The Callithumpian Consort’s performance in Jordan Hall on January 25th featured an interesting mix of improvised and non-improvised performance. The composers represented on the program, Debussy, Nicholas Vines, Zorn, Murail, and Ikue Mori, represented a refreshingly wide array of styles and aesthetics.

Being the only pre-21^st-century piece on the program, Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp was perhaps the most familiar work of the program. It is more harmonically conservative than most of his late works but has all of the textural and figurative appeal that makes Debussy’s music so unique. Karina Fox, Jessi Rosinski, and Franziska Huhn’s playing was crisp and animated: qualities that played particularly well to the Finale. While the placement of the Debussy seemed a bit odd on a program otherwise consisting entirely of pieces composed in the last eight years, some link between Debussy and Murail’s Lachryme, after intermission, appeared to be the motivation for such programming.

Nicholas Vines’s Economy of Wax, a setting of an excerpt from Darwin’s The Origin of Species for soprano, flute, viola, and harp, features a peculiarly scientific description (in prose) of an experiment involving bees constructing and maintaining their hive. The piece had some nice moments of lyricism between soprano and piccolo and exhibited a masterful control of contrapuntal texture. Since the text hardly has an ounce of expressive potential, Vines chose to focus more on vocal acrobatics than clarity of text. The writing contained itself to a single contrapuntal consistency, wonderfully evocative of the relentless swarming of Darwin’s bees, but ultimately it came across as rather stagnant and undermotivated. The piece was handled excellently by the performers, though balance was an issue at times.

John Zorn’s Orphée offered an interesting balance of notated music and improvised material. The piece opens with a noisy clash of dissonant and punctuated sonorities separated by awkward and immediate non-transitions: a block-structured caricature of modernism. The piece suddenly shifts into a very distant Minimalist territory, thorny stabs of dissonance now replaced with triadic, predictable bliss. Zorn thrives in the territory of these postmodern musical decisions and makes them appear much less arbitrary than many of his counterparts. Admittedly, the piece becomes “about” these stylistic shifts instead of the inner workings — which have the potential to be far more interesting. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of idioms was quite convincing, comical as they were.

Tristan Murail’s Lachrymae, composed for the Callithumpian Consort last summer at Sick Puppy (Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice), returned us to a meticulously controlled form of musical expression. While I have a deep admiration of Murail as a composer, a gripe I often have with his music is its tendency to marinate in its textures (gorgeous as they may be) with little concern for sustaining a sense of continuity through the narrative of the piece. Lachrymae seemed to go in the complete opposite direction, borrowing ubiquitously Classical tactics to organize constantly developing and profoundly moving materials while remaining “Spectralist” in its treatment of texture and harmony. The Callithumpians clearly invest a sense of ownership in this piece, resulting in the most convincing (by far) performance of the evening.

Ikue Mori, who performed live electronics on the Zorn earlier in the program, was again featured in her own composition, Confucius Becomes Popular, for large improvisational ensemble and animated video. It was more or less a collage of miniature narratives summarizing traditional Chinese parables, undoubtedly selected for their particular relevance to contemporary American politics. Musically, the piece seemed to relinquish almost all of its control to the performers’ collective intuition. Mori, in particular, had an unusually convincing grasp of her electronic setup, inventing her own meta-instrument that had both identity and expressive breadth. Her interactions with percussionist Nick Tolle at times were quite intriguing.

Much of the rest of the ensemble was less convincing; apparently they were more concerned with their own stage theatrics than with meaningful dialogue. This improvisational model worked better with the smaller group at the end of the performance, likely due to the presence of pianist Anthony Coleman, a true luminary in the world of free improvisation. Joined by Artistic Director Stephen Drury on piano, the improv session was quite engaging; the focus was purely on the intuitive interactions of the musicians, without any other visual guide. Had I left with much of the audience before this post-program improv session, I would have sorely lost out!

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 performances for the vast majority of the program were overwhelmingly positive. The first two pieces, both collections of songs, Du (1951) and Mehr ‘Du’ (1991), seem to highlight a general theme of the program by outlining the expressive disparity between the composer’s early, meticulously controlled compositions and the later ones, which, although still meticulously controlled, have a certain poetic quality to them. The earlier pieces, in my opinion, are attractive only in their structural elegance on the page—an aesthetic quality that is not transmitted in its intended form to even the most receptive ears. That said, the performance of Du by Sarah Bach and Rodney Lister was so well-executed that it generated a certain appeal on a separate plane than that of the structural organization—a phenomenon not uncommon to Babbitt’s music. Ceceilia Allwein highlighted the more expressive nature of Mehr ‘Du’ with candid feeling, which sometimes felt at odds with the more deliberate approach of the instrumentalists. I much appreciated D’Anna Fortunato’s presence at the concert. Her performance of the Feldeinsamkeit was simply gorgeous. Babbitt’s Composition for One Instrument (2000), performed on celesta by Lister, existed in a strangely engaging place between the eerie and playful, whereas the program’s closing piece Composition for Viola and Piano (1950) seemed cold and sterile.

Perhaps the most interesting contributions were from the NEC Preparatory School students. Pianists Hannah Ryu and Niklas Kniesche showed technical ability and musicianship far beyond their years, as did violinists Tristan Flores and Yuki Beppu in their duet performance of Arrivals and Departures. Daniel Kim, who seemed to be the oldest of the student performers, showed true prowess in the tongue-in-cheek It Takes Twelve to Tango, but really shone with an exquisite performance of Schoenberg’s Piano Piece, Op. 11 No. 1, which is simply amazing.

The focus of the guest speakers in general was on Babbitt’s warm personality, yet there seemed to be an uncomfortable subtext about the “at large” musical community’s attitude towards Milton Babbitt.  The exception was Marty Boykan’s explanation of Babbitt’s historical importance, with praise for the moment-to-moment aspects of Babbitt’s music.  I daresay even Boykan would have difficulty appreciating the narrative qualities of the more rigid, earlier works for which Babbitt is most known. Granted, some of these trying questions would have seemed out of place at a memorial concert, but I do not doubt they were on many minds: what precisely is at the root of such a large portion of the musical community’s rejection of Babbitt’s music? Why have the vast majority of living composers found Babbitt’s compositional system to be a creative dead-end? Listeners’ preconceptions and prejudices are largely to blame, no doubt. The famous essay by Babbit from High Fidelity magazine in February of 1958 entitled, Who Cares if You Listen?, is usually misunderstood by readers who are unable to derive the optimistic subtext of the argument (the title was changed by editors from “The Composer as Specialist” probably to make the article more polemical).  But despite the stalwart performances by the musicians throughout these performances, I still couldn’t help but find the lingering contrast between the cold, calculated nature of the music and the amiable nature of the man a bit mystifying.

