A Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presentation. At the Orpheum Theatre on Saturday, June 13.

A program of two beautifully balanced works ended the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra's season at the Orpheum: Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, the latter as static and calm as the former is hectic and barbarous. One is coolly cerebral and the other is viscerally primal, the combination making for a (theoretically) ideal conjoint opposition of impulses in music—the Apollonian and Dionysian.

Each involves a chorus, and the VSO, under Bramwell Tovey, enlisted the Vancouver Bach Choir and, in the Orff, the Vancouver Bach Children's Chorus. This was a lot of voices—about 150—for the Stravinsky, which suffers a loss of chasteness from a number that big, and it certainly did. There was nothing Apollonian about this Stravinsky; it sounded more like something from one of those Last Night of the Proms rodeos, but without the vitality.

It was a mess. The imprecision of pitch and lack of rhythmic incisiveness and focus suggested nobody really knew what was going on.

Carmina Burana, about an hour long, is always the hit of any program it's on and saved the night. No wonder commercials and sports have grabbed on to the simple block harmonies, brutal rhythms, and memorable tunes of the famous work, a setting of 13th-century minstrel drinking songs and the poems of defrocked priests discovered in 1803 in the Bavarian Alps.

Everything is memorable about this joyously bewildering collection, which says only that life is a matter of luck and change, but two sections are especially so: “Olim lacus colueram” (“Once I Lived on Lakes”), a swan song performed by the excellent tenor Colin Ainsworth in slightly strangulated tones, as the bird laments the end of its freedom while turning on a spit, and “In trutina” (“In the Balance”), featuring the very pure soprano Laura Whalen, who doubled her effect in a later stratospheric, less-than-a-minute-long number that can only represent orgasm.

The baritone has to seize a tough part and shake it in his teeth, and Hugh Russell, with his virile, hearty tone, was like, well, a Russell terrier. All three soloists were magnificent and the whole performance was athletic, vital, and primary. A great season closer after all.

The night also marked the retirement of two stellar VSO musicians: bassist Ken Friedman and trombonist Gordon Cherry.