Austin of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

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