September 17, 2016 An unusually expressive, and often aggressive, account of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana was the main event on the opening concert of the San Antonio Symphony’s new season, Sept. 16 in the Tobin Center. Music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing conducted the orchestra, the Mastersingers, the Children’s Chorus of San Antonio and three extraordinary vocal soloists.  Carmina Burana has been a reliable box-office hit for decades. The local orchestra has performed it several times, most recently on a specialnon-subscription concert that opened the 2009-10 season.  Orff composed the work in 1935-36, and the premiere was given in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1937, four years after Hitler was elected chancellor. The texts came from a collection of 13th-century secular poems, many of them of  a boozy or randy nature, in medieval Latin and German. Orff had some of the sexual explicitness of the originals cleaned up, perhaps with a cautious eye to the Nazi regime’s emphasis on traditional family values. A review of the premiere by the Nazi musicologist Hans Gerigk slammed the work for its primitivism, but it was quickly embraced by the crowd and by Nazi elites, and eventually by audiences worldwide.  Orff himself had been associated with the left prior to Hitler’s rise, but the composer was mainly an opportunist with no political convictions beyond his own ambition. He adjusted easily to the Nazi regime — he conveniently forgot that one of his grandparents was Jewish, and in 1943 he hoped to be named Reichsminister of Music. After the war, he falsely claimed to have co-founded a resistance cell. By all accounts, he was not a nice person.  Although no ideology motivated the distinctive musical style of Carmina Burana, that style is highly compatible with authoritarian governments, whether the regime is labeled Nazi, Communist, Fascist or anything else. (Trumpist, perhaps?)  Despotic regimes rely equally on force and on propaganda to control their populations. The propaganda side consists of simplistic formulas and slogans, endlessly repeated, and delivered with great panache. Much of Carmina Burana consists of obsessively repeated rhythmic patterns, and although Orff’s color palette is brilliant and innovative, the harmonic palette is stripped down, simplistic, missing the emotional layering and human nuance that Orff’s Germanic predecessors — think Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler — conveyed by navigating more freely through the tonal system.  Mr. Lang-Lessing found ways, however, to give the work additional expressive depth. He brought great flexibility to the lyrical sections, and he pushed the tempo in quicker sections, sometimes giving the music a frantic sense of impending doom — eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. He got generally crisp ensemble from his large forces, so the scintillating colors Orff commanded from the percussion and the high woodwinds landed with a crackle. (The H-E-B Performance Hall’s splendid acoustics, so faithful to instrumental timbres, deserve credit, too.)  The vocal soloists were top-drawer. Tenor Anthony Webb was the show-stopper in his brief comic appearance as the cooked goose, in a voice that managed to remain pristine and beautiful while honoring the grotesque spirit of the text. Soprano Sarah Shafer’s pure, gleaming instrument was unalloyed pleasure, and glorious in the stratospheric “Stetit puella."   Baritone Steven LaBrie’s caramel timbre, rhythmic acuity and superb sense of the texts could hardly be surpassed. He wanted more steel in one solo, the opening of the tavern section, but otherwise he projected well.  The Mastersingers, prepared by John Silantien, and the Children’s Chorus, prepared by Joseph Casuby, did consistently first-class work. So did the orchestra. Special notice goes to the expanded percussion section, to the wonderful cellos, to Julie Luker (piccolo), and to the newly appointed principal flute, Mark Teplitsky.  The concert opened with a well-crafted account of the brooding, dramatic overture to Verdi’s bloody opera I vespri siciliani.  Mike Greenberg

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In ‘Carmina Burana,’ the power of simplicity 

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Final bows after Carmina Burana in the Tobin Center.

San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing