Voices frame a BSO success

Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe.

Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" is a certified crowd-pleaser, so popular and instantly recognizable that it has earned a spot in countless television commercials and ice skating routines. (You know it even if you think you don't.)

It would be hard to imagine a truly fresh way to present this piece in concert, and yet that's exactly what the Boston Symphony Orchestra has done this week. Thursday night in Symphony Hall, Orff's massive choral-orchestral juggernaut was offset by music hailing from another universe altogether, also known as the 13th century.

In the first half of the program, the BSO made itself scarce and the enlarged stage was given over to the visiting vocal ensemble Sequentia, which performed medieval settings of the original "Carmina Burana" poetry that inspired Orff 700 years later.

There could be no starker contrast with Orff's music of orgiastic extremes. These 13th-century gems were intimately scaled, spare, and haunting in their mellifluous rise and fall. Sequentia performed with six voices, often unaccompanied or with gentle embroidery from a single harp.

And thanks to the witty translations by Sequentia's intrepid director, Benjamin Bagby, these ancient musings on fate, power, sex, and greed seemed eerily and often amusingly contemporary.

Then came Orff's "Carmina Burana," led by guest conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. This "scenic cantata" is filled with music that seems intent on bypassing the mind and going straight for the gut. I confess I find it difficult to muster much sympathy for this lapel-grabbing music, or to fully divorce it from the aesthetic and political conditions of its birth in Germany in 1935-36. Yet I am clearly in the minority. Even mediocre performances can whip a crowd into a frenzy.

Thursday night's performance was far better than that. The forces massed on stage included an expanded BSO, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, the PALS Children's Chorus, and the vocal soloists Norah Amsellem, William Ferguson, and Christian Gerhaher. Frühbeck relishes giant sonic canvases. He seemed to know exactly what he wanted and usually got his way.

The chorus in particular deserved every bit of the hearty ovation sent its way.