Written in 1941, Paul Bunyan is Britten’s first work of music-theater and, in many ways, his most unusual. The librettist, poet W. H. Auden, took a brilliantly balanced fable-as-metaphor approach to the work, enriching the story with a little irony and a lot of social commentary. Still, it is a less weighty and more narratively direct libretto than any Britten would set thereafter. It is also the only one that is structured and delivered like an operetta (which is what composer and author properly called it), that is, an accessible “numbers” piece, comic, with spoken dialog. The work also represents Britten’s one true attempt at capturing the musical essence of “Americana,” complete with pseudo hoe-downs and guitar-and-fiddle ballad narration. Nonetheless, there is plenty in the work that is signature Britten: colorful and evocative instrumentation, tertiary harmonies with ever-shifting modalities, novel voice-type casting, intricately accessible choral writing, and simple yet potent melodies and rhythms.

The challenge for performers is to maneuver the course between the directness of light opera and the multi-layered richness of more serious fare that Britten and Auden lay out so beautifully. By and large, the NEC performers met that challenge with success. The young singer-actors were clearly all very comfortable with the parts and threw themselves into their roles with gusto. All had fine voices and solid technique, most notably the free and easy tenor of Davis Charles Tay as soup-chef Sam Sharkey; the bold, sonorous baritone of Leroy Davis both as one of the happy Swedes and one of the Sad Defeated; the gorgeously clear and colorful tenor of Michael Kuhn as the (more or less) romantic lead Biscuit Slim; and the startlingly powerful and rich counter-tenor of Tai Oney as Number 2 of the Goose-Trio. However, one of the largest steps into mastery that young singers need to take is the one from being a singer who is acting a character to a singer who can actually be the character. The one performer who stood head and shoulders (both literally and figuratively) above the others in this regard was bass-baritone Daniel Brevik as Hel Helson. Of all the characters in the work, Helson has the longest developmental trajectory; yet he spends most of it either standing and watching or sitting and brooding, both in silence. When he does sing, it is generally short, powerful phrases full of simple and forceful emotion. Brevik did a wonderful job of standing, sitting, being silent, and especially singing, all with the acting skills of someone who truly inhabits his character, as well as a magnificently ringing voice. It would not be surprising if, a decade or so from now, this artist appears on stages as a painfully tragic Wotan or a woefully lecherous Ochs von Lerchenau.

As to Paul Bunyan himself, as an even larger than larger-than-life hero, he could never be convincingly portrayed on stage. One of Britten and Auden’s strokes of dramatic genius was solving this problem by writing him as a disembodied spoken voice. In this production, that role fell to James Maddalena, and as one of the finest professional singers of 20^th-century literature, his voice is naturally strong and clear. However, Bunyan is a North American, rural folk-hero whose vocal quality should be more mountain story-teller than stage narrator. It seemed a lost opportunity not to cast someone with a grittier, more home-spun speaking style, especially since the part was amplified so that projection would not have been an issue. Nonetheless, Maddalena’s delivery had the firm presence that is required by the character.

James Robinson’s stage design was appropriately minimalist, with evocative lighting, colorful, no-nonsense costumes, simple props, and a couple of trees whose exaggerated construction gave them the look of visual stand-ins for the title character. The ceiling was somewhat confusing; perhaps intended to represent a multi-colored outdoor sky, it looked more like early-‘70s bathroom tile. On the other hand, the choice of using simple masks on sticks held by the singers to suggest characters such as trees and animals added much to the authentic rural, tale-spinning atmosphere to the production.

The performance was led by conductor Stephen Lord, who struck a near-perfect balance between depth and light-heartedness and held cast and orchestra together with skill and fine musicality. Only on occasion did the tempi seem a bit too hurried for both diction and the easy back-porch flavor of the work. Overall, though, cast and crew produced a very convincing and entertaining performance if this rare and happy work.

Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan.

Baritone Steven Condy as Dr. Bartolo and Baritone Jonathan Beyer as Figaro (Eric Antoniou photo)

On Sunday, March 11, in the Shubert Theater, Boston Lyric Opera presented its second of five performances this week of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville). The near-capacity audience was treated to a captivatingly clever production that reminded everyone just why this work is so deservingly popular. Upcoming performances are March 14, 16, and 18.

