Chorus Austin

There’s no escaping Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. It’s ubiquitous, popping up – usually to signal impending doom – in movies as varied as Salò, Excalibur, Natural Born Killers, The Doors, and Happy Death Day 2U, as well as TV episodes of The Simpsons, American Horror Story, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Glee. Vacillating from creeping to shrieking, leadoff “O Fortuna” is the banger, but the whole cantata – performed this weekend by Austin Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Austin – is terrific, both oppressive and soothing, to borrow language from the fate-obsessed medieval poetry Orff based his 1930s choral masterwork on. The program opens with Melissa Dunphy’s Canticum Novum and Kevin Puts’ dynamic Concerto for Orchestra. – Kimberley Jones