Since 1996, oboist Peggy Pearson has been directing Winsor Music, which in addition to regularly programming chamber music performances in Brookline also commissions new chamber works by some of the most prolific American composers alive today. On Sunday evening, April 25, The Winsor Quartet (Peggy Pearson, oboe; Randy Hiller, violin; Drew Ricciardi, viola; Tony Rymer, cello) featured some refreshing interpretations of Beethoven and Bach as well as the Boston premiere of Peter Lieberson’s cycle, The Coming of Light, with some top-tier local instrumentalists and singers. Among the lists of featured musicians were tenor Frank Kelley, baritone Sumner Thomson, soprano Kasey Fahy, and the Boston Children’s Chorus led by director Anthony Trecek-King.

Beethoven’s Quintet in C major, Op. 29 represents one of the rare moments in musical history when one can actually hear a composer’s stylistic voice evolve, a sort of aesthetic hiccup, within the context of a single piece. As with many of the Classical pieces that Winsor performs, this piece was arranged to include the oboe — for the most part, replacing a violin. Not being a purist of any sort, I found the integration of the oboe into the ensemble gives a beautiful new timbral element to the piece and illuminates some of the inner-voice counterpoint with an interesting coloristic gleam. The “Allegro moderato” and the “Adagio” have more elements in common with Beethoven’s earlier period. The playing of the “Allegro” was a bit too tense and rigid, and that of the “Adagio,” though exhibiting an impressive degree of control and expression, especially in Hiller’s wonderfully emotive solo moments, lost some of its confidence towards the end of the movement.

The “Scherzo: Allegro” contains some of the first examples of a darker complexity that ultimately defines Beethoven’s second period. The ensemble danced through this movement with conviction and vivacity, featuring some rarely heard acrobatics between the two violas. The “Presto” received a dynamic performance, marked by an effective effort to blend the oboe into the string ensemble in the appropriate moments.

Peter Lieberson, who came to prominence as a composer in the Boston area before moving to the Southwest, is well known for including Buddhist themes as a philosophical element in his music. The Coming of Light was co-commissioned by Winsor Music and the Chicago Chamber Musicians for the centennial of the dedication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple. Interestingly, the piece relies more on general humanistic ideas of impermanence and love, in response to an architectural corollary. Pearson shared some words on behalf of the composer before the piece was performed:

“…We create structures all the time to shield ourselves from impermanence – not only for shelter and comfort but also as edifices built to celebrate our stay here on earth. Architecture by its very nature is constructed out of materials that are impermanent. We make structures that we think are beautiful and interiors that are inviting, and the very fact that these edifices may point to something noble expresses a kind of sacredness about what we as human beings do. That we do these things at all is itself an opportunity to reflect on their impermanent nature, to appreciate how fleeting and precious all of life really is. And love of course is love. It’s simple to understand and be touched by the impermanence of all of that we love. So from that perspective and from my own personal experience of having been ill over the last three years, I thought about how life provides many opportunities—love returns, one’s life changes…“

The piece set two poems each by John Ashbery, Shakespeare, and Mark Strand for baritone, oboe, and string quartet. The settings, consistently oriented towards an ultra-conservative harmonic language, displayed an undeniably exceptional level of craft, sense of continuity, and at times, imagination. Sumner Thomson’s voice fit the ensemble and the composition perfectly. The most effective setting was the second Ashbery text, Forgiveness. The song grew out of unison between the strings, into elastic iterations of a serene melodic line that managed to be both emotional and cerebral. The following movements were characterized by some interesting developments to thematic material introduced in earlier movements but began to rely increasingly on constant, square pulses that became expressively restricting. The performers were constantly engaged with the music (even through the moments when the music was not engaging). Pearson’s lyricism as lines between the oboe and baritone mingled was definitely a highlight of the evening.

The closing performance of Bach Cantata 159, “Sehet, wir gehen hinauf gen Jerusalem” pulled the full forces of the evening’s performers together, with the addition of Kasey Fahy, Jazimina MacNeil, Frank Kelley, and Boston Children’s Chorus. Thompson’s enchanting and powerful voice was most enthralling when set against mezzo MacNeil’s euphoric placid tone, which meshed perfectly with the oboe in the second aria and chorale. The Boston Children’s Chorus provided wonderful depth to the closing chorale and a powerful finale to the evening.

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.