So how do we reconcile the counterpoint between Milton Babbitt’s music and his personality?  The reality is that our recollection of his warm, personable nature­—his love of Broadway, beer, and football—and the tales of his interactions with his students will eventually fade from our cultural memory.  Even his significant contributions to electronic music and academia’s role as a patronage system for composers will shift with the ever-changing artistic landscape of contemporary music in the United States. What will remain, however, is his body of work.  And if the entirety of Babbitt’s character is to live on past the anecdotes of those close to him, the performance practice of his music will have to incorporate a more subjectivist approach.  In many cases (particularly with his earlier serial compositions), this will mean re-conceiving the musical interpretation of his work, most likely in a way that is at odds with the principles inherent in the composition of these pieces.  Perhaps a freer interpretative approach to the performance of Babbitt’s music is the best way to communicate his artistic intentions.

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 four movements of David Cutler’s Weekend Traveler were spread throughout the program, which made it difficult to note any particular large-scale continuity within the piece as a whole. Nonetheless, I’ll share my views on the piece as a whole. The concept of the piece included asking each of the ensemble’s players to choose a style from somewhere around the globe, which was then composed as a movement featuring that player’s instrument. Beads, Bourbon, & Binoculars featured the baritone sax in an off-axis, quirky tribute to early New Orleans jazz. The movement quickly verified Hays as a formidable addition to the ensemble’s permanent roster. The second movement, No Patios en Los Patios was the most interesting number of the evening. While the opening clapping of the hallmark Cuban son clave rhythm may have seemed gimmicky at first, the development of familiar Afro-Cuban rhythms into dense, interesting polyrhythmic composition was exceptionally compelling. As alto sax player Chris Hemingway topped of the movement with a spectacular breakneck cadenza, it became clear Cutler was taking full advantage of the virtuosic capabilities of his ensemble. The movement ended with an interesting commentary on its derived style; the clapping returned, but this time in son clave montuno form (a sort of backwards son clave, which was vastly important to the development of salsa). Any Cuban music purist will say that the two fundamental rhythms are incompatible in the same piece – it’s either one or the other – so Cutler did his duty as a contemporary composer in combining the two.

Tenor saxophonist Stephen Pollock’s movement, En Route to Edinburgh­ – Trapped at Carousel C, featured a sensitively interpreted Scottish tune with some jazzy ornamentation, while Wedding Crasher, the final movement featuring some heavy virtuosity on soprano saxophonist Michael Stephenson’s part, deconstructed Bulgarian wedding music into an eccentric joyride. Most of Cutler’s music heard in this piece relied heavily on repetitive bass lines and “looping” of rhythmic figures, which may have limited the pieces expressive potential at times. But for the most part the composer managed to develop these ideas into really interesting and eclectic musical narratives. Cutler and NCSQ have surely contributed a worthy and addition to the growing repertoire of new music for sax quartets.

Other notable performances included Piazzolla’s Bordel 1900 from L’Histoire du Tango, which featured some smart use of key clicks in the arrangement. A Paul Harvey arrangement of a suite of set poems by Robert Burns had its moments. Stephenson played an impassioned melody over My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose, and the ensemble provided an uncanny mimicry of bagpipes in Bannocks O’Bearsmeal.  There were a number of arrangements of folk-inspired tunes arranged by Glenn Haynes spread throughout the program. Though some of them were quite beautiful (in particular My Lord, What a Morning), the tended to homogenize the program in the direction of tiresome folk music arrangements.

The ensemble’s final piece on the program was a well-arranged rendition of Shostakovich’s Folk Dances, which the group played from memory. Though not among the composer’s masterpieces, the work (originally the third movement of the Native Leningrad suite) has become popular among wind ensembles and orchestras in the U.S.  New Century’s performance of the piece was energetic and impressively tight. The group returned for an encore of a jazz/gospel tune that featured more of Hemingway’s consummate jazz chops.

The quality of performance by NCSQ could hardly be drawn into question, yet the overall programming may be another issue. In an interview published on Gloucester’s Wicked Local site, Pollock noted that “this concert might be lighter in nature, but we definitely don’t think it’s trite.” But with the Cutler premiere broken up throughout the concert, the rest of the program was ultimately filled up with rather short crowd-pleasers – many of which fit comfortably into the category of ultra-conservative arrangements of folk tunes. Add that to the general excess of comic rituals throughout, and it might be safe to say that the ensemble underestimated the audience’s ability to appreciate a wider range of musical styles. The want for some more adventurous programming aside, the quartet provided an evening of performances that was engaging, nuanced, and relentlessly entertaining.

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 four pieces performed offered a good snapshot of Ziporyn’s compositional style, which although heavily influenced by Minimalism, tend to favor constant development in the context of block structures, driving rhythms, and definitely virtuosic demands of the performers. Hive, In Bounds, and Typical Music (the last three pieces on the program) all shared this unique mix of Post-Minimalist and Totalist (a response to minimalism) leanings, and received the kind of spot-on performances you can only get with abundant collaboration time spent with the composer.

The opening performance, Tsmindao Gmerto (for solo bass clarinet) stood out stylistically from the others. After a congenial introduction by the composer, he described the piece as an attempt to mimic the sounds of a large group of men singing Georgian chant with a single bass clarinet. The music that followed was a string of flowing, chant-like phrases composed of multi-phonics and trills, jittering on the surface, but moving slowly through evocative pre-tonal harmonies. I had the opportunity to hear the piece performed a few years ago in a large, stone chapel in Miami, and must say the piece benefits from a large, reverberant space to help blend together the sounds of the performer vocalizing while playing (one of a few methods of achieving multi-phonics on the clarinet). In this performance space, the inner parts were more in the foreground, which (based on my observations of nearby listeners) appeared to be too discordant for some to enjoy. Personally, I find the piece’s arching phrases of dense and varying timbres to be quite beautiful.

