The opera is one of big ideas, and it has a great many of them. What responsibility do we, in the present, have for the actions of those who preceded us? A half dozen TVs stood on both sides of the stage and played iconic newsreel footage from the past 50 years. How has our attitude towards war and a manufactured “other” changed since and as a result of World War II? A cameraman followed actors onstage, sending the mediated image for us to follow on the TVs. How does television affect our ability to relate to events at the scale of war? Nazi soldiers, young and old, offered defenses for their actions. What is the moral weight of an individual?

These are all, indeed, heady questions, but the production brought them up more than it interrogated them. Any one of those topics would fill a fine dissertation. To throw them out, one after another, in the span of 90 minutes felt intellectually irresponsible. The opera’s conclusion, that suburban America of the 1950s served as an anaesthetic for said headiness, felt slapped-on and simplistic. That decade in America had its own share of conflicts and inequalities. But their origin was fundamentally American, which gave them a much different nature than the European origins of World War II. Are we to believe, to play on the mathematics of the title of this opera, that all inequalities are equal?

Such thinking draws attention away from the individual and individual situations, focusing instead on the faceless masses lumbering through history. This was in fact where 3 x 3 = ? pointed the proverbial camera. No character was named. The lines between their very identities were blurred. Yet, the questions that Frau A struggled with were of an individual nature: how do you deal with history? How can you act ethically in modern society? One of the soldiers defended his actions by saying that if he didn’t shoot prisoners, someone else would have. The individual is readily replaceable, therefore worthless. If that’s the argument, why invest individual energies in writing and producing an opera? Would we have done just as well if everyone involved stayed home and watched Leave It To Beaver reruns?

The opera’s reality is one where looming, unknowable forces bat us about like puppets. As a philosophical stance, it has a long line of defendants. But this is art, not security camera footage. The reality of an opera is that it is a work, one written and produced by people. When the soldier said his hand was forced in shooting prisoners, those words were given to him by the librettist (Tina Hartmann). When those words were sung, the composers (Peter Gilbert and Karola Obermüller) provided the pitches. These people were the forces that guided the opera and those that dwelled within it. What granted them leave from the existential issues they outlined in order to take on this role? I don’t mean to sound hyperbolic, but the aesthetics of the work didn’t exactly mesh with the message.

The instrumentation used was spare, but provided a rich sound. Three musicians (Jay Hutchinson, clarinet; Rachel Arnold, cello; and Kana Zink, accordion) were hidden in the balcony. Live electronics from Gregory Cornelius balanced out the ensemble. Sounds were angular and icy, drifting with sudden collisions. Michael Sakir was a stolid conductor, guiding each element into place. The singers were integrated into this texture. Amanda Robie, playing Frau A, was nearly a constant presence. She brought a melodramatic touch to her character. The siblings (Tyler Wayne Smith, Chelsea Beatty, Andrew Wannigman) constituted a chorus of sorts, piercing and gray. The Nazi soldiers (Sean Malkus, Nathan Troup) were a cut out of older World War II movies. Copeland Woodruff’s stage direction had an even string of strong stage pictures: the old Nazi emerging from the audience, the cameraman snaking around the stage, the dead-eyed family staring at the TV. Its writers should be proud to have such devoted supporters.

Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist. He lives in Cambridge.

The show was staged Saturday evening, April 24, at Midway Studios, one of the school’s auxiliary theaters. Getting there was a bit like finding a speakeasy: venture to South Boston, drift into the industrial area near the post office, follow a couple side streets, enter the converted factory building. The stage was a black box theater with some brick walls. The orchestra had to be hidden at an elevated level. The walls created a very live acoustic for the choral numbers. Individual voices, despite amplification, were often swallowed. As might be expected with a school production, talent was uneven, but in some places it really shined. Steven Cardona may just be a Junior in college, but he’s also a very talented choreographer. He made sure standards like “The Man I Love” and “I’ve Got a Crush On You” got integrated into the larger story. Nathan Scott Hancock played an elvish Spelvin. He had a fluid dancing style and a fun comic sense. Olivia Kenwell’s Mrs. Draper was both a sassy and gawky guardian for her daughter, Ann. Chelsea Turbin brought a combination of ambition and naiveté to that character.