In 1822, during what must be one of the most famous and oft-told historical meetings between two musical giants, the 52 year-old Ludwig van Beethoven remarked to the 30-year-old Rossini that he should write exclusively opera buffa, since anything else would “do violence to your nature.” This came from an ailing master who, no doubt, knew he could write circles around the whelp when it came to large-scale harmonic and structural drama; but he also probably knew that the younger composer had a stronger sense of theatrical and comedic timing than the old man ever did. It’s even possible that the ghost of Mozart was floating somewhere in the corner of his inner ear: Beethoven must have seen that both the decades-dead Austrian genius and the Italian pop star standing in front of him had the rare ability never to make the music more complicated than it needed to be.

The work that prompted this comment from the Master was Il barbiere, one of the most popular works in the comic opera repertoire, still performed a dozen or so times a year throughout operadom. And why not? Keen dramatic timing and appropriately simple music, what could be easier? Well, that’s where the performers come in. If they do their job right, it does indeed look and sound easy, and all the honed skill, mastery of technique, and immense musicality behind an effective performance belie the fact that this work is actually very difficult to pull off successfully.

The BLO’s performance was successful to say the least. All the singers flew through Rossini’s vocal acrobatics with ease, delivered the recitatives in a smoothly conversational manner, and made the most of the buffa without slipping into buffoonery. There were also some unexpected takes on the characters themselves. Baritone Jonathan Beyer’s Figaro was a man who took almost boyish glee in his manipulations, while John Tessier’s Almaviva was like a rich jockey who just really, really wants the girl. Both of them played their characters’ friendship as one between two well-meaning glee-club boys who have fantastic singing voices and aren’t afraid to use them for fun and profit. The color of soprano Sarah Coburn’s rich, facile voice gave her Rosina an air that was a bit too mature for the character, but she made up for it with a charmingly girlish coquettishness that didn’t entirely mask the street smarts of a real woman. Judith Christin’s Berta was hilarious as well as impressively sung, and David Cushing, working through a respiratory ailment, still managed to deliver a convincing Basilio as a dark-hued musical moron.

The most delightfully surprising and truly brilliant performance, however, came from baritone Steven Condy as Don Bartolo. This character is often played either as a doddering fool or just a mean old guy, resulting in a mono-dimensional secondo role. Condy’s approach, however, was musico-comedic genius. It was as if Walter Barry were singing Peter Boyle playing the Godfather. The agility of his voice, not only in negotiating the vocal roller-coasters, but also in creating comically nuanced coloring, combined with his clumsily agile physicality and an edgy-but-not-threatening delivery of the role as a whole, stole the show. Based on his performance, the opera might well be re-titled Don Bartolo.

Stage Director Doug Verone and his team created a set that was a perfect visual parallel to the music: mostly painted fore-and backdrops, simple yet colorful, with strong shades of reds, whites, and golds, and occasional spurts of mismatched oranges, browns, and teal-ish greens. The costumes echoed the overall color-schemes, as did the minimal props. These all came together to evoke a lively period feel while refreshingly avoiding the Met-style gaudiness that this opera often lands in. And in keeping with the composer’s perfect timing, the set changes happened quickly, smoothly, and unobtrusively, never disturbing the flow of the performance.

Most of that flow was directed by conductor David Angus. His approach to the tempi and the orchestral colors was snappy, with lots of bite. It tended to stomp on the Italianate lilt that occasionally creeps into the score, and sometimes resulted in speeds that hampered the drama: the humor in the Act II ensemble get-Basilio-out-of-the-room scene really only works if the music is agonizingly slow. Overall, however, Angus and fortepianist Allen Perriello supported the singers sensitively and solidly, spurring the wit and energy that marked the entire wonderful performance.

Act One of Boston Lyric Opera’s The Barber of Seville (Eric Antoniu photo)

Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan.

The bulk of the program consisted of three out of four of the song cycles that together form The Seasons, a cantata in which Bell sets poems of New England poet Elizabeth Kirschner.   Kirschner’s poetry is dense, laden with almost overwhelming sensuality, much of which involves evocative musical images.  Though they seem like natural choices for a composer to want to set to music, the poems let loose such cascades of text that Bell’s music sometimes got lost among all the words.   For the most part, though, he was able to craft sounds that suited the text, surrounding the vivid poetic swirls with a rich textural palate reminiscent of the English Pastoral tradition.  His choice of instruments and the way he wrote for them reflected skilled experience.  He was able to turn each one into perfect sonic reflections of the seasons they represented:  orange-and-red hued harp for Autumn; windy, icy piano for Winter; jaunty, bird-ish harpsichord for Spring.

