Laura Claycomb - photo by Sergio Valente Click on photo to download high-res .tiff file from DROPBOX

Laura joined Ryan McAdams, filling in for Spanish Maestro Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, in Israel with the Israeli Philharmonic for a series of 11 performances of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.  Although a seemingly strange choice for the Israelis to program this piece by a man who, by most accounts, was at best just an “accommodator” of the Third Reich, and the piece itself was used to show Nazi power in Germany.   But it seems the infectious rhythms and the joining of the voices in the choirs in songs both bawdy and folksy, have an undeniable pull, and one man’s duplicity can be forgiven for creating a piece that is both raucous and rapturous.

Here is another article on Carl Orff and his war-time activities.