Adam Fenton Goddu’s Fletcher was often the broad-shouldered tycoon, but transitioned awkwardly between his imperious and comic moments. His daughter Joan (Marissa Miller) had a thin voice, but came off as the most sensible and mature romancer of the set. Jim (Taylor Avazpour), her beau, seemed stiff, I think a result of trying to maintain good posture for singing (which he did). The two of them never quite found their chemistry. Tim (Edward Tolve), the factory foreman and Ann’s suitor, found the harried posture of a middle manager. Sloane (Trey Harrington) had a lot of opportunity to show interesting emotions (a spurned lover given the opportunity to humiliate his rival), but his affect had a general feel to it. Stephen Markarian’s General Holmes was a mousey military man who balanced well his bumbling personality with his real authority as presidential confidante.

F. Wade Russo acted as both stage and musical director. He gave the music a light swing and a round sound. The band sounded refined, but not with the fun refined out of it. The set was quite minimal; banners and signs, basically. While there was no scenery to indicate “factory” or “Swiss Alps,” the variety in direction clearly communicated the variety in setting. The eye was never bored with the on-stage activity.

Love stories dominate musical theater. Strike Up The Band is no exception, but it ends with a twist. As the war ends, it appears Joan and Jim will finally be able to be together. However, their reprise of “The Man I Love” is cut off by the return of a mass chorus. It would appear Russia is agitating over caviar tariffs. Since Fletcher used his war profits to invest in caviar, he decides it’s time for yet another war. The couple is split again, as it’s implied Jim will have to return to active duty. Love, it would seem, doesn’t always conquer all.

Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist. He lives in Cambridge.

The format of this show, while typical of its time, will surprise anyone whose understanding of American musical theater centers on Rodgers & Hammerstein. Yaphank! has no story, or even recurring characters. It’s a series of songs (mostly) connected by the theme of war. They’re sung by a chorus with occasional soloists. As staged by American Classics, 10 singers were onstage with a pianist, trumpet player, and drummer (Joe Della Penna, Andrew Cormier, and Dean Groves, respectively). They wore army-styled garb and pulled occasional props out from under their chairs. Bob Jolly served as the “interlocutor,” providing context to the songs and the original staging. (This was particularly necessary when one song introduced a series of specialty acts.) He blended a little with the action, acting as a comic foil.

The subject matter of the songs was incredibly broad. Love songs to the ladies of soldiers (“I’m Gonna Pin My Medal on the Girl I Left Behind”), mock-tributes to alcohol subsitutes (“Bevo”), drag-parodies of the Ziegfield Follies, requests to President Wilson to send jazz bands overseas to entertain the troops, autobiography on army life (“Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning”), jingoistic attacks on the Germans (“The Devil Has Bought Up All the Coal” — “He’s piling it up by the ton / And, oh, what he’ll do to that Hun” — the Kaiser, naturally, once he gets to hell), true-tributes to those on KP (“Against his wishes / He scrubs the dishes / To make this wide world safe for democracy”). “God Bless America” — originally written for the show, but kept in the proverbial drawer for 20 years — was added as an encore.

The tone is consistently light and flippant. There are abundant references to contemporary culture, which gives the show a throwaway feel (which is fair, as it was only intended to be performed the one time). It insists on being fun and entertaining (as was the case with most Broadway shows in the 1910′s). The cast was full of very fine singers, but they seemed too self-aware to embrace the ridiculousness that makes early Broadway what it is. And yet, there was something a little atypical about the original production. Remember that the original performers were enlisted men? When they finished, they marched off-stage, out of the theater, to a truck which brought them to Hoboken, and from there on a boat to France. Now that’s theater.

Editor’s Note: There is a charming 1943 film version of Yip Yip Yahank called “This is the Army” available on DVD.

Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist. He lives in Cambridge.