The emotional contours of the songs tended to be broad, that of distant, rolling hills.  There were, however, a few truly moving moments, such as the end of “Exiled Deities” in which the tenor floats hauntingly high over the “church we call the world,” or the joyous “glory of clouds” that the baritone rings out in “In a Garden of Dreamers.”  The singers themselves were clearly dedicated to the material, and if Thomas Gregg’s easy, natural tenor voice sometimes lost its pitch center, or Bethany Tammaro Condon’s expressive mezzo-soprano occasionally suffered from muddled diction, it did not detract from the obvious pleasure these artists took in delivering the music.

The concert also featured two short instrumental works that reflected Bell’s apparent love of 18th-century music.  Both the Serenade No. 2 for recorder, cello, and harpsichord, and the Partita No. 1 for solo harpsichord demonstrated a charming take on Neo-Baroqueism.   It was as if the players had discovered unknown scores from 300 years ago, did not quite know how to read them, but gave it a go anyway, filling in the gaps with their own, 21st-century musical personality and wit.  These works were wholly enjoyable gems that made for welcome diversions from the loftier nature of the songs.

On a personal note, as a composer nearly two decades his junior, I was glad to hear Bell’s music for the first time in the context of celebrating an inspirational career.  I wish him even greater success in the next 60 years.

Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan.

Foreground: Julie Boulianne as Beatrice and Sean Panikkar as Benedict in dress rehearsal (Clive Grainge photo)

On October 21^st, at the Cutler Majestic Theater, Opera Boston gave its first performance of Hector Berlioz’s last work, Béatrice et Bénédict, an opera comedy adapted from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.  It was performed with the music sung in French and the dialogue spoken in English, an effective approach that, strange though it may sound to some modern listeners, is fully in keeping with the traditions of comic opera. The production was directed by David Kneuss with Robert Perdziola serving as the scenic and costume designer.

By the time Béatrice et Bénédict was premiered in 1863, the French had formalized the opera comique into an odd species of music-theater.  Ensconced between the high spectacle-drama of grand opera and the toe-tapping satire of opéra bouffe, it often resulted in works that were too light-hearted to be serious, yet too polite to really be comic (i.e., works that can best be described as charming).  This work certainly falls into that category:  The story is simple, the music unassuming, and neither the characters nor the dialogue is particularly complex.

The advantage to such a work is that it gives the performers a broad, beige canvas to color with their own specific skills.  Opera Boston is nothing if not a troupe of highly skilled artists, though in this case they applied their abilities to varying degrees of success.   In the title roles were tenor Sean Panikkar and mezzo-soprano Julie Boulianne.  Panikkar’s bright, easy voice had little trouble with Bénédict’s sung material, while his speech and general mannerisms were characteristic of modern, teenage, television comedies—entertaining, though somewhat  disconnected from the pseudo-Shakespearian English of the translated dialogue.   Boulianne’s rich, clear voice and confident stage presence were perfectly suited to the witty and sarcastic Béatrice of Act I, but did not deliver so convincingly as the lovelorn, tongue-tied Béatrice of Act II. In all fairness to Boulianne, though, while it is easy to believe that a young male could have his switch flipped from snarky youth to hormonally charged lover in an instant, it is not so much the case with a young woman; so a plausible transformation is harder to pull off.

Heather Buck as Hero with Kelly O’Connor as Ursule (Clive Grainger photo)

The other couple in the story are Hero, the cousin of Béatrice, and Claudio, her betrothed.  Baritone David McFerrin did the best he could as Claudio, a character that, even in this dramatically simple context, is rather a non-entity, at least as far as the singing goes.  In fact, Hero spends so much more stage time with her maid Ursule, that one might suspect her husband-to-be is just a beard.  In this particular production, though, that was an advantage.  Hero was played by soprano Heather Buck, whose voice is too mature for that of a young maiden; and she couldn’t quite act the part either.  However, when paired with the delicious, sonic caramel of contralto Kelly O’Connor as Ursule, the result was magnificent.  Their duet at the end of Act I—a gorgeously dreamy, slightly gloomy, and wondrously wistful nocturne—was the highlight of the evening.