Pianist Vicky Chow completely won over the audience with her vigorous and animated performance of In Bounds. She danced playfully through the piece, despite its severe difficulty; one only had to see the subtle fear in the page-turner’s eyes as he worked to keep up with the myriad of notes and pages that flew by as the Chow’s hands moved at an unfathomable pace.

Hive, for four clarinets (two B-flat and two bass) quartet featured Ziporyn on bass clarinet, joined by fellow clarinetists Rane Moore, Eran Egozy, and Alicia Lee. Some of the pieces materials are derived from Tsmindao Gmerto, but as part of a much more eclectic array of other styles. The narrative of the piece, as Ziporyn explained, was inspired by his observations of bees (he recently has taken on the hobby of beekeeping).  Rapidly moving lines bounce back and fourth between the players, who effectively made clear the interactive and often antiphonal nature of the piece. The closing piece, Typical Music for piano trio, takes some of the stylistic eclecticism of Hive and truly runs away with it. Chow returned, joined by violinist Todd Reynolds and Ashley Bathgate for a riveting performance. Overall the piece made a positive impact, though I must admit I found some of the moments where the players drifted into jazz/blues material to be rather dry.  The final movement contained some very exciting ideas. Included in this movement was a very exposed moment of paradiddle rhythms, which I couldn’t help but think was a shout out to the composer’s long-time friend and colleague, Steve Reich (referencing Different Trains).

The Rockport Chamber Music Festival undoubtedly deserves commendation for programming an entire concert dedicated to a living composer. While most of the programming this summer at the Shalin Liu falls into the ultra-traditional category, hopefully programs like these will prove popular among their subscribers and rouse more programming of contemporary music in the future.

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.

Steven Drury at last year's SICPP (Andrew Hurbut photo)

New England Conservatory’s Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP, aka Sick Puppy) has established itself as one of the most prolific contemporary music festivals the East Coast has to offer. Running from June 18-25, the festival offers a multifaceted program for composers, instrumentalists, and vocalists through participant ensembles, master classes, and workshops in electronic music and performance. Artistic Director Stephen Drury has assembled a notable faculty of distinguished composers and performers, making participation in this festival a coveted experience for enthusiastic contemporary performers and emerging composers alike.

But the big perk for the rest of us music lovers is an action-packed week of performances by Drury’s Callithumpian Consort and the festival musicians. Starting on Monday, June 20, Jordan Hall and Brown Hall will host a concert every evening, featuring faculty composers and performers. The unique daily concerts will include premieres of works by Tristan Murail (the festival’s composer-in-residence), John Luther Adams, and Nicholas Vines, and a diverse array of works by Fredereic Rzewski, John Corigliano, Joshua Fineberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tamar Diesendruck, Lei Liang, Charles Wuorinen, John Zorn, and more.

The concerts on Monday and Wednesday both feature performances by the Callithumpian Consort. Drury himself will perform Zorn’s fay ce que vouldras. But perhaps one of the most anticipated evenings of the series will be Wednesday’s concert, at which the ensemble features resident composer Tristan Murail. He is one of the world’s most celebrated living composers, known primarily as one of the innovators behind the compositional practice, Spectralism. In addition to a performance of Le Lac will be the world premiere of Lachrymae, composed for the Callithumpians. Also on the program is the virtuosic Territoires de l’oubil, to be performed by William Fried; Okanagon by Giacinto Scelsi, who had a profound influence on Murail’s unique style; and Counterfactual by Boston’s own Joshua Fineberg, protégé of Murail

On Tuesday evening, pianist Ursula Oppens, a bona fide contemporary music legend, will be performing Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated, for which she received one of her three Grammy nominations, as well as Corigliano’s Etude Fantasy and Wuorinen’s Oros, both of which were commissioned and premiered by Oppens in the last couple of years.

Thursday’s performance includes a performance of Stockhausen’s Kontakte, with Drury at the piano and percussionist Stuart Gerber; Gerber’s ties with the composer are sure to guarantee a stalwart performance. Also on the program is the Boston premiere of Four Thousand Holes by John Luther Adams, who has recently been in town as a visiting lecturer at Harvard.

Friday’s performance features musicians Corey Hamm, Yukiko Takagi, Jessi Rosinski, Stuart Gerber, Karina Fox, and Martin Stragier in a program featuring the faculty musicians as soloists.

The festival culminates on Saturday, June 25, with the SICPP Iditarod, a six-hour-plus marathon concert. In addition to performances of works by the festival’s composition fellows, they also will perform works by Saariaho, Stockhausen, Carter, Schnittke, Hurel, Grisey, Xenakis, Cage, Wolff, Foss, Crumb, Kurtag, and Scelsi, as well as more music by Murail, and Steve Reich’s masterwork Music for Eighteen Musicians. The Iditarod will also feature the premiere performance of New England Drift, commissioned by Callithumpian Consort and SICPP composed by 2009 SICPP fellow Lee Weisert.

All these concerts are free and open to the public. And with such a broad and inclusive collection of contemporary milestones, Sick Puppy’s upcoming concert series is one not to be missed.

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.

Nikola Tesla with Chorus of Bees (Keith Collier photo)

Juventas New Music Ensemble gave the opening performance of their 2011 Opera Project, Light and Power, on Thursday evening, May 19, at the Cambridge YMCA Theater in Cambridge. The full length, two-act opera takes an interesting spin on the story of Nikola Tesla and his interactions with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and George Westinghouse. What makes the narrative really effective is how the story, told in reverie as Tesla’s lab is burning down, shifts between his own interpretations of his contemporaries and a bizarre, science-fiction-esque internal dialog with Nova, a “cyborgian hive queen” (as described by librettist Jillian Burcar and presumably meaning a merger of human and technology).  One of the really refreshing elements about this production was that, unlike what seems to be the norm of many modern operas, the breaking of time and the shifting between reality and abstraction was handled with a careful sense of clarity. The collaboration between Burcar and composer Isaac Schankler was very evident; one got the sense that the entire production was bound to a unified vision. This is no easy feat for operas that have been produced hundreds of times, let alone a world premiere.

