On Friday night at Jordan Hall, The Cantata Singers, one of Boston's premiere choral ensembles, performed pieces written by three composers-two German, one Italian-whose lives and work were indelibly marked by the rise of fascism and the devastation of the World Wars.Kurt Weill's angry anti-war Legend of the Dead Soldier, Luigi Dallapiccola's cry for freedom, Songs of the Prisoners and, finally, Carl Orff's famous Carmina Burana were all written after the end of World War I but before the Allies' victory in World War II-a dark and disturbing time in Europe, which produced dark and disturbing art. These works, despite their beauty, are no exception.

The most overtly political piece is Weill's Legend of the Dead Soldier, which sets to music a poem written by longtime collaborator Bertolt Brecht. The poem, written shortly after Brecht's service in a German army hospital during the last throes of World War I, is a vicious satire of war, telling the story of a dead soldier whose corpse is dug up, reanimated and shoved back into the front lines to fight and die all over again.

Weill sets the poem to a very heroic, anthem-like imitation of Schubert and Schumann's German Romanticism-he knew that the best satire should be delivered with a completely straight face. It is a disturbing setting of a disturbing text, and it was clear that some in the audience weren't quite sure what to make of it. Still, the applause was enthusiastic.

It was followed by the haunting, apocalyptic Songs of the Prisoners, which takes its text from prayers composed by three historical prisoners: Mary, Queen of Scots; ancient Christian philosopher Boethius; and Italian religious radical Savonarola. Dallapiccola began composing the piece immediately after hearing the radio address in which Mussolini launched his anti-Semitic crusade. He wrote much of it while in hiding with his Jewish wife, and his music clearly conveys the trapped helplessness of the imprisoned and their indomitable will to endure.

The piece never reaches a grand climax or rousing finale-the singers' voices, crying to God, sometimes break free, but the clanging, ominous percussion always beats them down again. Suffering from a somewhat weak and thin soprano sound and unfortunate carelessness with the ends of phrases, the piece was nonetheless sensitively conducted, ably performed and well-received.

The centerpiece of the concert, Orff's Carmina Burana, is possibly the most well-known piece of choral music in the world, after Handel's Messiah. Carmina Burana, especially its ominous first song, "O Fortuna," has been so endlessly quoted, imitated and echoed that by now it ought to have become clichéd and unexciting. It has not.

From the cheerful pastoral of the "Springtime" movements to the bawdy enthusiasm of the many odes to love and lust, every mood was fully explored by the chorus, the percussion and the soloists, particularly baritone David Kravitz and soprano Janet Brown, who performed at Brandeis last semester with the University Chorus and Brandeis-Wellesley Orchestra. This is not to say that the performance was perfect-the sopranos were again underwhelming, and some puzzling conducting choices left the audience and the performers at a loss-but the visceral power of the work came through, as it always must.

Orff's masterpiece is a gargantuan, exhausting undertaking, and one could understand if the Cantata Singers' final iteration of the signature "O Fortuna," which closed the concert, was tired or sluggish, but the finale was just what a finale should be-deeply satisfying-emotionally and musically. They were rewarded with a three-minute standing ovation, in which the audience demanded five bows from the performers-a well-deserved compliment on a job beautifully done.