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.

It is a notable seachange in performance practice. Whether it came out of youthful rebellion, an attempt to cultivate a party atmosphere, or as a mirror of the pace of music after minimalism is unclear (all of the above?). Regardless, presenting downtown music like this feels natural. A similar presentation of the Bach-to-Brahms rep would come off somewhere between odd and blasphemous, depending on whom you asked.

A few years ago, BoaC set roots at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass.) for an annual summer festival. It has a mix of student instruction and concerts like any other, but maintains an aesthetic center of its own: Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk have appeared in the past as artists-in-residence.

Reich is this year’s guest. A concert of his work on July 25th will feature Music for 18 Musicians, along with Eight Lines and Video Phase (a multimedia arrangement of Piano Phase). That concert will be presented in conjunction with the museum’s Sol LeWitt retrospective. It is a half-day affair; a pre-concert lecture by the composer begins at 3 pm, followed by the concert at 4:30. Music for 18 Musicians is scheduled to start at 8 pm.

The festival closes with a marathon concert on August 1st, from 4 to 10 pm. Its centerpiece is George Anthiel’s Ballet Mechanique. The Ballet is scored for a wide range of percussion instruments, from player pianos to sirens. It is in the cacophonous spirit of other music from the modernist ’20s and was the cause of a  small riot at its premiere.

Naturally, the music of the BoaC trifecta (David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon) will make an appearance. Contrary to what one might assume, these three composers write very different music. Lang often writes in answer to what-if questions (what if one’s music were unflattering instead of self-glorifying, what if the music was on laughing gas). He writes precisely and titles his pieces to lead you to the concepts behind them. Wolfe is the most vivid orchestrator of the three, choosing strong textures and unexpected instrumental combinations. Her music favors pulse over beat. While other post-minimalists take that as a stylistic anchor, she uses it as more of a touching point.

Gordon usually comes off as the oddball of the group. He is drawn to complex polyrhythms that fall in a no-man’s-land between classical and popular musics. His music requires performers who can play those rhythms without flinching, who make them clear without making them the main event.

Other composers featured will be John Adams, Meredith Monk, and Frederick Rzewski. Those attending the marathon have an extra treat – they may roam the gallery and come and go as they please.

[click here for related review]

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

Johann Friedrich Fasch’s Overture in G minor (FWV K: g 2) was cast in the form of a dance suite for full ensemble. His music gave the group the most opportunity to enjoy a groove, an invitation they usually took. Dominic Teresi’s phrasing on the bassoon was particularly elegant.

The fifth Brandenburg Concerto is a piece with a reputation. It was a delight to hear it presented by a scaled-down ensemble. They took the approach that one reaches transcendence in Bach through discipline and devotion of playing, and it paid off. The texture was consistently taught, but floated as if delicate lace. The notorious harpsichord part was easily devoured by Kristian Bezuidenhout, but the other soloists (Sandra Miller with flute, Robert Mealy with violin) were no less distinguished.

Jan Dismas Zelenka’s Overture Hipochondrie à 7 in A major (Z 187) did not leave a deep impression, but its slow-fast-slow form seemed unusual. It was more like an extended slow introduction leading to an Allegro, followed by a slow coda.

The Vivaldi Concerto in C major for mandolin (RV 425) was another delight. It’s easy to think of him as a concerto machine, deploying the same time-worn tricks again and again. But, hey, each piece is a little different, and those tricks get you to their own unique place. Paul O’Dette’s mandolin anchored those trademark resonant harmonies. All virtuosic playing must ultimately be effortless, some people just make more of a point out of it than others. He was “only” there for the joy of doing what he so clearly loves.

Telemann is another composer who gets written off pretty easily. His Ouverture in Bb major (TWV 55:B 10) engaged the full ensemble in another dance suite. It clocked in at nine movements, but the melodic and textural diversity prevented it from dragging. Several also felt more like snappy interludes. One of these, the Hornepipe, had some frequent meter changes that kept the dancers on their toes.

A footnote: BEMF is to be commended for its fecund “Fringe” concert offerings, also.

Ed: This is one of 11 full reviews by Boston Musical Intelligencer reviewers of concerts from the 2009 Boston Early Music Festival.

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

Chorus pro Musica concluded its 60th season with a semi-staged production on Sunday afternoon, May 31, at Jordan Hall. The opera’s exoticisms certainly invite a grand staging, but it seemed better off without it. The singers squeezed against the orchestra’s punch-drunk playing, the nearly packed house keeping cool on a warm day… musical theater is more fun when one is reminded of its essential gaudiness. The staging was actually quite effective, a series of simple but strong pictures. Regrettably, the program didn’t credit the director by name, so neither can I.

The group was led by Jeffrey Rink. This was final concert with the group before leaving to lead the Northwest Florida Symphony Orchestra. He was clearly having the time of his life. He sang along with most of the show. Each time he left the podium, he did so with a swagger and impish grin. His conducting favored momentum over decorum, but was never sloppy. The orchestra kept up with him the entire afternoon.

Othalie Graham’s Turnadot projected a mystery befitting the character. She began cold and removed, but readily transitioned to enraptured lover. Special mention should go to David Kravitz (Ping) for his acting during Liù’s death scene. It was a good reminder that comic characters are not devoid of humanity, nor that opening one’s mouth is necessary to make a major contribution to a scene.

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

Matthew Vest’s The Hourglass adapted Danilo Kiš’s book of the same name. The book is a fictionalized account of the Axis occupation of the former Yugoslavia and what happened to the local Jewish population. In operatic form, the story was told through four unnamed characters. The music and action were highly contrapuntal. Multiple scenes occurred at the same time. Some of the instrumentalists (a piano quintet accompanied) occasionally entered into the action. The goal appeared to be the portrayal of chaos, but it ended up being literal instead of depicted. No particular elements drew the eye or ear. The density of the score made it difficult to hear any of the text. Or as the composer indicated in his notes: “The idea that one must analyze in order to truly understand has focused this piece and allowed me as the composer to fractionate the text and to create music that must be discovered in a similar fashion.” In which case, a copy of the score (or at least information on obtaining one – the composer does not appear to have a website) would have been a courteous addition to the program.

Erin Huelskamp’s “The Year of the Serpent” was modeled after Hong Kong kong fu movies. It told the story of a young woman offered as a virgin sacrifice to a serpent who terrorized her village. Rather than succumb, she slayed him, earning freedom for her and the spirits of past sacrifices. This show was one of abundance: a flashback scene, a fight scene/vocal contest with simulated slow-motion/wire effects, Amy Horing’s dog marionette (the heroine’s faithful companion), Evertt Hoag’s vibrant costumes, and a half-a-dozen flower arrangements occupying a corner of the stage. The music associated different characters with different genres: pentatonic chinoiserie for Li Chi, steamy jazz for the serpent. The choices were a bit familiar, but fit into the opera’s campy vibe. The two leads deserve special mention for their performances. Sara Ann Mitchell gave Li Chi a comic girlishness and a clearly articulated arc. José Torres-Cooban’s Serpent combined seduction and sleaze. Everyone on stage seemed to be having a blast.

The evening as a whole must have been a tremendous undertaking for Juventas (three nights of two operas with independent casts and crews). They deserve a lot of credit for putting the program together and pulling it off as smoothly as they did. I hope this isn’t the last such evening they present.

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