In the supporting cast, Robert Honeysucker’s warm, powerful bass, combined with his comfortable stage-presence, lent an air of grandfatherly affection to the role of Don Pedro; Phil Tompson’s Leonato—a purely spoken part—was an appropriately refined family man; and baritone Andrew Funk threw himself

Stage design and costuming by Robert Perdziola (Clive Grainger photo)

into the role of the pompously incompetent music master Somarone with flair and gusto.  The most impressive support, however, came from the chorus, a group of men and women who sang beautifully—or not, when called for—while engaging in delightful little comic gestures that, over the course of the opera, gave each character in the ensemble a recognizable and enjoyable personality.

The cast and orchestra were led by Opera Boston’s Music Director Gil Rose.  As always, his technique was superb, resulting in clean instrumental performances and solid overall cohesion.  A work like this, however, needs a bit more daring for it fully to come to life: more color in the overture, more mist in the Nocturne, and more sparkle and energy in the runs and off-beat pulses of the aria accompaniments.  Rose’s approach, while sound, resulted in many missed opportunities that could have given the opera a wider variety of hues.

The staging was simple in the best sense of the word, with some refreshingly low-tech effects, such as a twilight lakefront backdrop and multi-colored paper lanterns lowered from the fly loft creating a lovely atmosphere.  The Majestic’s stage is small, so when everyone was on it, no one could move much.  However, it would have been nice to have the characters use the space more when they were the only ones up there.

Overall, the performance was a modest success.  One came away neither disappointed nor excited, but rather with the easy satisfaction of someone who has enjoyed an herbal tea with honey and is now ready either for a more substantial drink or a peaceful night’s sleep.

Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan

The program opened with a violin sonata featuring Susanna Ogata as soloist. Ogata, who could easily be the stylistic love-child of Andrew Manze and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, played the piece with sensitivity and a fire that belied the relatively timid sound of her instrument. Her musicality was echoed by harpsichordist and Newton Baroque director Andrus Madsen and cellist Sarah Freiberg, who nearly shredded her instrument with excitement during the work’s riveting final Allegro. Throughout the program, Madsen (or, in one work, guest artist David Schulenberg) worked with either Freiberg or, for the two cantatas of milder nature, the slightly mellower gamba player Angus Lansing. Their continuo provided bounce and bite where needed, without degenerating into the percussive clangor that many other period instrument ensembles seem to favor. Moreover, it not only supplied a solid foundation, but was also an equally expressive musical partner to the soloists.

Soprano Shannon Canavin’s full-bodied yet floaty voice brought gentle expression to Deines neuen Bundes Gnade.  Her tendency to gloss over some of the more forceful German consonants, combined with the fact that her line was often doubled at the unison by flautist Mary Oleskiewicz, created an almost glowing sonority that, while not always appropriate for the text, was attractive nonetheless. In contrast, mezzo-soprano Mary Gerbi let the words guide her tone colors in Schau nach Sodom nicht zurücke. Her earthy tone and crisp diction, along with Ogata’s dynamic violin, brought a spark and an energetic directness to the piece. In Die stärkende Wirkung des Geistes, Shiba Nemat-Nasser did an impressive job of containing her powerful mezzo-soprano voice while still singing with richness and clarity. This particular cantata features one of Telemann’s more inspired expressive devices: at certain key points in the text, the continuo drops out, resulting in a powerfully sparse texture of vocalist and instrumentalist alone. Unfortunately, this proved to be a bit troublesome for Nemat-Nasser and violinist Scott Metcalfe, whose slightly choppy phrasing compounded the slight skittishness with which the performers negotiated these sections.