The Boston Chamber Music Society performed a program of Mozart, Röntgen, and Mendelssohn for a sizable and responsive audience in Sanders Theatre on Sunday, April 18. Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major, K. 493 and Mendelssohn’s String Quintet in B-flat major, Op. 87 were likely familiar to most, though the Lyrische Gänge from the far less performed Dutch composer Julius Röntgen offered a certain rarity to the program. While this particular evening didn’t quite err on the side of risk-taking programming that new Artistic Director Marcus Thompson discussed in his interview with BMInt at the beginning of the season, it did possess a certain air of youthful energy and dramatic character. The emphasis on this element of performance practice may very well function within BCMS’s growing interest in cultivating a new audiences and “connect[ing] to the next generation,” which undoubtedly contributed to effective interpretations of the pieces (especially the Mozart). Admittedly, despite being near the end of a season of such efforts, I still found myself to be one of very few audience members under the age of 30. Nonetheless, BCMS has unquestionably sustained a top-tier performance standard and exhibited no less on Sunday evening.

Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major is filled with compelling dialogue between piano and strings. Although the performance was not without its surface flaws, the group managed to catch effectively the expressive qualities of the work. The conversational underpinning of the piece relies heavily on a pianist who can convincingly construct a pronounced, and sometimes domineering, character. Mihae Lee carried this role with brilliance and conviction. The rest of the ensemble also displayed a strong ability to recognize comic gestures in the music. While the Allegro and Allegretto well delivered, if at times inarticulate, the Larghetto was undoubtedly the most successful movement of the three, exhibiting a near-perfect sense of pacing and expressive vitality.

Mezzo-soprano Krista River gave a stunning performance Röntgen’s Lyrische Gänge for voice, viola, and piano to poems by Friedrich Theodor Vischer.. Her resonant, rich voice had palpable substance, seeping into the walls with each lyrical line. Her dramatic pacing was dead-on for the second song, Stille, with potent and impassioned lyricism that debunks the antiquated notion that German cannot be an inherently beautifully sung language. The viola and voice often seemed disconnected, however: a symptom of some truly terrible writing for viola within this ensemble’s context, and no discredit to Thompson, who has proven himself a seasoned musician of the Boston chamber scene. Despite some truly beautiful harmonies and lush, expressive vocal writing, Lyrische Gänge is little more than bad Brahms. It seems reasonable that the composer did not feel inclined to have the work published or performed, especially since at that point in his career (late 1920s) he appeared to be more interested in progressive styles. Regardless, the performance was no doubt worthwhile, fully exploiting the talents of guest artist Krista River, and nicely contributed to the program.

Mendelssohn’s String Quintet in B-flat major provided the most consistent and polished performance of the evening. The Allegro vivace was tightly knit, filled with contrasting disposition to the Andante scherzando and convincingly portrayed by the animated performance of violinists Ida Levin and Harumi Rhodes. Cellist Astrid Schween shone beautifully in a gripping, dynamic performance of the Adagio e lento. Energetic and Vibrant, the Allegro molto vivace closed the performance with a persuasive climax. Again, this performance to emitted a new sense of vibrancy from an ensemble looking forward towards a new audience that demands a more energetic and visceral performance approach.

BCMS will return to Sanders Theatre on May 16 for a program of Haydn, Villa-Lobos, and Chausson.

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.

The world premiere of Nathan Ball’s Stained glass opened the program with an amalgam of American post-minimalist and European spiritual minimalist styles, with intermittent hints of Americana. Ball exhibited a praiseworthy command of orchestration, shifting between musical textures with convincing and affective narrative. The piece was quite enjoyable, though limited by a rather strict, at times uninventive harmonic language, and developed musical ideas successfully despite being on the shorter side. Stained Glass is, however, a first movement of a larger work entitled Atone, and undoubtedly left the audience very interested in hearing this up-and-coming composer’s triptych in its entirety.