This past weekend, Boston Metro Opera presented a group of one-act “operas,” all American, at St. John the Evangelist Church on Beacon Hill. A small cast (Ceceilia Allwein, Amy Dancz, Joshua May, Erin Mercuruio, Roselin Osser, Christopher Aaron Smith, Xavier Taylor, David Walther) cycled through the pieces while Aaron Likness stayed at the piano. They opened with Barber’s A Hand of Bridge (libretto by Menotti). It is exactly what the title indicates: two couples are together playing the game. As the hand unfolds, each player shares their internal preoccupations. They range from the banal (an attractive hat that Sally didn’t buy) to the burdened (Geraldine’s dying mother). There’s little drama in the room they share; the story is more how people in the same room can be in very different places.

The Face on the Barroom Floor, title on an actual painting in a Colorado bar, has inspired poetry, films, and an opera by Henry Mollicone. It presents parallel stories taking place in the same bar at different times. Both end with a fight over a woman and a gunshot. The music freely mixed styles. At one point, an actor walked over to the piano, tapped on it, and requested a change of mood: “How about something slow and easy, mister?” The diversity of material gave the opera an expansive feel, to the point where the music felt more decorative than connective.

Fables was a premiere, contributed by David Edgar Walther (who also sang in it). The biography on his website announces his accomplishments as a singer, composer, and powerlifter. His music was contrapuntal, just-dissonant-enough so to sound modern. It collected four of Aesop’s. Two involved a man and woman arguing over whether to spray for ants. There was also the Fox and the Raven and the Lion and the Mouse. Rather than be staged with actors, Joshua May and Xavier Taylor had a collection of stuffed animals and acted as puppeteers. It was a good, attractive idea, but just came off as “cute.” The whole performance had a jokey, ironic feel. It was hard to tell what made the composer and performers say, “This is a piece that we want to bring to the world.”

A fourth opera was to be featured, but last-minute licensing issues forced a substitution. Ten arias from different operas (Candide, Ballad of Baby Doe, Street Scene, The Old Maid and The Thief, Good Soldier Schweik, Vanessa, Susannah, Taming of the Shrew) were shared instead. The were mainly of the genre of reasons-why-others-don’t-understand-my-complex-emotional-state-and-how-that-inculcates-my-general-loneliness. What provides counterpoint in a larger piece can turn monotonous when strung together.

The venue was acoustically inappropriate for the concert. St. John’s is a slightly cavernous space. The piano often overwhelmed the singers and made it difficult to discern words. The singers all had solid vocal technique, but were less comfortable with being a character justifying his space onstage. There were a lot of exciting ideas presented in the program. However, opera is not just music: it’s musical theater.

Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist. He lives in Cambridge.

On stage, they made for a study in contrasts. Goode is the elder eminence, short and stout with a monkish haircut. He makes small, refined movements. His bows are polite. At the piano, his thick lips pucker out to the music. He seems to be half singing, half conversing with the material. Biss cuts a crisp figure, long and angular. His eyes have focus, as does his near buzzcut. He’ll use his body for dramatic effect, singing with his torso and exploding when big chords hit.

Their program brought together music of thoroughly canonized composers, but with enough thoughtful connections between the pieces that it hardly felt rote. They opened with a piece for single piano, four hands: Schubert’s Allegro (D. 947). Diabelli also gave it the title “Lebensstürme” (“storms of life”), a quality that is certainly suggested by the music. Swirling textures spread apart and regroup around a central theme. The playing had an elasticity to match, but they used a dry, clear sound that sometimes seemed at odds with the music.

Schumann wrote a series of six Studies in a Canon Form for pedal piano (op. 56); a pedal piano has pedals for playing notes, like an organ. Debussy arranged these for four-hand piano (played here on two pianos). The music is disciplined as well as gorgeous; history tends to focus on Schumann-the-Romantic, but there was also Schumann-the-Nerd. The phrasing of both pianists was sublime: supplely subdivided beats that made the clockwork sing.

Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, from his op. 130 string quartet, was arranged by the composer for piano four hands. Goode and Biss spread it across two pianos. The music can more than amply fill the extra space. Here, it is the music itself that is a vision of the Sublime. Unsurpassed craft yields unsurpassed emotional violence. The music’s contrapuntal and rhythmic complexities were tackled with clarity, never complaint, by the musicians.