The only vocalist who sang more than one work was tenor Jason McStoots. Though he had more difficulty than the others with the German pronunciation, it did not stop him from delivering engaging and sensitively nuanced performances. In Trifft menschlich und voll Fehler, he teamed up with recorder player Sarah Cantor, who danced the music as much as played it with such joy and sprightly ease that one wished she had been given more to do than just the one piece. Though McStoots’s ringing, head-voicey tone overpowered Cantor in the first aria of this cantata, he softened his sound so tenderly for the second aria (Gleich dem Balsam sind die Lehren) that, along with Cantor’s achingly delicate playing, the performance made for the warmest, loveliest moment of the entire evening. And if Metcalfe’s violin playing was problematic in the previous cantata, his bright tone and bold musicality were perfect for the final cantata on the program, Packe dich, gelähmter Drache. He, along with McStoots’s narrative prowess and the frenetic energy of Madsen and Freiberg’s hellfire continuo, ended the evening with as mighty a dragonish roar as such a small group of fine musicians can.

Four programs remain in the Telemann Harmonischer Gottesdienst, series for this year. “Control F” search “Gottesdienst” in BMInt’s “Upcoming Events” for details.

 Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan

The lecture-recital is a tricky format, mainly because it often ends up more lecture than recital. The music becomes the sonic equivalent of illustrations in an academic paper rather than the structural and emotional focus of the event. When your lecturer is as knowledgeable and passionate about the topic as Klingenstein, it is almost inevitable that a large part of the performance ends up being someone talking about the music; and talk she did. She offered a term paper’s worth of historical, biographical, analytical (sometimes over-analytical), and interpretive information on the texts and music, as well as the artists who originally wrote and performed them. At the end of the program, she even sang a couple of the songs (along with the pianist), a sign that she truly engaged every level that these works inhabit. Yet, all that talk was at times overbearing, upstaging the simple, powerfully direct impact of the songs themselves.

These pieces, however, had survived a ghetto and a Nazi death camp, so an over-enthusiastic academic presented little hindrance.  They were brought to life by pianist Eugenia Gerstein and mezzo-soprano Sophie Michaux, both fine musicians who performed the songs with grace and skill. Michaux’s voice is a luscious shade of burgundy, velvety and ever so slightly smoky. Her Yiddish diction was clear, almost speech-like, as if she were telling stories rather than singing songs, an effective technique for the Goethe Institute’s intimate concert venue. However, her interpretations were rarely more than narrative, and she missed opportunities to delve into the deep emotional layers that many of the songs offered. Similarly, Gerstein’s accompanying style seemed more supportive than collaborative, and her somewhat monochromatic tone dulled much of what was evocative in the piano parts, especially in the more harmonically and texturally rich arrangements by Henech Kon.

Nonetheless, the beauty and strength of the songs shone through. They are stylistic offspring of Jewish folk and European cabaret, with hues of klezmer and hints of operetta, all radiating the subtly overt poignancy of a people whose cultural experience has forced them over the centuries to smile through tears. Among them were wrenching stories borne of the Holocaust (Es iz geven a zumer-tog, Shtiler, shtiler); rousingly defiant and hopeful anthems (Es shlogt di sho, Mir lebn eybik), and a couple of true gems (Friling, Es dremlen feygl oyf di tsvaygn) that could easily hold their ground in the art song repertoire. As with so many who perished or barely survived that terrible time, the composers and lyricists of these songs—people like Shmerke Kaczerginski, Avrum Brudno, and Kasriel Broydo—are artists whose names nearly disappeared with them. Thankfully, there are scholars and performers today, like Klingenstein, Gerstein, and Michaux, who keep these rarely performed pieces alive. They are works that must be revisited and remembered if for no other reason than their creators represent what the best of human spirit can accomplish against the worst of human barbarism.

Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan.

For over three decades, the Tallis Scholars has explored the vast world of Renaissance and Medieval vocal music, reinterpreting the works of well known composers and shining light on that of lesser or unknown composers.  The ensemble’s signature approach is simply—and nearly perfectly— to sing the words and the notes, honing a crystalline sound, but allowing the design of the works themselves to be the main device of musical expression. There is a lot to be said for that approach; the works they perform contain compelling melodies, and usually involve highly complex, varied polyphony and contrapuntal sophistication.