As Scott Wheeler’s Crazy Weather and Stephen Hartke’s Alvorada followed, one could not help but notice some unifying aspects between the pieces on the first half. Each of the pieces seemed to rely on traditional formal structures, some of which permeated well beyond both Wheeler’s and Hartke’s three-movement, fast-slow-fast structural mold. The most effective moments of Crazy Weather came in the more freely composed Adagio, as the music slowly and mysteriously gained a sense of motion from its suspended, frozen beginning. The third movement, Steadily Driving, built a more visceral and satisfying movement off of the materials introduced in the first, but at times seemed unconfidently delivered, and lacking in the motivation and intensity that the piece required– a very rare symptom for an ensemble with the versatility and performance standards of BMOP. Crazy Weather concluded with an extremely effective hocketing of string harmonics. Hartke’s Alvorada, Three Madrigals also seemed to press some of its most intriguing moments into the second movement, with overt melodiousness that seemed both strange and familiar. The third movement, “Bailada,” developed a wonderfully elaborate dance out of very simple materials, culminating in a surprising and pleasantly awkward coda reminiscent of Hindemith.

The performance of Milton Babbitt’s Correspondences was a validating display of BMOPs adeptness with some of the most difficult (both practically and conceptually) music written in the 20th century.  A good performance of Babbitt’s strict, pointillistic, and methodologically composed music will go beyond accuracy and draw a sense of organicism out of mixture of strings and prerecorded synthetic sounds.  No easy feat, Gil Rose and BMOP were able to breathe some sense of life into a piece that is most often only interpreted with cold precision.

Israeli composer Betty Olivero’s Neharót, Neharót was beautiful, disturbing, comforting, mystifying, and alien all at once– and without doubt the most impassioned performance of the evening.  The piece immediately drops the listener into a distinct and compelling sound world, craftily blurring the lines between consonance and dissonance while maintaining focus on an eerily shifting atmosphere. Out of the texture emerges a mesmerizing, twisting counterpoint between the accordion, section violist, and solo violist Kim Kashkashian. The solo viola continues to later interact with prerecorded samples of Middle-eastern, African, and Spanish sources– all of which become obscured in some way beneath the dense textures of the ensemble.  Kashkashian’s performance created a sense of connectivity between audience and soloist that is rarely experiences, especially in contemporary music.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project closed the program with a fantastic performance of Bartók’s Divertimento, one of the finest works of the composer, and one of the finest compositions of the period. The performance was energetic and sensitive, and rounded off the various styles represented in the program with profundity. BMOP concludes its season with the full orchestra on May 28th with a program not to be missed, featuring the works of Steven Stucky, Leon Kirchner, Anthony De Ritis, Kati Agócs, and Martin Boykan.

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.

Arlene Sierra’s Cicada Shell opened the concert with the unique experience of a two-movement piece. A number of contemporary composers have approached a two-movements-of-equal-length model while incorporating some idea of dichotomy between the two movements. In Sierra’s piece, we find a mirror-image of sorts in the form, where the first movement is organized into a series of decrescendos while the second is organized into crescendos. The most effective aspects of the piece dealt not with the formal scheme, but with more microscopic elements. The first movement focused the listener in on a series of fairly simple, and very recognizable motives passing around the ensemble above a strong rhythmic drive. While new ideas were introduced, old ones appeared more sparsely, eventually fading away or transforming into newly developed material. The second movement possessed a slightly less present tactus in its eerie and constantly shifting backdrop, with extremely effective use of the piccolo in a small ensemble, courtesy of flutist Christopher Krueger. Despite a somewhat unmotivated ending, the work’s engaging narrative came across clearly, and was performed exquisitely.

Sebastian Currier’s Static opened with the meditative repetition of a single dense chord, immediately establishing a significantly slower, much different sense of pulse in the first of six movements entitled: “Remote,” “Ethereal,” “Bipolar,” “Resonant,” “Charged,” and “Floating.” Each fixated on a central mood or concept. The whole work is quite successful. It was, after all, awarded the 2007 Grawemeyer Award. Percussive textures in “Ethereal” created refreshingly imaginative musical atmospheres, Catherine French’s violin solo in “Resonant” was both beautiful and hypnotic. The later movements, unfortunately, became less engaging. “Charged,” though energetic and exciting, was entirely too square and quickly became unsatisfyingly predictable. “Floating” functioned primarily as a recapitulation of “Remote,” but was so long and repetitive that it seemed to tip the entire piece out of balance.

Chen Yi’s …as like a raging fire… was visceral and relentless, demanding of considerable performance intensity, which it received. Despite the inspired delivery, the composition itself was generally lacking. The piece seemed to be composed entirely of chromatic wedges, with the occasional pentatonic scale arbitrarily inserted. The harmonic language and style came across as anonymous, and the seemingly purposeless interjections of references to traditional Chinese music lacked inspiration or authenticity.