Agon was Stravinsky’s last ballet. The piano duo arrangement was created for rehearsal purposes. The single timbre highlighted the Webern influence, while squashing the inventive (even by Stravinsky’s standards) orchestration of the original. The orchestration, unfortunately, also provides much of the music’s variety and momentum. The performance didn’t get the mechanical obeisance that Stravinsky’s rhythms are predicated on.

The program closed with En blanc et noir, a piano duo piece from the end of Debussy’s life. Its three movements come off as concise rather than short. Each is a masterpiece of texture. Other than that, it’s the kind of music that would suffer from description. The piece was a fitting close, as it seemed the best suited to the pianists’ strengths. They brought to it the clarity, restraint, and sensuality that Debussy’s music thrives on.

Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist. He lives in Cambridge.

Pierrot is a singular piece. It was written in 1912, during a stretch in Schoenberg’s career when all he could seem to write were singular pieces. It’s a “when worlds collide” song cycle: Commedia dell’Arte characters brought into the decadent avant-garde. It’s music that’s constantly on the edge; searing gazes, unplaceable screams, and bloody knives. The real twist is that the campy, vampy world of cabaret is never far away. The half-spoken Sprechstimme vocal style is as avant as it is of the theater (Pierrot’s commissioner and original singer was a cabaret singer). A healthy genre has since formed around the piece’s (then original) instrumentation: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.

Being a holiday night, a larger event was spun around the concert. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres to accompany pre-concert mingling. A commissioned video installation on a lunar theme. The crowd that came was not out of the formidably hip new music set. Instead, it seemed to be people attracted to classical music and an evening that would end at nine o’clock.

The Gardner is really a natural location for such an event — if you lived there, wouldn’t you invent reasons to have galas? The bar was set in front of El Jaleo(Sargent’s sensual portrait of a Spanish dancer). Projection screens for the video installation decorated the courtyard. The videos (Taro Shinoda’s Lunar Reflections, on display through January 31) stitched together overexposed urban night shots with close-ups of the moon. The scenes were largely still; any motion emerged from twinkling street lights. Their mood was contemplative, the focus on the gradual variations and their lunar parallels.

The concert was held in the museum’s tapestry room. It brought together a group of ringers, mostly New York-based (Sooyun Kim, flutes; Alexis Lanz, clarinets; David Fulmer, violin and viola; Eric Jacobsen, cello; Steven Beck, piano). Paula Robison, known primarily as a flautist, took the role of the speaker. She wore a plain white dress with a large collar. It resembled a nightgown and suggested a homebound insanity: someone who wandered out of her bedroom long enough to deliver her ravings, someone who would return to her quarters just as suddenly as she emerged. She was placed in the middle of the instrumentalists behind a nearly horizontal music stand, which gave her a sermonic stance. She held her ground for the duration and leaned on a small set of gestures. Her choices were sensitive to the text, but she kept a safe distance from any psychic edge (as did the dry, illustrative musicians). Fitting as it was, a blue moon can only provide the astrological scenery. Moondrunkenness is an individual effort, one that is needed for Pierrot Lunaire to come alive.

Publisher’s note: I do not consider the term, “ringer,” to be pejorative. In my understanding of musical parlance a ringer is a highly qualified professional artist who is brought into an assemblage with which she is not normally associated.

Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist. He lives in Cambridge.

Both of Janácek’s quartets are programmatic and concern torrid love affairs. They’re the subject of the Emerson’s latest recording. the first, based on Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, was presented on this program. It’s fun music to listen to. Character-associated themes appear, foreshadow the coming drama, and are developed to tragic climax. Their reading brought out in equal parts the music’s romanticism and its modernity, its passion and its weirdness.

After an intermission, we got Barber’s Adagio. Normally heard arranged for string orchestra, it comes from his op. 11 string quartet. In keeping with its allusions to Renaissance vocal music, the playing took an early music tint: even tone and minimal vibrato. It was hard to tell why it was programmed. It’s so familiar that it needs a lot to liven it up. It’s one big money shot of pathos, but was placed in the middle of three pieces with more intriguing emotional narratives.

