The Beijing Modern Music Festival, for those like your correspondent who had no inkling, is an annual event that, having begun 10 years ago as a chiefly domestic operation, rapidly developed into an international event combining orchestral and chamber concerts, master classes, workshops, and lectures.

It is funded both privately and by the Chinese ministries of culture and education and operates out of the facilities of the Central Conservatory of Music, whose director, Wang Cizhao, is the festival’s titular producer. The festival’s founder, composer Xiaoging Ye (who, like several other people we observed among the creative set prefers to order his name Western-style), is the artistic director. Students at the CCM and other Chinese music schools staff the festival and supplement the imported and native professional ensembles.

There have been many eminent Western ensembles who have performed at the festival, beginning in its first “international” year, 2004, with the New York New Music Ensemble and the Ensemble Zurich. This year’s complement includes Boston’s Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, the newEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble from Kansas City, Missouri, and the Third Angle Ensemble Consort from Portland, Oregon. Many of the foreign composers whose works are featured have shown up as well, including James Mobberley and Chen Yi, both now affiliated with the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Boston’s Scott Wheeler and Yu-Hui Chang (whose surname the festival program printers have “corrected” in transliteration as Zhang), Stephen Hartke, Robert Beaser, Norbert Palej (a Pole now resident in Canada), Enjott Schneider from Germany, and Narong Prangcharoen from Thailand.

The venues for performances are spread out over downtown Beijing, from the Concert Hall of the elephantine “egg” of the National Center for Performing Arts (about which more later), to the nearby mid-sized and user-friendly Beijing Concert Hall, to the more intimate concert and recital halls of CCM.

The festival’s opening concert at the NCPA Concert Hall was an orchestral program called “At the Edge of Time” after a Schneider piece on the program. The orchestra was the China NCPA Orchestra, an internationally recruited band formed contemporaneously with the Center four years ago and conducted by Lv Jia. This dispatch does not purport to be a review but will describe what went on as an insight into creative enterprise in today’s China. Some of the physical circumstances proved enlightening in their own right.

The Concert Hall is one of four performance spaces within the vast NCPA, which carries forward the tradition of grandiosity that gave the world the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, and the Great Hall of the People’s Congress, to say nothing of the forbidding monoliths lining Financial Street, and is accessible directly from the subway (fare: 2 yuan, or 37¢). If you have your ticket, you are processed through the ubiquitous security scanner. China has them everywhere: in the subway, and even in open spaces like Tiananmen, but this one is doubly diligent: bags through the x-ray and wand searches. Not only is photography prohibited in the hall, but anyone with a camera is sternly ordered to check it. Bottled water, which everyone carries because tap water is not potable, is also verboten, and not because they sell it inside (one could refresh oneself at the bubbler, or as they charmingly call it, the “hydrant”). Of course, once in the hall, people were snapping pics left and right. Phones are not confiscated.

Another thing that might astonish those accustomed to stateside contemporary music concerts was the packed house. At a guess, the Concert Hall holds a good 1,500 seats minimum, and there were bottoms in nearly all of them. Whether the ears indirectly attached to those bottoms expected to hear what they did is another matter: applause for almost everything was, considering the size of the audience, rather wan and brief by the admittedly rather inflated US standards. The per-capita consumption of music education in China is higher than just about any place, and we suspect many teachers made a point of having their students, and the students’ parents, attend. It’s anybody’s guess how many attendees actually bought tickets.

Those of you who attend closely to matters acoustical may find it interesting that from where we sat, well forward in the orchestra section, the sound of the strings and, to a degree, even the solo piano, was rather muffled. It is possible that the acoustic design throws the sound upward (the seating is raked); nobody we knew was seated far enough back for us to compare experiences.

The event began, as so many festivals do, with a round of acknowledgments to sponsors and organizers. What we didn’t see coming was how this was done. An emcee in big hair and sequined tuxedo (and — wait for it, a sequined bow tie!) read off the necessaries, and the honorees and their official award presenters were then escorted to the stage by a bevy of lovelies in long gowns doing their best Vanna White imitations. These then handed each presenter, in uniform sequence, a dust-catcher trophy, a leather-bound certificate, and a bouquet; the presenters handed these over to the honorees in time-honored photo-op poses. This process, we were informed, is quite common in China.