Schankler’s music is extraordinarily eclectic – where traditional operatic roles may have themes or motifs associated with characters, Schenkler attached entire musical idioms to them. The mystical Nova character (Christine Teeters, soprano) is given some spectralist qualities to her music, while the idiom for Edison (Davron Monroe, tenor) leaped into ragtime. All of the music was masterfully composed. The divergences of styles were effectively informed by both the tradition of opera and the tradition of the American musical. The use of electronics, varied and sensitive, was always complementary to the musical drama. There were also more than a few musical surprises: interesting uses of musical shifting between disarray and uniformity, as well as “phasing” in the chorus parts. Other highlights (which may also have been under the influence of Steve Reich) were scenes where the instruments mimicked the actors’ speech patterns. It was very effective with Barratt Park’s presidential speech, less so with Henry Ford’s character later in the act.

Chelsea Beatty as Nikola Tesla (Keith Collier photo)

The performances of Chelsea Beatty and Christine Teeters played off each other extremely well. Beatty’s performance was a well-rounded package – her quality vocal performance was enhanced by a captivating stage presence and convincing body language – whereas Teeters’s enrapturing, powerful voice alone was simply a show stealer: as much of a spectacle as were her and her Chorus of Bees’s outlandish costumes. Monroe portrayed Edison with wry charisma, complemented by the contrastingly shy character of Ford, played by Rachel Selan. The chorus and the pit, under the direction of Lidiya Yankovskaya, also deserve special commendation.

What is perhaps most impressive about this entire production is the scope. While there were not any substantial set changes in the opera and the staging was confined to a relatively limited space, the costumes, set, lighting, and stage direction were all quite elaborate. With the recent emergence of a handful of low-budget, grassroots-based opera companies in the area, one can justifiably question the ability of a contemporary music chamber ensemble to successfully take on such a monumental project. Juventas’s success is undoubtedly by virtue of the dozens of production staff members, many who volunteer, that have a passion about what they are doing. It is comforting to know that there are not only outlets for the premiering of new operatic works, but that there’s a receptive and enthusiastic base of supporters to bring these works to life with quality and authenticity. Light and Power will be running at the Cambridge YMCA Theater all weekend.

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.

John Harbison’s Songs America Loves to Sing, co-commissioned by the ensemble in 2004, sets ten well-known traditional songs (senza singer) for pierrot ensemble —flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. The piece is inspired by the (perhaps lost) family ritual of singing traditional songs around the piano. In a similar sentimental way, the piece engages a large amount of the American musical canon. The opening number, a setting of Amazing Grace, embellishes the familiar tune in the flute, played with sensitivity by Christina Smith. Toying with the tonality of the original tune, the song meditates on the overtone series with lifting piano lines and cello harmonics. Much of the cycle operates on the fringe of tonality reminiscent of Charles Ives, shifting within a wide and beautifully nebulous spectrum between consonance and dissonance. Some of the songs, such as Canon: St. Louis Blues dive head first into the gospel/blues idiom, albeit with a good deal of added complexity. The musicians, especially pianist Paula Peace, were able to step successfully out of the typical rigidity of chamber playing to portray convincingly the movements that were a bit more c aricaturish in nature. Clarinetist Laura Ardan’s playing in the cadenza-like Solo: Poor Butterfly was a particularly revealing moment of exceptional writing married with captivating performance. Anniversary Song ends the set with the instrumentalists all playing harmonicas, repeating the melancholy tune with a certain unexpected quirkiness.

The ensemble then treated us to the Boston premiere of Michael Gandolfi’s Canzona Nova: Fractured Fairy Tale, which was commissioned just this season by the Atlanta Chamber Players. The piece (scored for oboe, string trio, and piano) is a fast-paced amalgam of rapidly moving inner-parts and broad lyricism. The piece is saturated with imitation, building off of the sixteenth-century instrumental canzona with surface motion and narrative style; in a brief intro to the performance, Gandolfi described his work as a “pre-sonata piece in a post-sonata world.” While harmonically conservative, Conzona Nova is quite adventurous in its layering of complex rhythms. The piece opens with a visceral energy that remains throughout. Gandolfi cites jazz/rock influences, which were particularly evident as musical themes characterized by expressive, falling triads in the strings were repeated, transposed up a whole-step (a trait more conversant with popular music forms). In one of the most absorbing new pieces I’ve heard lately, the music eventually dissipates into the motoric clockwork of the cello and piano – a truly compelling ending. The musicians, Elizabeth Koch, Justin Bruns, Catherine Lynn, Brad Ritchie, and Paula Peace deserve special note for a meticulous performance. The ensemble skillfully balanced the mechanical precision the piece calls for, while highlighting the piece’s larger gestures and inherent musicality.

Arthur Foote is known for being one of very few late nineteenth-/ early twentieth-century composers to receive his musical training exclusively in America. That said, there seems to be nothing of his style that differentiates it from his European counterparts; he is just as much a product of the European tradition as Brahms or Fuchs. Nonetheless, Piano Quartet in C Major, Opus 23 is an exemplary and sophisticated artifact of late Romanticism. The Scherzo stirred with excited energy, and the Adagio was part to a beguiling interpretation by violinist Justin Bruns. The ensemble gave an inspired performance, and deserves the highest praise for not only championing the music of living composers, but the music of composers whose music they feel is undeservingly disregarded by concert programmers at large.

The program credits support from the National Endowment for the Arts American Masterworks Program, which helps many groups like ACF disseminate their wonderful interpretation of American Composers’ works to audiences around the country. Hopefully we will find that this (and the rest of NEA’s) programs have survived the cuts when the new federal budget is made public.

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.

Jaime Fatás’s Flamenco sin Limites for solo saxophone opened with a lyrical fantasy, wittily reinforcing the piece’s inner tension between idiomatic Flamenco elements with more free-improvisational style. The first, most abrupt exclamation of this comes as unexpected foot-stomping to interrupt an otherwise timeless and flowing musical surface. The piece was short and sweet, but in its limited duration featured evocative use of timbral trills, short micro-tonal colorations, alongside some more typical harmonies reminiscent of Spanish/Romani styles.

