We’re lucky to hear “Carmina Burana”

The blast of “O Fortuna” at the beginning and its crushing return at the end stick in the memory from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Friday night, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with Andreas Delfs conducting, blew the doors off Uihlein Hall when Fortune, indifferent to the loves and lives of mortals, turned her wheel.

But the point of the medieval poems that inspired Orff to write this profane — even lurid — cantata is that life is feast and famine, yearning and satiation, winning and losing. Embrace it all, lustily.

Delfs did exactly that, in a conception of the piece at once recklessly bold and finely nuanced. A credible explosion requires a contrasting hush, and violence becomes more compelling amid tenderness. This Carmina had all of that, in epic scale.

The MSO chorus, very well prepared by Lee Erickson, the Milwaukee Children’s Choir (led by Elizabeth Egger) and three superb soloists really got what Delfs was after. The chorus sang the quiet choral portions of “O Fortuna” so quietly that almost nothing was left but the intensely articulated sibilants and plosives. I’ve never heard such furious choral hissing and spitting, and no other sounds could better fit the bitter words.

But the wheel turned and Spring arrived, in a little sinfonia as sweet and dreamy as the aroma of wildflowers. A buoyant and bounding choral “Floret silva” celebrated the carnal awakening of spring. But one creature’s abundant summer is another’s undoing; tenor Andrew Bidlack brought out all the dark humor in his one number, the swan song of a roasted fowl.

Carmina, written primarily by monks who had left their commissions for lives of debauchery, is all about sex and the yearning for it, which became uncommonly vivid in this performance. Baritone Hugh Russell sang brilliantly and mugged shamelessly (and appropriately). He advanced with implacable logic through his slurry recitative (“Ego sum abbas”) about being the abbot of the holy order of the bar stool through his ardent courting — much of it in a remarkable falsetto — of soprano Norah Amsellem. Ansellem looked like an Art Nouveau goddess in a shimmering gown of black and gold, and she sang like a goddess. She and Russell, egged on by the orchestra and chorus, built her aria/duet to a downright orgasmic leap of a major ninth to a high B in the climactic Dulcissime.

At that moment, love and lust become a perfect unity for just as long as the human breath can hold a note. And then Fortune turned her wheel.

Delfs opened the evening with an inventive interlacing of Slavonic Dances by Dvorak and Hungarian Dances by Brahms. The two friendly composers wrote many such dances for their common publisher, Simrock, for piano four hands. They were big money-makers. Dvorak orchestrated two of the Brahms dances in the Delfs “dance mix,” which springs from his and spouse Amy’s practice of playing four-hands music at their own piano.

Delfs conducted from memory and had some very specific ideas about phrasing, thrust and rubato. The composers contrasted free, expressive melodrama with jolly, propulsive allegros. Delfs took it all to extremes, the orchestra bought in, and the 10 dances were lots of fun. Danis Kelly played the funny little harp passages that Delfs concocted, in part to smooth out key transitions between the numbers and in part to suppress applause until the end. And I think he was making little jokes, too. Taken together, the linking passages become the Delfs Golden Book of Harp Clichés. Which turns out to be pretty darned funny.

This Milwaukee Symphony program, which drew a huge ovation at the end, will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday (Jan. 21-22). For tickets, call the Marcus Center box office, 414 273-7206.