The actual concert that followed happened in pretty much the normal way. The program featured Chen’s Blue, Blue Sky, Prangcharoen’s Illuminations, and the aforementioned Schneider work, At the Edge of Time, before the intermission; then Zou Hang’s The Color of Beijing and Beaser’s Piano Concerto afterwards, the latter with British soloist Christopher Janwong McKiggan (that middle name bespeaking an ethnic Chinese Thai mother). Anyone who has heard Chen’s music would know what to expect: milky sonorities balancing Chinese tradition with Western craft. To a Chinese audience this was not new news. The Prangcharoen was something else, a statement that high modernism still lives in an Asian wrapper. Schneider’s piece quotes from and stitches together fragments from Mozart’s Requiem and had been part of the quarter-millennium Mozart celebrations of 2006. In sharp contrast to these somewhat cerebral and ethereal exercises, the two post-intermission works were unabashedly populist. Zou has been active as a composer of film and TV scores in addition to standard classical genres, and his piece on the program, though written without a specific event in mind, is somewhat in the spirit of John Williams, especially with its fanfare opening; although sonically, with its patriotic-folkloric affect and quartal harmonies it conveys a sense of — how shall we say? — Chinese Copland. (Fanfare for the Common Cadre, anyone?) The concluding work was the Beaser, written originally for the Louisville Orchestra in the days of Leonard Slatkin. Its mash-up of Gershwin, Bernstein, Copland, Barber and — in its opening central motif — Vaughan Willliams over a Rachmaninovian piano texture was the work that brought the hitherto reserved audience to exuberant life.

In future days we hope to bring you some more vignettes of the festival and other musical events here (hoping to get tickets for Un Ballo in Maschera). Stay tuned.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Rowe, Hudgins, Baksys, Sommerville, Svoboda and Ferrillo (Stu Rosner photo)

The Boston Symphony Chamber Players concluded their season-long travelogue with a program of English music at Jordan Hall on April 22. Representing Old Blighty were works of Adès, Britten, Elgar, and Gordon Jacob —  interesting choices not least for the fact that the oldest work on the program dated from 1892, with the next-oldest 40 years more recent than that.

Britten was given the bookend positions, with two early works, his Phantasy Quartet in F, for oboe and string trio, op.2 at the beginning, and his Sinfonietta for winds and strings, op. 1, at the end. Both works date from 1932 and show Britten’s rather self-conscious precocity. We have commented here on a performance of the Phantasy earlier this year, so it is less urgent for us to go into descriptive depth here. The performance it received from John Ferrillo, oboe, Malcolm Lowe, violin, Steven Ansell, viola, and Martha Babcock, cello, was as precise and idiomatic as one could hope for. Britten was rather fond of processional-recessional gestures, and the Phantasy has this palindromic feature, which relied on Babcock first, then the other strings (the oboe gets into the picture afterwards) to carry the march-like accompaniment figure first from, then, at the work’s end, to, silence. The execution was admirably gradual in both cases. Ferrillo’s tone was limpid, his phrasing precise. There was a spot of bother with his instrument in the penultimate section, but otherwise this was a perfectly rendered performance.

Thomas Adès, now too old (40!) to be a Wunderkind, produced his second opera in 2004, on the subject — though not a direct setting — of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. From it he derived two additional pieces, one a vocal-orchestral suite of excerpts, the other a set of character sketches called Court Studies from The Tempest for clarinet and piano trio that use the music from the opera as source material without simply re-scoring it. The fact that this is his second work for this ensemble, the first being his Catch, op. 4 from 1991, undercuts any suspicion that Adès had cribbed the idea from Paul Moravec, whose 2002 Tempest Fantasy, for the identical ensemble, took the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. The two works are actually quite complementary: both are in an advanced neo-tonal idiom that tends more to gesture than lyricism, and while both depict characters from the play, Moravec focuses on the principals, whereas Adès takes a more Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern approach, sketching relatively minor personages. The piece’s six attached movements open with a flourish and a Stravinskyan baroque-y feeling alternating contrapuntal elegance with chunky chords. More hearings (which would not be unwelcome) would be necessary to isolate all the incidents, but we were left with a strong sense of canny artifice, with some striking sonorities created without resort to any advanced instrumental techniques. Clarinetist William R. Hudgins, joined by Lowe, Babcock, and pianist Vytas Baksys, were thoroughly persuasive in this inviting work.

The first half of the program closed with one of only three works we know of for wind quintet and piano, the Sextet in B-flat for piano and winds, op.6 by Gordon (Percival Septimus) Jacob (1895-1984). The Poulenc sextet for this ensemble gets heard with reasonable frequency, but the Brahmsian entry by Ludwig Thuille need to be heard more often, and a septet from the early 19^th century by George Onslow for this ensemble plus contrabass also deserves revival. The Jacob Sextet dates from 1956, when he was at the height of his fame. (He was well known as a writer for winds.) Written in memory of Aubrey Brain, second only to his son Dennis as the most famous horn player of the mid-20^th century, it is in five movements, beginning with an “Elegiac Prelude” that provides the central melodic element of the work, a dotted-rhythm figure for horn. The central “Cortege” begins with that motto but expands dramatically and touchingly; it is surrounded on one side by a scherzo and on the other by a minuet suggesting Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin. Jacob was famously fond of Baroque touches and references. The finale is a rondo that segues into an epilogue on the principal motif and other music from the Cortege. Jacob’s writing cuts an interesting middle ground sonically between the blended sonorities of Thuille and the individuated ones of Poulenc; the work is superbly crafted and emotionally direct. The BSO’s principal winds, Elizabeth Rowe, flute, Ferrillo, Hudgins, James Sommerville, horn, and Richard Svoboda, bassoon, with Baksys, gave a thoroughly sympathetic and effective performance, with Sommerville especially appealing in the Cortege’s muted slow march, and Baksys superbly delicate in the prelude.