Two pieces for alto sax and cello by the youngest composer on the program, Juan Ruiz, followed Fatás’s solo piece. The more interesting and successful of the two, Avenida la Playa, opened with acrobatic percussive use of the cello, effectively executed by Diana Flores. The sax joined in for a brief, syncopated rhythmic dance that was the entirety of the piece. It seemed restrained, as if more energy was on the page than on the stage, and might have benefited by a more up-tempo performance.

The following piece, Lejanias, opened with an thick, consonant lament ripe with some adept and sensitive use of dynamic contrast but soon transgressed into a series of rather unremarkable pseudo-tonal sequences. Both pieces seemed to inspire (or be inspired by) original poems by the composer included in lieu of program notes, both of which were beautiful pieces of literary art in their own rights.

In Radnofsky’s notes, he professed a recently found affinity for early-twentieth-century Spanish composer Joaquin Turina’s Trio, Op. 35. The piece, originally scored for piano trio, worked well as edited by Radnofsky for flute, sax, and piano. Flutist Marcos Granados and pianist/composer John McDonald joined for the performance. The adapted instrumentation seemed to aid the Prelude and Fugue during duet passages between the flute and saxophone. The color of the wind instruments provided a deeper level of intrigue than the typical homogenous sounds of violin and cello for which the piece was originally scored. Despite its attractive moments and exceptional performance this evening, the majority of the piece is painfully uninventive and falls into timeworn maxims and nearly exhaustive levels of predictability at every barline. In my ear, the piece does little to integrate late-nineteenth-century Spanish popular music into a post-Romantic style, but rather uses popular music’s influence as an excuse for half-baked musical ideas and poorly executed formal structures.

The second half of the concert opened with a far more satisfying exhibition of elegant simplicity. Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileras No. 1 (originally for orchestra and solo cello) received a wonderfully sensitive performance. Set for string quartet and alto sax by Jorge Hoyo and featuring a string section of members of A Far Cry and Discovery Ensemble, this arrangement seemed to be tailored for Radnofsky’s whispery thin, delicate tone. The blend between the quartet and saxophone provided an interesting new perspective in this lush, beautiful piece.

John McDonald’s Reunion in Solos and Duets, five miniatures alternating between solos and duets, were written in celebration of the composer’s chance to again play with Radnofsky (on  flute) and Marcos Granados (as pianist on the Turina and closing pieces by Cristian Yufra); McDonald became acquainted with the other performers in his high-school and college years. The pieces intelligently mingled the two instruments using very limited — but decidedly not limiting! — material from the slow movement of Bach’s fifth Brandenburg Concerto. Featuring palindromic inner solo movements, the set as a whole was mostly characterized by restrained, often meditative developments. As if being suddenly awakened from a trance, the fifth miniature, “Duet: Maestoso” allowed the flute and saxophone to dance excitedly around enticing and erratic rhythms, closing playfully with a satisfying quip for the premiere performance of a truly exceptional piece.

Cristian Yufra’s longer movements, also in a set of five, were characterized by familiar modality and persistent consonance (often to the point of excess). Amancer (Dawn) opened with exuberant Lydian melodies in Radnofsky’s soprano sax. The consistent, regular rhythms of all of the movements were aided by the addition of Juan Ruiz (the multi-talented young composer heard on the first half) playing the bombo leguero, a large Argentine folk drum. The program notes, which were entirely in Spanish (and I shall not let my upbringing in Miami go to waste!) briefly describe the folk roots and inspirations of each of the movements. The playful second one, Ayelen, is dedicated to the composer’s young niece. La fresca was something of an Argentine pastorale. Most of the pieces were enjoyable and understated, if under-stimulating (and perhaps too fatiguing, judging by the unfortunate case of conspicuous snoring from the audience). The quartet of Granados, Radnosky, McDonald, and Ruiz proved a good blend, most effective in the final movement, Desesperación. It contained some of the few moments of the evening that featured the more compelling sort of rhythmic constructions one might expect from a program featuring contemporary Spanish and South American music.

The program as a whole was quite successful, as it allowed Radnofsky and the fine musicians that accompanied him to share their music with a receptive audience. My only grievance (which may, no doubt, be the source of many other audience members’ praise) is that the program offered only a narrow extreme of the spectrum of Spanish and Latin American-influenced contemporary music. I celebrate Kenneth Radnofsky’s right, especially at his level of stature, to commission and perform the types of music he prefers. But in a program boasting multiple world premieres and predominantly newly commissioned works, I would have expected to hear much more music outside of the ultra-conservative vein. Of course, it’s not every performer or concert presenter’s obligation to challenge the audience. But after the concert, I couldn’t help but feel that a the vast majority of Spanish and South-American compositional styles were severely underrepresented.

Ed note: This fine review was received “at the editor’s desk” a week ago, then was transferred to a laptop to be worked on while on-flight from San Francisco. This proved unworkable. From hence this soldier was “hors de combat” for two days and the review in limbo until reclaimed.

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 New York-based quintet, Imani Winds, performed an eclectic array of mostly 20th- and 21st-century works at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Sunday, Nov. 7. The concert experience given by Imani Winds is without doubt linked to the group’s enormous success as a touring and recording chamber ensemble. While performing a substantial program of relentlessly difficult music, the group constantly engaged the audience in informal discussion on the pieces – thus bringing the aesthetic approach to wind music from Elliot Carter to as comparable a level of audience accessibility as Piazzolla.

The only pre-20th-century piece on the program was an arrangement of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream “Scherzo.” The arrangement still contained some modern flair, since the piece concentrates a tremendous amount of busy figuration from a larger ensemble into five instruments, with seemingly no downscaling of complexity. Flutist Valerie Coleman was hardly given a single chance to breathe in this arrangement, but lost none of her vibrancy along the way. The group displays an exciting sense of unity: a special, virtuosic kind of unity that teeters between feeling organic and mechanical, which was an unfailing virtue of the performances throughout the program.

