Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times  Riccardo Muti leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the opening night of Carnegie Hall.  On Wednesday morning at Carnegie Hall, right before the players of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and their conductor, Riccardo Muti, began a rehearsal for that evening’s concert opening the Carnegie season, Clive Gillinson, the hall’s executive and artistic director, went onstage to tell the musicians that he had never been so happy to greet an orchestra.  On Sept. 22 the Chicago players went on strike in a dispute over wages and benefits. Whatever distress this action caused in Chicago, it sent Carnegie Hall into full panic mode, since the orchestra was scheduled to play three programs, including the important opening-night concert.  After a few tense days the players, among the highest-paid in America, came to an agreement with the orchestra’s administration, and the strike ended, a huge relief to Mr. Gillinson and his Carnegie team, who had spent the time making frantic calls to find a potential replacement orchestra.  The hall was packed for the gala program on Wednesday night, which offered just one work: Carl Orff’s popular “Carmina Burana,” a Muti specialty. (A recording of the performance is available for streaming on the Web sites of NPR and WQXR radio.) Now in his third season as the orchestra’s music director, Mr. Muti drew a fresh, exciting and uncommonly subtle performance of this unabashedly theatrical piece from the orchestra; the 150-voice Chicago Symphony Chorus (Duain Wolfe, director); the 33-member Chicago Children’s Choir (Josephine Lee, director); and three vocal soloists.  Though “Carmina Burana” had its premiere in a staged version at the Frankfurt Opera in 1937, it is no opera. Lasting about 65 minutes, it is like a scenic song cycle, with settings of 24 medieval poems, mostly in Latin, that deal with the fickleness of fortune, the seasons of nature and life, and especially the pros and cons of gluttony and lust.  To some degree “Carmina Burana,” which was very popular in Germany after its premiere, was Orff’s rebuttal to his era’s complex modernist styles, considered degenerate by the Nazi regime. Orff’s music is direct and accessible, with scant counterpoint and unadventurous harmony, relying instead on pummeling energy, rhythmic intricacy and melodic writing that variously evokes elegy, chant and children’s ditties.  Though Mr. Muti has had vast experience in opera, he did not milk “Carmina” for its operatic elements. If anything, he took a contrary approach, treating the score with musicianly respect, highlighting inner textures, drawing out delicate colorings and maximizing every moment of tenderness and refinement. He gave full force to episodes of driving rhythm and vehement choral outbursts but kept tempos in check and exact, achieving fearsome intensity through a kind of grave power.  His way with the piece came through immediately in the opening chorus, “O Fortuna,” a human cry against cruel fortune, which Mr. Muti conducted with weighty textures in a broad, steady tempo; the chorus, venting anguish and anger, was backed by the pounding orchestra.  But when the music shifted to a muttered litany of complaints that fortune makes sport with human desires, the chorus sang with hushed intensity, and the orchestra played with eerie calm, coiled and waiting to strike. In the subdued “Veris leta facies” (“The joyous face of spring”), the woodwinds voiced Orff’s chords with such precision that the harmonies for once sounded pungently modern.  There were weak patches in the singing of the young baritone Audun Iversen. But when it mattered most, in the gently melodic “Omnia sol temperat” (“All things are tempered”), he sang with elegant legato and warm sound. The lyric soprano Rosa Feola was radiant in her soaring solos, especially the angelic “Dulcissime” (“Sweetest boy”). Antonio Giovannini brought plaintive humor to the countertenor song sung by a miserable swan recalling life on his beloved lake while he spins and roasts on a spit.  In a video interview made for the Chicago Symphony’s Web site, Mr. Muti speaks about a performance of “Carmina Burana” that he conducted with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1980. Orff was in attendance, Mr. Muti says, and was so impressed that he made changes to some dynamic and tempo markings for a new edition of the piece. After hearing this performance, I can believe it.  The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performs its final New York concert on Friday evening at Carnegie Hall; (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, led by Riccardo Muti, resolved a brief strike last week in time to perform Carl Orffâs âCarmina Buranaâ on Wednesday night at Carnegie Hallâs season-opening concert.