If there had to be just one musical signal that something epic is about to happen, it could easily be “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”
Its crashing drums and howling chorus have been heard in countless movie trailers and TV shows.
For an orchestral cantata, it makes a pretty apocalyptic soundtrack.
But after that first dramatic take on fortune’s moonlike waxing and waning, “Carmina Burana” turns to more earthly pursuits, becoming one of the most approachable and joyously populist works in all of classical music.
Written in 1937 by Orff, a composer otherwise best known for innovations in music education, “Carmina Burana” takes its text from a collection of 13th-century songs and poems about life, lust and liquor.
“It’s very powerful in every respect,” says conductor Mark Laycock, who leads the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in a performance Thursday at the Richardson Auditorium in Princeton, with soloists Ava Pine (soprano), Andrew Garland (baritone) and Chad Johnson (tenor) and a chorus from Opera New Jersey.
“It’s almost all in major keys so it’s bright and exciting,” Laycock says. “It’s written in a strophic form that’s just repetition and more repetition for each musical idea, and that has a certain immediate attractiveness to any listener.”
Unlike the way orchestral themes typically get twisted, morphed and expanded in the course of a composition, the 25 movements of “Carmina Burana” are in verses, like pop songs.
“You hear (an idea) once, you like it, you hear it a second time, you get, it, a third time and, ‘Wow, I really love it,’ ” Laycock says.
In its repetitive simplicity and boisterousness, “Carmina Burana” sometimes comes under fire as a less than serious work.
“If people are a bit highbrow and think this is not sophistication,” Laycock says, “I’d say it’s sad they’ve lost touch with that part of themselves that is in touch with the earth and all of the glorious pleasures they can experience here.”
Bookended by “O Fortuna” and its reprise, the work has three main sections: “In spring,” “In the tavern,” and “Court of Love.” Near the end of the third, which details a seduction, the soprano soloist sings, “Sweetest boy, I give myself to you,” her voice soaring up to a climactic high D before the chorus avows its gratitude to the Virgin Mary and Venus.
Laycock says some of his favorite parts of the work are the soprano solos, which also include the lyrical aria “In Trutina.” These contrast with the wildness of the men’s drinking songs and the melodrama of the tenor who screams in pain as he describes himself as a swan roasting on a spit.
The baritone solo is often sung with yelps and hiccups interspersed with challenging operatic riffs. “You wouldn’t normally find that same type of expression in an operatic role. It allows everyone to show more facets,” Laycock says.
The concert will keep a theatrical feeling throughout, with the Symphonic Dances from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” and Samuel Barber’s Overture to “The School of Scandal” also on the program.
Carmina Burana
Where: Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University, Nassau Street and University Place, Princeton.
When: Thursday at 8 p.m.
How much: $25-$35; call (800) 255-3476 or visit njsymphony.org.
Ronni Reich: (973) 392-1726 or rreich@starledger.com.