Jason Moran’s Cane revealed some of the top-notch music that Imani Wind’s commissioning efforts are contributing to the wind quintet repertoire. The programmatic narrative of the piece followed the story of Marie Thérèse Metoyer or “Coincoin,” a freed slave who became a successful businesswoman and an icon of Créole culture in Louisiana. Moran’s connection to Coincoin goes beyond that of regional influence, as he is in fact one of her descendants. The style of the first three movements were largely characterized by shifting contrapuntal rhythmic textures underneath alluring melodies. The piece moves forward at a swift rate, having at least some grounding in post-minimalist techniques. The final movement wails in a contrasting, loose Dixieland idiom.

The two following works represented more established (though I dare say not quite as engaging) examples of the 20th-century chamber wind literature. Nielsen’s Neoclassical, pseudo-romantic Quintet for Winds has become a standard for wind quintets everywhere. The ensemble breathed color and life into the piece, and the tone of horn player Jeff Scott and bassoonist Monica Ellis fused nicely. But the variations, despite even the most extraordinary performances, are rather non-stimulating. Elliott Carter’s Quartet, a very early piece of the composer’s career, explores very limiting musical ideas over eight short etudes. The etudes sometimes feel like quirky composition exercises, but the closing movement delightfully pulls all of the materials together in a Fantasy that exhibits Carter’s colossal facility for counterpoint and convincing development.

Derek Bermel’s Wanderings integrates Jewish and Muslim influences into its first movement. West African rhythms are the root of the second movement, “Two Songs from Nandom.” There seemed to be little material that ties the two movements together, which was perhaps the motivation for the title. The first movement, “Gift of Life,” contained some interesting effects, and clarinetist Mariam Adam seemed completely comfortable with the Yiddish stylizations demanded by the piece. Interestingly, the bassoon was even asked to bend pitches in Klezmer fashion, which made for some really interesting ensemble sounds. The piece barely scratches the surface of the cultural dichotomies it claims to engage, but works quite well on a purely musical level.

Closing the concert was horn player Jeff Scott’s arrangement of Piazzolla’s Libertango. In addition to being a talented instrumentalist, Scott shows deft facility for orchestrating for the finicky medium that is the wind quintet. Coleman once again danced the off-axis tango melodies with virtuosic spectacle. Ellis’s tone and dynamic control was deserving of awe, as was the agility of oboist Toyin Spellman-Diaz. Libertango was a fun, high-energy close to an exceptional performance.

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 performances were supplemented by panel discussions between pieces. Panelists on Thursday included composer Alex Rehding and science historians Jimena Canales and Myles Jackson.  While each of the discussions was informative and interesting, I think most would have preferred the traditional format: panel discussions and presentations pre-concert, with uninterrupted music. Murail’s Treize couleurs du soleil couchant, a landmark composition in the establishing of the spectralist aesthetic, shifts through thirteen coloristic musical frames. The only electronic manipulation used in the piece involves adjustments in the level of amplification and slight changes to the reverberant space of individual instruments. The resulting effect, however, is wildly more electronic sounding.  In particular, there is an enormous demand on the part of the flautist. Jessi Rosinski’s level of control and musicality was quite remarkable, and brought a heightened level of cohesion to the textures masterfully orchestrated by Murail.

Kaija Saariaho’s Lonh was the most recently composed piece on the program (1996). Saariaho, who is largely influenced by the music of spectralists Murail and Grisey, explores various timbres of the soprano voice in this piece.  Jane Sheldon’s potent, forceful voice was a perfect match for this piece.  The live electronic manipulation diffused haunting timbres around the room, shifting in and out of the dense texture of the voice. Whispers bounced around the speakers, while crystalline strands of Sheldon’s immaculately controlled upper register dissipated into impossibly transforming acoustical spaces. The narrative of the piece is beautifully handled, and the performance was convincing.

Grisey’s Prologue takes a solo viola on a long-winded linear journey from a fairly simple sequence of pitches towards noise (sub-tones and bow-screeching). The program notes describe the piece as a study in the timbral limits of a single instrument, though I found the actual timbral limits of this piece to be fairly limited. The repetitive, slowly varying nature of the piece allowed for little expressive use of the instrument’s acoustic and dynamic possibilities. Instead, the repetitive music integrates microtones (derived from the harmonic series), which elicited some interesting moments. While Nathaniel Farny gave an accurate and motivated performance of the very difficult and technically demanding music, the piece was quite one-dimensional, and at times rather dull.

The Heavenly Spheres are Illuminated By Lights by Japanese composer Somei Satoh featured some fine playing by percussionist Aaron Trant and pianist Cory Smythe and some more great singing by soprano Jane Sheldon. The piece was characterized by a number of truly beautiful textures and took a very different aesthetic approach from the other pieces on the program. The piece undoubtedly has, due to its minimalist influence and generally consonant set of sound environments, a much wider appeal. Unfortunately it was a rather short period of time before I got the impression the text was simply marinating in a set of lugubrious, euphoric textures. The music did little (if anything) interesting after the exposition of these sounds. The result was an unusually long twelve minutes.

Sargasso Arts, the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard, and Firebird Ensemble deserve commendation for taking contemporary music into a new and interesting venue.  While composers like Murail and Grisey have become iconic figures in many ways, their music remains rarely programmed and even more rarely performed well.  And despite being presented in an ultra-cerebral environment, much of the music was intriguing and beautiful.

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.

Pinchas Zukerman with levitating Marcelo Lehninger (Stu Rosner photo)

Newly appointed Assistant Conductor Marcelo Lehninger made his BSO debut in Symphony Hall on Thursday evening, October 21, at the opening concert of a series featuring works by Barber, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. The program featured soloist Pinchas Zukerman for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61. Considering the current circumstances of the Orchestra, audiences have a higher-than-usual investment in the ability of the new Assistant Conductors. And Lehninger’s debut was undoubtedly met with a meticulous eye. Across the entire program, audience response was overwhelmingly positive, and Lehninger’s conducting was assured and unfaltering.

Barber’s Overture to The School for Scandal opened the program with a sort of modest brilliance that can only be found in the music of Barber. While the non-overture is far from a masterpiece, knowing that it was indeed the composer’s first work for orchestra speaks volumes to Barbers genius. The woodwinds are given a prominent role, and the playing of oboist John Ferrillo and clarinetist William R. Hudgins was particularly noteworthy. Lehninger brought out the quirky moments of the piece with charm, and navigated the swift tempo changes and juxtaposed moods with ease. The piece is a short one, and lead into the much more well-known masterpiece, Beethoveen’s Violin Concerto in D.

