ASO concert pleases crowd

A dynamite performance of an Atlanta Symphony party piece —- Carl Orff’s bawdy and affecting “Carmina Burana” —- opened the orchestra’s outdoor summer season Saturday night at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park.

We’re now into the second year for the 12,000-seat pavilion in Alpharetta, which is owned by the Woodruff Arts Center and run by the ASO. By size and architectural design, the venue is best suited for touring rock acts —- the Dave Matthews Band played earlier in the spring —- and that income helps the ASO’s balance sheet.

Overall, it’s a pleasant place to hear a concert, although a few niggling problems seem built into the place. Worst among them: the noisy food-service exhaust fans that flank the stage. Although the orchestra is judiciously amplified, only when it plays at forte fortissimo does it overcome that loud, ceaseless whooosh. For heavily amplified pop bands producing a wall of sound, extraneous noise simply isn’t a problem.

But Encore Park fulfills another essential mission for ASO: luring new audiences (especially from Atlanta’s affluent northern suburbs) to a classical concert.

To that end, Saturday’s show was success of a different sort. Folks who attend ASO concerts in Symphony Hall quickly pick up the etiquette: You don’t talk, text-message or take pictures during the performance; you clap only at prescribed times. Here flashbulbs popped and enthusiastic applause rushed to fill the gaps between movements, which is an unmistakable —- and wonderfully sincere —- measure of the classical neophyte.

And we were all treated to a superb concert that got better as the sun dropped below the trees and the evening finally cooled. The program was smartly constructed, given that music director Robert Spano is currently in rehearsals for Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle at the Seattle Opera. For this ASO concert, he flew back Friday, rehearsed his musicians twice, gave the concert and returned to the West Coast Sunday.

After the “Star-Spangled Banner” came hits from Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” with a trio of opera singers. Spano and the orchestra plodded through the overture, then buoyantly accompanied the singers. Tenor Nicholas Phan felt most secure among them in the balcony-scene aria “Ecco ridente,” his voice light, airy, agile. Soprano Georgia Jarman was flirty, girlish and pretty in voice for the colorature showpiece “Una voce poco fa.”

Then came “Carmina Burana.” Spano took broad tempos that suited the venue’s long-delay acoustics. Chorus master Norman Mackenzie had his 200 voices —- including the Gwinnett Young Singers —- pitched at full power. Amplified, they made an awesome, terrifying, spectacularly colorful sound. The Rossini trio also sang the “Carmina” solos, led by Matthew Worth’s rich, velvety baritone. He sculpted his Latin words in “Dies, nox et omnia” (“Day, night and everything”) with passion and intelligence, a major star in the making.

At the end, Spano channeled “Wayne’s World” by bowing his head and flapping his arms at the chorus, in the traditional “I’m not worthy” gesture —- an energized start to the summer season.