Steven Mackey’s Animated Shorts was a brilliant collection of miniatures featuring Nicholas Tolle on the cimbalom, a Hungarian hammered dulcimer. The novelty of experiencing a virtuosic performance of a rare instrument was only part of the thrill here. Each of the miniatures was effective and thoughtful. While Mackey’s approach to the pieces leaned towards a rock-influenced model, giving up a sense of continuity and development for a more riff-oriented, process-influenced musicality, the various self-contained movements were engaging, emotive, and intensely entertaining. “Depending,” the opening movement, was a full-fledged, aggressive joy-ride, featuring interactive soloistic performances from every angle. “Slippery Dog” morphed through lyrical, alien soundscapes, triumphantly capitalizing on the tonal discrepancies between the cimbalom and piano. The Mackey was a truly potent way to close the evening in alliance with Hoose’s discussion on pulse in American contemporary music.

Collage New Music will present its next concert March 22, at Pickman Hall, and will feature two works by John Harbison, and also works by David McMullin, David Lang, and John Aylward.

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.

This approach is, of course, for the best–getting a sample of each contrasting period makes for a much more interesting audience experience. There is, however, an added element of difficulty that comes with taking on a piece from each of Beethoven’s periods on the same concert program: the musical approach to each piece has to be entirely different and fresh, as if the ensemble was interpreting pieces written centuries apart from each other. As expected with an ensemble that has become so intimate with the music of Beethoven over the years, Muir String Quartet brought each masterpiece to life on its own terms. The evening’s performances became unique characters, the ensemble placing various traits–tranquility and intensity, motion and suspension, delicacy and grit—in all the right places.

The two earlier works, the G Major and the E-flat Major, or, “Harp” Quartet were performed on the first half of the concert. The ensemble performed the lyricism of the G major quartet with a rarely heard quality of organic beauty. Perhaps the one aspect of both pieces on the first half, representing Beethoven’s comparatively less progressive music, is the demand for each performer to add their own unique drama into their part, while remaining tightly knit as an ensemble. The “Harp” Quartet shares many of these attributes, with a bit more expansive properties in terms of style and musical expression. This performance’s high point was without doubt the Scherzo of the E-flat quartet, exhibiting the ensemble’s fullest expressive abilities that can only come from years of playing with each other.

While there are devout camps of musicians that champion any of the three periods imposed on Beethoven’s catalog, I can say without hesitation that the E-flat Major and G Major quartets are child’s play compared to the C-sharp minor quartet. The 40-minute work contains one of the most inspired, complicated, and elegant webs of musical development in the canon of 19^th-century music. The demands on the performers in this piece go far beyond earlier examples of Beethoven’s music for strings. The Muir’s performance of the quartet was done with such precision that all the inner complexities of the structure seemed to illuminate themselves as the piece unfolded–a phenomenon that can only occur when the ensemble possesses the dedication to apply a vast theoretical understanding of the composition to its practice.

These series of performances by the Muir String Quartet have attracted a good deal of local enthusiasm, evidenced by such an impressive turnout at the Tsai Performing Arts Center that they ran out of programs before the concert began. It has become clear that the work this ensemble is putting into this series will become a significant milestone in the developing performance tradition of Beethoven’s string quartets.

The next performance in the Muir String Quartet’s series on Beethoven’s Quartets is scheduled for March 3rd.

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.

Chameleon Arts Ensemble presented their season’s second program, tagged “wordless wondrous things,” at the Goethe-Institut on Saturday evening, November 7. The unifying component of the works performed was that each of the instrumental pieces was, in some way, vocally conceived.  As with many of the Chameleons’ concerts, the program juxtaposed pieces from different periods, featuring performances of Mendelssohn and Schubert alongside 20th-century composers Ester Mägi and Sebastian Currier. Having some of Boston’s most talented and versatile musicians, Chameleon Arts Ensemble delivered performances of the highest caliber. The program seemed to lack any true masterpieces, though, so the final affect of the concert was that of great performers weighed down by mediocre works.

Rafael Popper-Keizer and Gloria Chien opened the concert with Mendelssohn’s Lied ohne Worte (Song Without Words), for cello and piano. This is one of the few of Mendelssohn’s “wordless songs” that was written for piano and instrument by the composer. (Many others were written for solo piano and later arranged for other instruments.) The piece is short and sweet, with some the most expressive and lyrical cello melodies the 19th century has to offer. Popper-Keizer performed the piece with inspiration and emotional relevance, up to the song’s premature ending.