Despite having the stage-presence of a rock, Violinist Pinchas Zukerman is a virtuoso with a magnitude of musical sensitivity. The opening movement had some brief awkward moments, but the virtuosity displayed in the first cadenza left nothing to be wanted. The sheer power that Zukerman is able to produce in an otherwise silent hall is beyond me, and, I presume, beyond most violinists. But his real strongpoint is his lyricism, and for this, the Larghetto contained the most effective moments of the concerto. The Rondo was performed masterfully as well, opening up more acrobatic dialogues between the soloist and the orchestra. The dynamic conclusion of the violin concerto was greeted with a standing ovation.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 is a visceral and powerfully dynamic beast that gives any orchestra the chance to show its muscle, and is programmed often because of this. That the orchestra is able to create such an immaculately cohesive wall of sound is enough to remind even the patrons in the furthest rear corner why they bought their tickets. Lehninger showed particular care for the details – particularly in the shapely swells that gracefully close off melodic lines in the Andante cantabile. While the Valse left something to be desired in terms of the longer line and was not quite as elegant as it could have been, adrenaline was poured from every inch of the stage into the Finale.

Of course, both the Tchaikovsky and the Beethoven have a fairly ingrained performance tradition, due to their popularity. These aren’t the kind of pieces that demand a conductor re-invent the interpretive wheel. I would even argue that the best display of Lehninger’s chops was during Barber’s Overture, which is by far the least exemplary piece on the concert. Regardless, Lehninger’s work on each of the three pieces was well beyond impressive, and the audience gave him due credit. Followers of the BSO are unquestionably keeping a close and critical eye on its new conductors, and the official verdict is far from out on the newcomer. Nonetheless, it’s both comforting and exciting to see a promising new generation step up to the plate.

Lehninger, Zukerman, and the Boston Symphony repeat this program on Friday at 1:30 pm, and on Saturday and Tuesday at 8 pm.

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 first few pieces on the program, representative of the very earliest forms that could be considered madrigals (and generally preceding the use of the term), gave an interesting impression of the genesis of the style. Works by Costanzo Festa, Philippe Verdelot, Cipriano de Rore, and Jaques Arcadelt each had their own unique idiosyncrasies that were strongly suggestive of their roots in the frottola and chanson. Festa’s madrigal showcased the three lower voices of the group, Paul Guttry, Jason McStoots, and Owen McIntosh, who performed the piece valiantly. Countertenor Martin Near’s potent, penetrating voice richly illuminated the melancholy tone of Verdelot’s “Con lagrime.” The opening canon between Near and Owen McIntosh in Arcadelt’s “Solo e pensoso” transpired with enchanting elegance, and a delightfully surprising moment of unison later in the piece was delivered with a sense of energetic character that really injected it with a sense of life. Most of the really gratifying moments appeared in the first four madrigals. Throughout the program the musicians displayed an uncanny ability to translate what was happening musically in to a subtle form of body language; they were really communicating with each other in an intimate way that can only be seen with really small, really skilled choirs.

The Palestrina madrigals were the first pieces in which the full quintet sang.                   Perhaps it is because Palestrina’s secular music still sounds like Palestrina, and it tends to not sound secular, that the well-crafted sense of control and consistency we get from the sacred masses permeates through these works as well. Text setting is handled with an eloquence that is unrivaled by his contemporaries, or composers from any period for that matter, but there’s much less of a sense of compositional adventure that we find in Palestrina’s predecessors. Nonetheless, it was refreshing to hear some of the less-heard pieces from the composer, pieces that elicit less internal debate on Counter-Reformational dogma. It’s clear that the lighter context of the texts used in the early madrigals had at least some effect to loosen Palestrina’s typical rigidity.

It was in the Palestrina madrigals that we really got to enjoy the texture of the full core ensemble. Despite being only five singers, they created a lush texture, with the resonance of bass-baritone Paul Guttry filling out the bottom and Ms. Canavin and Mr. Near accommodating each other’s contrasting tones in moments where they share the same register, interweaving even the most contrapuntal moments with pristine clarity. The performances of the later madrigals, which addressed more religious themes, were done nicely as well, if slightly underwhelming in comparison to some of the other madrigals on the program. Marenzio’s “Non fu mai cervo sì veloce al corso,” near the end of the program, is a rigorous test of endurance for even the most experienced early-music group. The piece, though uncommonly long by madrigal standards, has not a single dull moment. The ensemble navigated through the vocal acrobatics with resolution, and only a faint loss of perseverance was noted near the end of the performance. The final Palestrina number also was performed with a slight sense of exhaustion, but took nothing away from an otherwise excellent evening. Although this was my first concert experience with this group (despite seeing its some of its members often with Blue Heron and some contemporary music ensembles), it seems evident that Exsultemus is unquestionably in the top-tier of Renaissance vocal ensembles in the Northeast.

Exsultemus’s next performance is entitled “A Portuguese Christmas” and is set for December 17th at First Lutheran Church of Boston, showcasing the seldom-performed music from the Iberian Peninsula.

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.

Each of the four pieces was played in succession without pause.  Instrumentalist changes were seamlessly executed during the overlap between pieces. And between the murmur of people downstairs and in other parts of the in the museum, the general atmosphere of the Gardner’s tapestry room, and the relaxed approach to the selected music, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of nostalgia for the Downtown scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s (if it is possible to feel nostalgia for a scene that existed decades before I was born).  John Luther Adams’s Songbirdsongs meditated on lush, quiet drones and various birdcalls mimicked by various instruments.  Even with the compromises imposed this particularly quiet piece by the noise of the venue, the performance of the piece summoned an ethereal beauty, eliciting a setting of nature that only very few composers can persuasively and authentically produce.

The performance morphed into Lou Harrison’s early Suite for cello and harp, as haunting textured and birdcalls were replaced by soft, pulsing modalities and repetitive cello lines. The Suite is hardly representative of what we generally expect to hear from one of Harrison’s pieces: it uses neither alternative tuning systems nor traditional Javanese instruments. The simplicity and objectivity of the piece was immaculately captured by harpist Franzisca Huhn and cellist Benjamin Schwartz, as the cyclic piece contained itself within bookends of the poetic Chorale.