The group seemed most at home in the finale: Shostakovich’s 9th Quartet. Their stance to the piece was that of old friends catching up. Nothing to prove, just paying attention to the little things that had changed since the last time they’d seen each other. The experience was listening to people listen to each other. As an encore, we heard an arrangement of a Dvorák song. It was essentially a trifle, but played with much grace.

Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist. He lives in Cambridge.

Lukas Foss’s Central Park Reel was another violin/piano duo. It’s best described as a caricature of a reel. The genre’s essential enthusiasm was doubled over on itself in a cascade of rhythms (the final section fed the violin through a delay pedal for a real barnstorming — unfortunately, sloppy volume control overwhelmed the piano). While a lazier composer would’ve made a minimalist reel and smiled with smug post-modern satisfaction, Foss dove into the nuances of his material and had fun. Sure, the premise was a little cerebral, but the mind at work was genuinely playful and joyous.

A commission from Michael Gandolfi marked the society’s anniversary. His note indicated that Line Drawings was modeled after Picasso’s single-gesture works. The music was a set of five sketches for violin, clarinet, and piano, each written in under three days with emphasis on a single gesture. The writing in each was strong and clear, but the whole set had a kind of “box of chocolates” effect. You’re happy when you get, for example, the chocolate-covered apricot. The marshmallow you might not take on its own, but it’s fine enough when taken with the rest. In all, the set was pleasant and refreshing.

The instrumentation for the Gandolfi was chosen to complement Bartók’s Contrasts, which concluded the program. It’s a piece that shows Bartók at his finest, drawing respectfully from folk music yet finding something altogether new. The players (Wendy Putnam, violin; Thomas Martin, clarinet; Vytas J. Baksys, piano) really rose to the challenge, finding all the dance and the snap in the piece.

Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist. He lives in Cambridge.

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Fenwick Smith‘s annual NEC recital (number 33!) brought a wide range of material to Jordan Hall on Sunday afternoon, September 13. C.P.E. Bach’s Sonata in G (W. 86) was a reminder of this composer’s comfort zone: not grand theater, but casual conversation between close friends. Flute and harpsichord (John Gibbons) played with a delicate rubato. The impression was of a post-dinner conversation, wine having freely flowed.

John Heiss’s Five Pieces for Flute and Cello (Natasha Brofsky) sat at the edge of tonality. They were of the genre of modern (ca. 1963) music that reached a pastoral sensibility through carefully dissonant counterpoint. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp.

Couperin’s Sixième Concert was a dance suite with harpsichord and cello (Laura Blustein). The music propelled itself through rhythmic tensions between parts. Its dances were powered by these dips and pulls.

Charles Koechlin’s Divertissement (op. 90) brought three flutes together: two sopranos (Seth Morris and Benjamin Smolen) and an alto (Smith). It relished in sustained flute tones, carving out blocks of sound and letting them rub up against each other. Unfortunately, this stasis proved more a liability than an asset for the music’s dramatic momentum.

Carl Maria von Weber is mainly known for his operas, but this program brought out his G minor Trio (op. 63). It occupied a dramatic world familiar to his theater work: a natural world full of murky terror, where your only way out of the woods is illuminated by a lightning storm. The players (adding Brofsky on cello, Randall Hodgkinson on piano) gave the piece proper shape without overselling the story. The music was plenty potent on its own.

Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist. He lives in Cambridge.

As a marathon concert  (scheduled for six hours, naturally running over), people could come and go between pieces. One audience member declared to her friends that she would stay for one more piece (a John Zorn string quartet) because “I like violins.” After a Frederic Rzewski piece (somewhere between the high modernism of new music and that of the jazz avant-garde), two others decided it was time for a break: “Would you call it music?” “It was… interesting.”

So why did these people make it out to North Adams, to the former factory complex that is Mass MoCA, for a serving of what’s new in new music? Well, just as the minimalists showed us that perception of musical time changes with scale, a concert too is transformed. It stops being a concert and becomes an event. One can come and go as one pleases. A restaurant will be open for the duration if you’d like to eat. A staff member will track the program on a whiteboard, while closed-circuit TV shows the stage. And yes, please join us for a glass of pro secco if you’re still with us at the end.