These musical characteristics reach stellar heights in the works of Victoria.  While some of his contemporaries wrote pieces that could sound staid and cold—the sonic equivalent of luminous yet motionless stained-glass painting—he used the various compositional techniques of the time to create subtly sublime emotionality and discreetly passionate acts of word-painting.  These expressive devices are built in to the music so integrally that the Tallis Scholars’ method of just giving them beautiful voice is often all that is needed to bring them out.  Victoria’s stunning five-voice Dum complerentur is filled with soaring lines and powerful blasts of homophony that paint the mood of the text with broad strokes, and the ensemble did a brilliant job of staying out of the way of the music, allowing it to sing for itself.  Similarly, the sorrowfully austere textures and keening long tones that inhabit Victoria’s Lamentations for Holy Friday, the first three of which were performed on this program, needed no extra push to communicate the sadness in the words.

There were many times, however, where the music cried out for a stronger interpretive voice. In his Missa O magnum mysterium, Victoria sets the words “et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis” using quick, bright gestures. This is a compositional choice that communicates a distinctly personal take on these words; rather than setting them slowly and prayer-like, as so many other composers did, Victoria is cheerfully shouting to the listener how wonderful such peace in Earth would actually be. It is a moment that can allow musicians to channel raw happiness, but only if they let themselves truly emote, something the Scholars do not typically do.  In general, the joy in words and phrases like “hosanna” and “et resurrexit” or in the “alleluia” at the end of the motet O magnum mysterium could have been communicated much more effectively through crisper diction and more energetic expression.

The most effective and, in a way, most telling part of the evening was the performance of Victoria’s Salve Regina at the end of the first half of the program.  For this antiphonal work the ensemble divided itself into a four-part SSAB quartet and a six-part SATB ensemble.  The one-on-a-part quartet delivered the most character and intensity of the whole evening, largely because the interpretive personality of each singer was allowed to shine. In contrast, the six-part choir, with the soprano and occasionally the tenor doubled, produced a more homogenous, less immediate sound that is more in keeping with the Scholars’ overall aesthetic.  The contrast itself was not only illuminating but also very satisfying in that it brought both musical variety and structural clarity to the work.

In true Tallis Scholars tradition, the program ended with two works by a far lesser-known contemporary of Victoria, Sebastián de Vivanco, another Spanish composer.  Although his Sicut lilium and his Magnificat Octavi Toni do not have nearly the expressive variety of Victoria’s music, they do contain enticing rhythms and craggier vocal lines that express the composer’s musical ideas in an engagingly direct way. As expected, the Tallis Scholars did a beautiful job of communicating those ideas with focus and skill of the highest order.

Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan.

Perhaps not so oddly, however. The Spaniard in question is Tomas Luis Victoria, the latest of the composers on the program. It was his motet O lux et decus (“O light and splendor”) that opened the concert and set the tone for the whole evening. The Cantorum performed this work at a fairly quick pace, emphasizing its energy and brightness. It also established the less-than-typical musical character and interpretative approach of the group itself: rather than attempting to bring careful clarity to each melodic line, as so many similar ensembles do, they instead illuminated Victoria’s complex polyphonic texture as a single, shining sonic entity, capturing the spirit rather than the construction of the piece.

This handling of polyphony served the singers well in those rich, fully-voiced sections that are found in nearly all the pieces they offered. It resulted in an appropriately poignant and expressive performance of the other work by Victoria on the program, his aching Vere languores nostros (“Truly he has born our grief”), though here the pacing was a bit too brisk to truly capture the long, keening vocal lines that give the work its real power. It also brought to the fore the ethereal beauty of Josquin des Pres’ occasional and luminous homo-rhythmic textures. It is an expressive device favored by this composer, one that the Cantorum delivered with rare richness in his Inviolata that opened the second half of the program (preceded by a surprisingly touching rendition of the chant by the same name that serves as the cantus firmus).

The only points in the program that seemed to give the group some trouble were those in which the musical textures were thinner. The earlier Franco-Flemish composers, the music of previous generations still in their ears, wrote works inhabited by more exposed vocal lines and hollow, third-less cadences. The stolidity of these sounds proved to be a bit of challenge to the group, so that the dark, Burgundian sonorities of Loyset Compare’s Ave Maria came off as somewhat dull, especially since it was sandwiched between the two more colorful works by Victoria.

