Carmina Burana by Orff, Pärt, Auerbach, Lera, Wagner, Richard, From (2024/2024), Conductor Stéphane Denève, Stifel Theatre, St. Louis, United States

“O fortuna!” Right from its famous opening notes, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana shakes the Stifel to its foundation. Orff’s work charts the course of fate with songs of joy, love, and celebration. Stéphane crafts a first half trilogy of loss and fateful farewell. In Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, pure sounds are as if directly descended from heaven, then Lera Auerbach brings us to the heat of the sun in Icarus. In the Love-death from Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde we end with a salute to eternal love.  A few things to know:  From Disney movies to Superbowl commercials, from Wrestlemania to beer ads, Carmina Burana has seeped into every nook and cranny of our culture. But its source material is obscure, a 13th-century collection of songs and poems that was lost for six centuries. Carl Orff was confident in the work, writing to his publisher, “Everything I have written to date can be destroyed. With Carmina Burana my collected works begin.”   Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is a tale of forbidden love. Isolde is an Irish princess. She is being taken by Tristan, against her will, to Cornwall. There she will marry his uncle, King Marke. On the way, Isolde tries to poison them both. Instead, a love potion causes them to fall in love. In the “Liebestod” (“love-death”), Isolde laments the death of Tristan, gradually engulfed by love and by her own death.  Russian-born Lera Auerbach is a very modern creator: conductor, pianist, composer, poet, and visual artist. “I have long been fascinated by the story of Icarus,” she writes. “Exhilarated by freedom, by his own youth, by the feeling of light, Icarus soared higher and higher until the wax on his wings melted and he fell into the ocean. Oh, gravity!”