The following two pieces represented the 20th-century component of the concert. While the Currier and the Mägi were stylistically different from each other, they both were quite audience-accessible. Mägi’s Serenade, a trio for flute, violin, and viola provided some interesting interactions between the performers, creating multiple sound-worlds with a nice sense of contrast without the safety net of a piano, but ultimately rambles incoherently from idea to idea with little sense of consistency or development. The piece ended where it started, which merely came off as a feeble and unsuccessful attempt to tie up all of the loose ends in the composition.

Sebastien Currier’s Whispers was by far a more intriguing work, and without doubt the most engaging performance of the evening. The piece, scored for flute, cello, piano, and percussion, constantly toyed with the instrumental expression of typically non-musical vocal sounds. The interpretations of whispers, murmurs, and chatters was cleverly integrated into a satisfying musical form. Percussionist William Manley wonderfully negotiated his role in the small ensemble with careful virtuosity. Pianist Vivian Chang-Freiheit and flutist Deborah Boldin also gave noteworthy performances with clarity and intent that can only be achieved by performers unflinchingly comfortable with contemporary music.

Oboist Nancy Dimock and violist Scott Woolweaver joined Chang-Freiheit for August Klughardt’s Schliflieder Reed Songs. The piece is an instrumental interpretation of five Nikolaus Lenau poems, set in the archetype of mid-late Romantic music by a composer whose presence has, in many ways, been subdued by history. Woolweaver and Dimock brought the piece to life with a palpable sense of connection between them, analogous to the character and his lost love in the poems. The piece is beautiful, sometimes to the point of cringing, with such an excess of both Romanticism (the musical) and romanticism (the vernacular) that it’s sometimes difficult to take seriously.

The second half of the program was entirely dedicated to Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat Major. Joel Pitchon, Rafael Popper-Keizer, and Gloria Chien performed the work with expressive purpose and relentless endurance (which the piece most definitely demands). The Trio, although a late work not performed until after the composer’s death, contains the length and development of a masterpiece, but without the profundity of many of his orchestral works. The piece, despite a marvelous performance, was likely quite tiring to all but the staunchest Schubert enthusiasts.

The Chameleons continue their season in early February, with a promising program of Boulez, Brahms, Larsen, Fine, and Saraste.

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.

BCO delivered its PR claim: a relaxed, inviting form of audience interaction. The pre-concert talk was actually a talk, and not a lecture. Pre-concert speaker Mary Ann Nichols and Howard Frazin had an interesting, accessible discussion on the inception of his premiered overture for chamber orchestra, In the Forests of the Night, as well as the interaction between the composer and the musicians throughout the rehearsal process. The song on which Frazin’s piece was based, a setting of William Blake’s The Tyger, was performed during the well-attended pre-concert session by mezzo Krista River and pianist Linda Osborn-Blaschke.

Hearing Frazin’s song on The Tyger first drastically heightened the effectiveness of the orchestral piece. Aside from being acquainted with the poetic context of the piece (which in its orchestral version has no text), it also allowed the listener to appreciate better the thoughtful orchestration of the melodies, since much of the overture material is taken directly from the song. Having an instrumental piece that both poetically and dramatically follows the form of a text allows for an unusually explicit expression of the programmatic aspect of the music. The piece still works very well outside of this context, however. The piece flows seamlessly, breathing in long phrases while harmonies shift rapidly and constantly underneath expressive melodies. In The Forests of the Night was accessible and familiar, yet filled with emotional tension and dramatic complexity. It was a good choice for BCO to  commission Frazin to write a piece for its 30th season; Frazin’s music is pensive and original, while still within the immediate grasp of classical musicians and audiences.

Before the orchestra began Schumann’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor, featured violinist Jennifer Frautschi casually shared some background on the piece. Though atypical, it was refreshing to hear the soloist talk passionately about the piece she was about to perform. This concerto is peculiar, as it was one of the last large-ensemble works Schumann, and did not have the opportunity to be polished by the composer in the way he did with his other works. The creation of the piece overlapped with his mental deterioration, and was removed from his collected works by his wife after his death. Frautschi’s performance was poignant and impassioned. The work does have its awkward moments, but reveals some interesting insights into Schumann’s compositional process – similar to the fashion in which the audience was offered insights into Howard Frazin’s piece.