Overall however, the Lowland composers were done more than justice. Despite the curious choice of splitting up the parts of Dufay’s mass, placing the “Kyrie” and “Gloria” at the end of the first half and the “Sanctus” and “Agnus dei” at the end of the second, the Cantorum performed the work with satisfying musicality. Their interpretation of the “Gloria” was particularly enlightening: with clear, crisp diction and a bouncy tempo, they found a joy in the music that many overlook. The multi-text motet Ut te per omnes/Ingens alumnus Padue (“Enlighten our unclean spirits/The famous offspring of Padua”) by Johanes Ciconia, the earliest composer on the program, was given a fleet tempo and startlingly pointed articulation that brought out a surprising rhythmic texture; for lack of a better word, it was the grooviest Ciconia one is likely to hear. Similarly, their approach to Orlando de Lasso’s four-section Missus est Angelus Gabriel demonstrated a keen interpretive insight. The text of the work is essentially a narrative describing in detail the events of the Annunciation. Directness of musical narration seems antithetical to and almost incompatible with the involved and often obfuscating polyphony of the time. But Orlando was a masterful enough composer to build the immediacy of storytelling into the complexity of the work; and, much to the delight of the small but very appreciative audience in the church that evening, the Schola Cantorum is a good enough group to have found it.

Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan.

Cardillac is a troublesome work. It was written in Germany in the 1920s, and the libretto by Ferdinand Lion, based on a novel by E.T.A. Hoffmann, reflects to an extreme degree the angst-ridden explosion of cultural freedom and dark exploration that permeated that time and place. The story is about a goldsmith, Cardillac, who creates such grizzly beautiful works (perhaps aided by the Devil) that he cannot part with them. Whenever someone buys a piece, Cardillac murders the buyer to get it back. Throughout the opera, he lies, obsesses, kills, mentally abuses his daughter, allows the brutal torture of his dealer—and is hailed as a beloved hero in the end (after an angry mob beats him to death) because he finally admits to his crimes. It is a story told in short, uncomfortable episodes that always seem to lead to even worse and more confusing places than one expects, with an ending that is part Weimar hedonism, part small-town evangelicalism, and that really doesn’t make any sense at all.

Yet the story isn’t the problem. Despite how one may feel about the structure and the moral (or lack thereof) of the tale, it is a richly kaleidoscopic trip through anxieties, loves, hatreds, betrayals, depressions, and desires, a multi-layered feast of the fraught that requires equally varied flavors from the music. The problem is that the thirty-year old Hindemith was unable to deliver that variety; he simply could not write music that supports all that emotional content. His craft is, of course, stunning, revealing an inordinate talent for shape, counterpoint, and rhythmic momentum. These skills served well in the opening scene when a crowd of art-gallery patrons, upon discovering the body of a murder victim, becomes franticly panicked. But they fall short of expressing the varieties and extremes of emotions contained in the entire story, such as the father-daughter duet, which never reaches the level of tenderness it calls for. Instead, the relentlessly complex linear textures and non-committal harmonic language for which Hindemith was so famous (and grew to manage with more sophistication as he got older), combined with a lackluster sort of “B-flat” orchestration, creates an aura of sonic grayness that compresses all that expression into a rather limited and unsatisfying emotional space.

That being said, however, Opera Boston’s production of the work was quite remarkable. For the most part, its strength lay in the casting. Each role was given to a singer whose vocal characteristics were unusually well suited to the person they were portraying. Tenor Frank Kelley brought a brilliantly brazen, spidery voice to the part of The Cavalier, making him fittingly unctuous and brittle. Janna Baty’s mezzo-soprano voice was as sensuous, sad, and voluptuous as is The Lady she portrayed. Sol Kim Bentley as Cardillac’s daughter sang with a bright, almost shrill soprano that seemed at times to scream out all the repression inside that character. And both the strong, rich bass of David Kravitz’ Gold Merchant and the full, powerful tenor of Steven Sanders’ Officer brought far more depth and energy to their characters than the writing suggests. The one exception to this fitting vocal cast was Sanford Sylvan in the title role. His voice, lovely though it is, is too smooth and colorless for a character as tortured as Cardillac, though he did make true attempts at bringing some grit to it; and the part itself is too big for his instrument, so that toward the end of the performance, one had the sense that he had bitten off a bit more than he could chew. On the other hand, conductor Gil Rose was very much in his element, doing what he does best: keeping up the momentum, offering flawless guidance to the singers and instrumentalists and bringing clarity to almost unbearable musical intricacy.