As the piece came to a close, instrumentalists from within the aisles stood, and all I could think was, Oh no, not another contrived adaptation of a piece with musicians standing around the audience. Despite what at first seemed a gimmick, the quintessence of James Tenney’s Swell Piece fit perfectly with the performance approach.  The piece is notated only as directions to the performers to play any pitches they choose in slow swells.  The surreal effect the surrounding performers had on this concept was nothing short of enrapturing, but the piece seemed to be over before it began.

Closing with the longest performance of the evening (though not nearly as long as many renditions) was the most compelling performance of Terry Riley’s In C I have yet to hear (including some widely circulated recordings by Bang on a Can and a number of other performances I’ve played in myself).  The pacing of In C is the key, and it is what differentiates true, convincing performances from underwhelming, indiscriminate ‘jam sessions’ on the piece.  Subtleties –such as how Philipp Stäudlin emerged and submerged the bright tone of the soprano sax into the texture, and how violinist Ethan Wood chose the absolute perfect time to highlight the harmonic motion of the piece (yes, there is indeed harmonic motion in In C) with an appropriate change from viola to mandolin–are what made this performance shine.

It is true that many ensembles in town will veer away from this music because it is not representative of New England’s general musical climate, or that the music is “too easy”.  But this, I think, is a clear example of what happens to conceptually simple music when a serious performance rigor is applied: powerful music that is appealing, convincing, and (despite its extremism in musical economy) consistently absorbing.

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.

BMInt’s own Rebecca Marchand addressed this very issue in her eloquent and informative pre-concert lecture “Isn’t it Romantic?. . . Or is it?” that quelled any raised eyebrows that may potentially have been brought on by the 50-percent 20th-century series’ tagline, The Romantic Spirit.  A certain likeness in imagination and gesture, however, did become clear throughout the evening, and it was refreshing to hear both Schumann and Barber in a different context than their usual settings. The program began with Schumann’s Fantasiestücke Op.73, originally for cello and piano, performed brilliantly by clarinetist Michael Wayne and pianist Hugh Hinton.  Wayne’s lyricism in the “Zart und mit Ausdruck” was darkly arresting, and the “Rasch und mit Feuer” danced with animated virtuosity.

Baritone Kyle Siddons, accompanied by pianist Mark McNeill, performed Barber’s Three Songs based on James Joyce texts; Siddons sung “I Hear an Army” with the power and booming resonance necessary to deliver the text convincingly. Pianists Eda Shlyam and Ludmilla Lifson followed with Schumann’s Andante und Variationen, Op. 46. The piece was originally written for two pianos, two cellos, and horn but is more often performed in its piano-duet version. The abilities of Lifson and Shlyam really shone through in some of the fast-paced and mind-bogglingly difficult later variations, but the true apex of the piece, perhaps even the entire evening, was the delicate, elegiac coda after the following final statement of the theme.

Barber’s Cello Sonata is undoubtedly one of his most celebrated and performed works for small ensemble. It is also one that seems most reminiscent of late Romanticism, despite its somewhat mundane conformityto Classical-era forms. Mihail Jojatu’s immense talent was indisputable in his performance, though it seemed that his full-fledged, relentless intensity, despite being poignantly informed by the piece’s stylistic roots, robbed the piece of its more fragile moments and set the dynamic of the work into a shallower relief than I would have liked.

Dimitri Murrath concluded the evening with Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 2 in D minor, Op. 121, performed on viola.  The Lento, con Energia is likely twice as impressive on viola as it is on violin, though there were unquestionable compromises when the viola was forced into an uncomfortable upper register. Throughout the performance, though, Murrath handled these compromises well, and at some of the more of delicate moments of the piece, such as the Simplice and parts of the following variation movement, the distinct color of the viola seemed even more appropriate than violin. Unfortunately, the finale began to lose steam and the pianist and violist seemed to loose their sense of solidarity. The final moments of the concert were regrettably plagued by a number of cringes, as there was no doubt that the performance quality faltered towards the end of the program. Nonetheless, with such attractive programming and consummate musicians on board, it is no wonder the concert events for the rest of Longy’s SeptemberFest are already completely sold out.

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.

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.

The Elizabethan Songs that opened the evening highlighted soprano Ilana Davidson and mezzo Janna Baty. The pieces were delightfully complementary, presenting the music of Purcell, Dowland, and John Coperario as a single cycle. Dan Lippel provided the lute part on guitar, which worked exceptionally well for the Dowland songs. Davidson and Baty each performed with exceptional individuality. This was to the advantage of the pieces in which they sang alone; the Dowland and Purcell songs were interpreted with a distinctive vibrancy, which made the pieces far more engaging than most performances in this idiom.  However, the opening and closing Coperario duets, seemed to suffer at this approach, missing the characteristic symbiotic blend that is so crucial to Early vocal music.

Roberto Sierra’s Triprico for guitar and string quartet achieves the difficult balance between accessibility and craft.  The piece is as inventive as it is engaging – and as virtuosic as it is inventive. The contrast of lingering, elastic string textures and crunching, driving rhythms reminiscent of Ginasterra was executed with excellence. Guitarist Dan Lippel was simply brilliant, knowing exactly when to thrust above the sting quartet and when to melt into its textures. The energy was palpable from the beginning, emanating from cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer throughout the ensemble, until the final exclamatory cliffhanger of an ending.

Ilana Davidson returned with flutist and artistic director Laura Gilbert to perform Deux poémes du Ronsard. The two short pieces by Albert Roussel, Rossignol, mon mignon, and Ciel, aer et vens are genuine pearls of the second-generation French Impressionists. The voice and flute resonated together with an organic and captivating sense of chemistry.  Davidson’s expressiveness and charisma during the two short pieces was nothing short of highly contagious.

The concert closed with an top-notch performance of Johannes Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet in B minor. Representative of Brahms’s later compositions, the piece has been esteemed as his highest achievement in chamber music. Clarinetist Steven Jackson led the ensemble with comfort and sensitivity throughout the work’s 35 minutes.  The ensemble did the masterpiece justice, underlining their ability to perform with diligence and authenticity, in addition to the musical amiability that was so abundant throughout 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.