After Frautschi graced the audience with a brief solo Bach encore, the orchestra played I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a five and ten cent store), in humorous self-deprecation with conductor Steven Lipsitt playing clarinet. Many ensembles are in difficult financial situations, and this was the most personal and wittiest plea for support I’ve seen from a performing organization. The final performance was of Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony. The BCO programmed the piece to honor the bicentennial of the composer’s birth – as did the BSO when it performed it this past Spring. In many ways, the BCO is able to provide a more accurate realization of Mendelssohn’s music with its smaller forces, as Mendelssohn usually favored writing for Mozart’s orchestra instead of larger Romantic orchestras that were becoming more and more popular during his career. The more compact string sections allowed for expressive clarity, with very little sacrifice of the musical drama. The performance, as with the rest of the program, was compelling, unpretentious, and… well… intimate.

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.

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The performance String Quartet No. 2 was filled with charismatic references to the music of Debussy, mixed together with the seeds of Bartók’s distinct harmonic language that becomes so cohesive in his later works. After a splendid performance of the piece, first violinist Nicholas Kitchen explained their system of reading music off of laptops instead of sheet music to avoid page turns and to facilitate reading off of a score instead of parts. He also shared an interesting story of visiting Budapest and personally investigating some of Bartók’s original manuscripts, exploring different interpretations of moments in String Quartet No. 4 based on sketches of the piece.

The first movement of the fourth quartet relies entirely on a dialogue between two musical ideas that juxtapose each other throughout the movement, often interchanging at an extremely rapid pace. Being able to support dynamic contrast as the two ideas battle each other takes an immense amount of control. The Borromeo’s performance provided the intensity necessary in these moments in such an unrestrained manner that the musical dialogue in the composition flowed freely from the ensemble. Nicholas Kitchen, effortlessly drawing the audience into the momentum of the allegro pizzicato, led the group with high-spirited animation.

Violist Mai Motobuchi soulfully opened the sixth quartet with the Mesto theme, which recurs in different incarnations, growing in harmonic density at the beginning of each movement. By the final movement, the desolate theme develops into an entire entity of its own, incorporating ideas from the previous movements only enough to bring a sense of finality. The inclination of most concert programs (as well as multi-movement works) is to end big, loud, and fast. The complete opposite is never so effective as it is String Quartet No. 6. This is one of the most beautiful, gut-wrenching pieces the 20th century has to offer. The ensemble realized it immaculately, with the kind of weight and affect that leaves you in a trance at the end of the piece, unable to applaud, for only a moment.

The Gardner Museum’s Sunday concert series will feature the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center next week. You can catch The Borromeo String Quartet at Jordan Hall on November 7th, in the Celebrity Series of Boston.”

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.

Peter Serkin in BSO photo (Michael J. Lutch)

The opening performance of Martinu’s The Frescoes of Piero Della Francesca fell far short of the typical standards of the BSO. The piece began with a sense of lifelessness and lack of expressive coordination and recovered only moderately by the end of the piece, which is unfortunate considering the performance was programmed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. These blunders are not at all common among the BSO, and although they infrequently make their mark upon every major orchestra, it’s best not to dwell on them.

Peter Serkin’s performance of Stravinsky’s Capriccio was tireless and animated. The piece was written after Stravinsky had fled from Russia in the 1920’s, so that the composer could perform the virtuosic piece to earn a living in France. While the piece is not among the most performed of Stravinsky’s catalog, it was a great opportunity to showcase star pianist Peter Serkin. From the percussive, forte opening short cascade of notes, Serkin’s performance was  elegant, seemingly effortless, yet perceptive. His playing, visually, is all in his hands, but what a mind lies behind them!

Without doubt the most remarkable, and to many the most anticipated performance of the evening was the American premiere of Augusta Read Thomas’s Helios Choros II (Sun God Dancers). The piece lived well up to its expectations and was delivered immaculately by the orchestra and Morlot, who is no stranger to conducting contemporary music.

Augusta Read Thomas with Ludovic Morlot (Michael J. Lutch)

Thomas is one of the rare composers who not only allows her personality to shine through her music, but allows the many facets of her persona to become concentrated and interact throughout her works. Helios Choros II, like the Stravinsky, was full of dance-like energy– but had a far wider emotional and dynamic range. The piece was much like walking into a room with a handful of very distinct, idiosyncratic characters. They’re having a conversation. Some are interested in what the others are saying, and respond with relevant and affected musical retorts; while others are only interested and hearing themselves speak and interject arrogantly and willfully throughout the piece. The piece seems to revel in this counterpoint of development and non-development with the end goal of establishing an overall dramatic corollary to a collective of musical personalities.

