I should be in bed, but I'm basking in the afterglow of playing contrabass in the Niwot Timerbline Symphony Orchestra's season finale performance of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

We also premiered with Gregory T. S. Walker's uneasy sits the king, which is a bass player's delight for its use of unharmonized tightly syncopated rhythmically pounding melodic grooves to express the evanesence of power and fame.

 Orff's 1936 cantata is based on a group of songs cribbed from a middle ages manuscript. Wandering monastery school dropouts thoroughly educated and just as thoroughly unemployable wrote or collected these songs and rendered them in a  mixture of Latin with vernacular Middle German and French.

The songs range from a philosophical riposte to Juvenal to bawdy love songs, drinking songs, and ballads, sort of a musical central European equivalent of the Canterbury Tales.

The philosophical riposte to Juvenal is O Fortuna which answers Juvenal's close to his Tenth Satire:

Thou wouldst have no divinity, O Fortune, if we had but wisdom; it is we that make a goddess of thee, and place thee in the skies.

To this the Carmina Burana replies:

Fate—monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel, stand malevolent, well-being is vain and always fades to nothing, shadowed and veiled you plague me too; now through the game, my bare back I bring to your villainy.

All this in lavish orchestration and sung by the Colorado Choral Arts Society headed by stellar baritone Robert Gardner, soprano Audra Gardner Silva and countertenor Michael Weitzner.

Young soprano Fabian Silva of the Rocky Mountain Children's Choir sang the dreams of the boy would be king in Walker's piece.

Directed by conducter Devin Patrick Hughes, this was our -- the NTSO's -- best performance of the season. Others have called it so, and I agree. I don't know what my opinion is worth ... I'm a pop/jazz hack with classical training, a music school dropout who has gigged for over forty years, lately a drop-in at this community-supported symphony.

But I would offer that opinion, and say we were in the groove. It helped us get in the groove that the entire program was song. You can swing with song. The symphony is a rythmic organism, and It Was Alive! last night.