Sunday, April 27, 2025
Tuesday, April 29, 2025

PSO Music Director is joined for this program by the Silver-Garburg Duo in two-piano concertos by J. S. Bach and Mozart. The Silver-Garburgs last played here in February, 2022 with concertos by Bach and Poulenc. After intermission, Carl Orff’s eternally popular Carmina Burana takes the stage, employing two choirs and three vocal soloists, with a large orchestra including prominent parts for the percussion section.

Music for two pianos, or music for one piano with two players, has long been popular in domestic music-making. For centuries, composers wrote works intended for the combination, but also made versions of their symphonies and chamber works for home music makers. At the same time, the rich sonority of two pianos attracted many composers to write concert works. Mozart even wrote a concerto for three pianos, seldom played because of the sheer awkwardness of positioning 3 such massive instruments onstage with an orchestra. Tonight’s concerto is a modest work of great charm, probably played first by its composer and his sister, and a few years later by Mozart and an advanced student.

Carl Orff, in the course of a long and productive life, became known equally as a composer and educator. His Schulwerk method is still used in many parts of the world to introduce young people to the basics of musical rhythm and pitch. Carmina Burana, with its highly rhythmic, faintly medieval-sounding music, remains his best-known composition. It has been staged as theater and as ballet, and has appeared as background in countless movies and TV shows. Its suggestive texts, clothed in ancient and sometimes ecclesiastical languages, are oblique enough to be titillating-vulgar but not precisely offensive. The same may be said of the music: it feels both modern and ancient, primal and elegant. Carmina Burana is sophisticated music for the masses.

– Martin Webster