Helios Choros II is the second and longest component of a three-part symphonic triptych. Along with Helios Choros I (commissioned by the Dallas Symphony) and Helios Choros II (commissioned by the Orchestre de Paris), the full work runs roughly around 40 minutes. Elliott Carter’s Symphonia was conceived in a similar manner, as different orchestras commissioned three movements at different times. Nowadays, Symphonia is rarely performed except in its entirety, which begs the question: When will Helios Choros be performed altogether? It would be quite a treat if the Boston Symphony Orchestra would provide the hinges for this splendid work.

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.

Pianist Orli Shaham with conductor David Robertson and the BSO on Sunday afternoon (Hilary Scott)

Roy Harris’s Symphony #3 opened the concert with the slow unfolding of chorale-like textures in the low strings. (The piece, premiered by the Boston Symphony 70 years ago under the baton of Serge Koussevitzky himself, has not been performed by the orchestra since the mid-1970s, though it has been quite popular in programming elsewhere. So the BSO revisiting it was a brave undertaking.) The piece, with a very rigid block-structure, accomplishes magnificently the straightforward musical aims of each localized section. The Pastoral, one of the most convincing sections, was visited by the soft downpour of rain from beyond the outer edges of the amphitheater, making the music all the more emotive. With the unanimity of musical material in each section, Harris’s Symphony #3 leaves little to be questioned until its abruptly rigid and unsettling ending, which seemed to propel the listener into the following pieces with a sense of apprehension.

The Five Songs from William Blake by Virgil Thomson featured the wildly successful baritone Thomas Hampson. His expressive and poignant performance gave a wealth of life to a set of pieces that can otherwise seem rather square, and the contrast between the each of the songs creates enough momentum and interest to engage even the most distrait listeners. The constant focus is on the song, and all the music seems to be dictated by the happenings of the voice. So although the essence of Thomson’s songs features a fairly risk-less relationship between the orchestra and singer, Hampson took command of his role with radiance, creating dimension to these steeples of neoclassicist Americana.

Anyone looking for a more intriguing and complex dialogue between Thomas Hampson and the BSO was without doubt appeased by the performances of Samuel Barber’s songs with orchestra: Sure on this shining night, Nocturne, and I hear an army charging upon the land. Unlike the Thomson, these songs were not originally conceived to be grouped together into a single performance, and the trajectory of the first two songs into the third seemed a bit skewed. Nonetheless, each performance was a fantastic realization of some of the greatest pieces for orchestra and voice of the 20^th century. Sure on this shining night, in particular supplied a great depth in sensitivity to the complex and intricate connections between the text, the musical development, and the orchestration. I hear an army flowed over with energy, and was the powerful and dark explosion that was needed to bid farewell to Hampson.

Thomas Hampson performs with guest conductor David Robertson and the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Sunday afternoon. (Hilary Scott)

Like Harris’s Symphony #3, Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony #2, “The Age of Anxiety,” received its premiere by the BSO under Koussevitzky decades ago. While the piece was conceived and formed around the poem by W.H. Auden that narrates the events of an evening of four acquaintances in a New York bar, Symphony #2 established a musical narrative of its own – a non-programmatic musical narrative that is so alluring and involved that an attempt to tie the musical events to the poetic narrative would not only be futile, but would thwart the ability of an gratifying listening experience. Thankfully, the folks at the BSO were kind enough to exclude the original poem from the program notes. The piece features a riveting dialogue between the piano and orchestra. Pianist Orli Shaham was as magnificent as her reputation suggests. The emotional depth of her performance was so entrancing that one can often overlook how wickedly difficult the solo piano part is. There seemed to be a supernatural link between Shaham and conductor David Robertson; the conversation between orchestra and pianist seemed to flow like a river, without the slightest disturbance.

The perks of having musical variety in a concert program are often hindered when an orchestra decides to focus on a limited timeframe and stylistic orientation. Though in this case, the program seemed to reveal to us, or at least remind us that the orchestral repertoire of mid-20^th-century America is far more eclectic than we often recollect, and is as diverse as it is euphonious.

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a composer and bassoonist who performs regularly in the Boston area. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.