The audience gracefully accepted all these offerings. The museum’s courtyard bustled with winers and diners (but, seriously, $5.50 for bottled beer?). People moved freely during the evening and the house was nearly full throughout. A cartoon-bubbled, all-caps NOW on the whiteboard’s active item gave urgency to see just what was going on in there. It’s no surprise the BoaC’s NYC marathon gets play-by-play coverage via live-blogging and tweets (same as when Obama, or Steve Jobs for that matter, makes a speech). Were you there?? Were you engaged in what was going on??

The aesthetic catch-all that BoaC is known for (their first marathon had both Milton Babbitt and Steve Reich in the flesh) isn’t just acceptable, but encouraged by these conditions. Old-school modernism? Forays into world music? You don’t even need to evoke exoticism (and none was); diversity and surprise become fuel for the fire of a raging spectacle.

All this being said, once your — is in your seat, you’re presented with a (nearly) non-stop banquet of musical delights (some might say vomitorium, but hey, check the etymology on that one). All musicians gave extremely committed and energetic performances. They’d been living and working together for the past three-and-a-half weeks, and it showed.

One of them, Paul Coleman, should be singled out as the only one who played the entire show. He was rarely seen on stage, but as the sound engineer, he was always heard. I don’t even want to think about the preparation and focus needed for such a monstrous, heterogenous program. That it all went so smoothly is a testament to the professionalism of him and the rest of the stage crew. I did wish there was more variety to the sound design, though. A cold, close-mic’d sound dominated. Some pieces, Shaker Loops in particular, would have benefitted from some warmth and bloom. Still, a disputed aesthetic choice is a relatively minor complaint.

With such a massive program, it would be unwieldy to touch upon everything. So, take these highlights as more personal takeaways than anything else: Meredith Monk’s Three Heavens and Hells set a child’s poem for four female voices. The three? People, animal, and thing, each with a distinct sonic picture. John Zorn’s cat o’ nine tails for string quartet (subtitled “Tex Avery directs the Marquis de Sade”) got the audience laughing at a number of spots, but I’m not sure Zorn has a sense of humor about such things. The performance had a looseness and sense of fun that beat out one I’d seen by the Kronos. Extra points to violist Andi Hemmenway for appropriate boots.

David Lang’s Pierced had gritty rhythms familiar to his music, but imaginative textures (inspired by Rover of The Prisoner, he claimed) that were just a little different. Eve Beglarian’s BachFeet: “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job” was missing the tape part with the titular text, but it was engaging all the same. Beglarian is a polystylistic magician who draws a straight line between unexpected genres and follows it. Her music consistently has a richness of craft and expression that’s a couple steps ahead of most of her peers.

Fred Frith is known equally well to post-rockers and new musickers (perhaps to others for his soundtrack to Rivers and Tides). His Snakes and Ladders was a well-balanced mobile of angular melodies. They lazily spun around each other, never quite overlapping in the same way twice. The program’s finale, George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, was the showstopper it was intended to be. There were no dancers, but it was indeed a ballet, with much choreographed humor and wit. Brad Lubman conducted, taking his usually dance-like demeanor to a new level.

Put together, did the entire program tell a story? In a way it did. The Antheil was introduced as a piece in search of describing what it was like to live in the modern world (i.e., Paris in the 1920s). Its precision cacophony celebrated machines, urban intensity, the Sublime over the Beautiful- Modernism, warts and all. An early piece on the program was David M. Gordon’s Friction Systems, written recently as the composer’s Master’s thesis. It was also an urban music, but its sense of scale, speed, and simultaneities was of today’s cities. Festival faculty member Nick Photinos introduced it. He declared that Eighth Blackbird, his usual performing group, fell in love with the music because it “sounds like nothing we’d ever heard, and it’s really wacked out.” Long live the frisson of the New.

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Adam Baratz is a composer and pianist. He lives in Cambridge.