As for the visual elements, Director Nic Muni presided over a production that was sparsely Neo-Expressionistic and appropriately grotesque. It all took place in Cardillac’s gallery (with a couple of scenes in what was probably a street out in front), a large, cold space of warped angles and unnatural light. The costumes were creepy caricatures of their own styles, and the singer-actors in them often moved with exaggerated gestures. Hats (and belts) off especially to Kelley and Baty for giving their all in one of the most deliciously disturbing sadomasochistic pantomimes one is likely ever to see on an operatic stage. The most striking aspect of the production, however, was the use of lighting to cast all manner of shadows on the severely sloped walls of the gallery. It gave the effect of a second play from a flat, dark, distorted universe paralleling the three-dimensional one; a silent, visual Greek Chorus commenting on and participating in the whole twisted tale. It was, in many ways, the most chilling aspect of the entire performance, darkly radiating a sort of emotional summary of all that bizarreness.

Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan.

The works that the group chose illustrate the fascinating transition from the multifaceted complexity of the late Baroque to the refined symmetry of the early Classical, a phenomenon that was particularly noticeable in the music of German composers of the time. This music also seems particularly well-suited to the performing style of the Musicians of the Old Post Road: their musicianship is delicate, almost refined, but not so fragile as to break from the currents of vibrancy that they brought to nearly every piece. Nowhere was this more apparent and appropriate than in the first piece on the program, the Quartet in C-major for traverso (Baroque flute), viola, cello, and continuo by Johann Gottlieb Janitsch. This work, a stylistic missing link of sorts between Baroque and Rococo, encloses richly layered textures within an evenly balanced structure, a compositional aesthetic to which the ensemble brought florid energy with galant restraint. Other pieces on the program tended more toward the Baroque side of the spectrum, allowing the performers to engage in expressively ornamented playing. The splendid Sonata in D Major by Johann Friedrich Fasch demonstrated just how sensitively the core of the ensemble—cellist Daniel Ryan, flautist Suzanne Stumpf, violinist/violist Sarah Darling, and harpsichordist Michael Bahmann—can play together.

One of the main attractions of the concert was that it featured two works whose scoring includes the chalumeau, the single-reed forerunner of the clarinet. The Quartet in F Major for soprano-chalumeau, violin, bassoon, and continuo by Johann Adolf Hasse, a Baroque composer who, like Janitsch, often stepped over into the next period, is a brilliant demonstration of how this unusual-sounding instrument can interact and blend with more common ones, in this case the violin and the bassoon. This is especially well displayed in the faster movements through Hasse’s nimble phrasal ball-tossing, which Darling, chalumeauist Owen Watkins, and bassoonist Marilyn Boenau handled with delightful dexterity. On the other hand, Christoph Graupner’s Trio Sonata in C Major for bass-chalumeau, bassoon, and continuo illustrates the pitfalls of choosing instruments primarily for their color. Though the low registers and the single-versus-double reed textures make for remarkable sonorities, Graupner had difficulty getting past these woodwinds’ inherent gracelessness. In fact, they would have sounded downright clumsy were it not for the skill of Watkins and Boenau, who did their best to make music out of less-than-satisfying material.

In contrast, the Concerto in G Major for traverso, bassoon, cello, and continuo by Johann David Heinichen is a model of deft and exciting antiphonal writing for two instruments with very different sounds. Unlike Graupner, Heinichen knew well how to balance the bassoon’s various registers in roles as both soloist—engaging in delightful call-and-response with the flute—and continuo, a duality that Boenau negotiated with adept musicality.

Fortunately, Graupner’s compositional skills were more than redeemed by the ensemble’s lovely performance of his Trio Sonata in d minor for traverso, viola, and continuo, the most contrapuntally sophisticated work on the program. The affective power of this solidly Baroque aesthetic was particularly brought to bear by the beautiful playing of Darling and Stumpf in the work’s largo, a true high point of the program.

The concert ended with an arrangement of J.S. Bach’s aria “Mein gläubiges Herze, frohlocke” from the Cantata Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt (BWV 68). Though somewhat out of place on the program—Bach is hardly a hidden treasure—it did allow the audience to hear all these performers to play together, providing a satisfying end to an evening of exploration.

Tom Schnauber is a Boston-based composer and is currently serving as chair of the Performance Arts Department at Emmanuel College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition and Theory from the University of Michigan.