The wheel of fortune turns, raising some up, casting others down.

But everyone was a winner Saturday evening at Hill Auditorium, where the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, directed by Arie Lipsky, made Carl Orff’s secular cantata “Carmina Burana” the centerpiece of its last concert of the season.

Fickle fortune and the joys of the senses are the themes of Orff’s stupendous work, for which the A2SO was joined by a stellar roster of soloists and a chorus of Cecil B. DeMille proportions: just about every local high school a cappella choir (Huron, Pioneer, Skyline); the men’s chorus Measure for Measure; the Ann Arbor Boychoir; and the Ann Arbor Youth Chorale.

It seemed a good time was had by all—those crowded onto the stage, those crowded into the hall.

Even those who fate failed to favor were good-natured about it.

After Aaron Jay Kernis’s curtain-opening “New Era Dance”—a piece whose rhythms and motifs, sirens and whistles often recalled riffs from Berstein’s “West Side Story”—Lipsky ceded the podium first to the Michigan Theater’s Russ Collins, there to announce the winner, among five finalists, of the A2SO’s “Pursuit of the Podium” contest; and then to the winner: Jim Irwin.

The contest raised more than $20,000 for the orchestra’s education and outreach programs, so the losing finalists (David Herzig, Dan Long, Linda Marshall and Larry Van Slambrook) were not too glum as they filed off—they’d done their part for the orchestra.

But then it was Irwin’s turn to do his part. With Lipsky by his side as a sort of body-double, in case he ran into trouble, Irwin conducted his favorite song—“The Victors.” He was ready for the task, taking off his suit coat with dramatic flair, straightening his tie, and then turning to face the orchestra—the better to allow us to see the “GO BLUE!” emblazoned on the back of his white shirt. It was a very Michigan moment, and Irwin and the orchestra gave the piece loving native son-and-daughter treatment; they had the home-court advantage over the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony and the Chicago Symphony, all of which have wooed local audiences with this music.

But wooing local audiences is a game at which the A2SO has become unbeatable, anyway.

To cap a season in which local artists and composers have often taken center stage—as has become a terrific norm with the orchestra—what better way to demonstrate strong community ties than to feature the community’s own young artists?

Those young artists, more than 200-strong along with the men of Measure for Measure, stepped up to the plate. In “Carmina,” they sang with aplomb, excellent diction, tonal ,sensitivity and a real feeling for Orff’s style—a tribute to mentors and conductors and to Lipsky as well: putting this together was no mean feat. And in a work that dwells on spring and renewal; on the highly hormonal pleasures of love; and on enjoying life now (before fate gets around to dealing its inevitable blows), a chorus made up mostly of high schoolers seems uniquely right.

The soloists - soprano Mary Wilson; tenor Timothy Culver; and baritone Paul Grizzell—were dramatically and vocally stellar. I hadn’t gotten to hear Wilson in her earlier performances this season with the symphony; she’s a knockout, with a pure, true, focused sound that just rings it’s so on target, and a beaming presence. Grizzell is stentorian—he really delivered here; and Culver was a knockout, vocally and theatrically, in the astonishing strangled “Roasted Swan” solo Orff sets for the tenor—the only piece allotted him. When I left the hall at the concert’s end, I found some of the feathers Culver had shed as he left the stage—a reminder of his role creation.

The orchestra played brilliantly and incisively in “Carmina,” exceptional in the many sections where Orff uses it sparingly, making it drop back to spotlight chorus or soloists; and extraordinary where Orff demands from it a veritable wall of sound or the crack of the Fate’s whip landing sharp lashes.

Was it because it followed “The Victors” that The Brahms “Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn” seemed a bit of a sleeper? It got off to a brilliant start, with Lipsky taking the opening theme at a good clip, lofting its phrases light and high to make the most of their dancelike qualities … but then someone burst the balloon. It’s a better piece in the two-piano version, I think (but then, I’m a pianist), but in any case, it seemed to need more seasoning—timbral and dynamic—than the orchestra delivered. Still, by the end of the evening, the grace of that opening theme, coupled with everything else on the platter, was more than enough for a fine grand finale feast.