The strings had the next turn on the program, with Elgar’s now-popular Serenade in E minor for strings , op. 20, originally for string orchestra but here played one on a part by Lowe, Haldan Martinson, second violin, Ansell, Babcock and Edwin Barker, contrabass. Elgar, himself a violinist, thought well of this piece as encapsulating something of the essence of string sonority. Except for the central movement (of three), a Larghetto, the sound and substance do not put one in mind of the composer of the Enigma Variations, the First Symphony and the Cello Concerto, but it is an engaging and diverting work all the same. Considering Elgar’s background, it comes somewhat as a surprise in this quintet version how prominent the viola is in the outer movements, which Ansell exploited with some delectably plummy tones. It may be inherent in the piece, but overall we derived more admiration for the BSCP’s precision and surface sheen than for any depth of feeling they may have been conveying.

The program returned to Britten for the finish, with the Sinfonietta providing a vehicle for the entire ensemble (minus the piano). Also in three movements, it opens in fragments that eventually coalesce into a proper theme. Britten’s early compositions, as we adumbrated earlier, tend to showboat a bit with his advanced instrumental and compositional tricks (not totally unlike Adès). In this case, Britten demonstrated great imagination in his dispersal of thematic materials among the instruments and his exploitation of dry pizzicato in the development of the first movement and throughout the variation second movement. This latter also cultivates a pentatonic sound that conjures Debussy in all but harmony. The tarantella finale is the least Italianate one we’ve ever heard, and introduces some very characteristic Britten licks, such as his interlocking triadic arpeggios. Again, the BSCP performance was classy, unfussy and spirited, technically as adroit as the music.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Samuel Barber’s Cello Concerto in A minor, op. 22, is probably the least-performed of his three concertos, though it is a splendid work that should be in the repertoire of every serious cello soloist. As is often the case with Barber, it fuses intense emotional content with rigorous and learnèd formal processes. It was written in 1946 for the BSO and cellist Raya Garbousova (mother of NEC’s Paul Biss and grandmother of pianist Jonathan Biss), who owned the piece for so long that it may have discouraged others from horning in — the way John Browning owned the piano concerto. Christine Lamprea, a Juilliard graduate now in the NEC master’s program under Natasha Brofsky, did the only sensible thing under such circumstances — she adopted her own unique take on the piece, with a sureness and aplomb that were totally persuasive. The cello’s entrance in the first movement is one of those over-the-top, upper-register, wound-up outbursts that puts us in mind of Judith Weir’s wry observation that Romantic composers can treat the cello as a hysterical treble instrument with a surprise bass extension. Without stinting on these moments, Lamprea alloyed them with a delightful bounciness in the outer movements and lyrical restraint in the slow movement between, which features one of Barber’s gorgeous tunes with cannily irregular meters, like a Sicilienne in Bulgarian rhythm. The concerto presents major technical hurdles, which she overcame with supreme panache and charmingly effortless phrasing.

Wolff adopted tempi that, to our ears, were exactly right, including a somewhat faster than normal reading of the second theme of the finale, which loses none of its insistence for that. (Many conductors stress its keening quality.) The principal subject of this movement was also treated both lyrically and with an emphasis on its jazziness, not a quality one often associates with Barber. Amid the profuse ovations for soloist and conductor (more bouquets for Lamprea than she could hold, much less carry), there was a well-earned call-out for oboist Michelle Zwi.

The concert ended with a symphonic staple, Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 in D, op. 73, treated in something other than a conventional way. Wolff’s note clearly indicated that he was going to focus on the clouds that he saw hovering over this conventionally sunny work. Brahms did, indeed, write that there were “black wings” over the piece, but since sunny works do not loom large in the Brahms œuvre, we wondered if this intent on Wolff’s part to undermine the conventional wisdom was entirely, well, politic. In the event, the audience was treated to some deliciously burnished roundness in the brass playing, especially the horns, which was a nice way of darkening the sound. The slow movement’s toe-dipping in Wagnerian chromatics certainly provided ample opportunity for Wolff’s interpretive approach; and, quite apart from the polemic, the relaxed mood and splendidly modulated dynamics of the intermezzo movement were admirable. One should never underestimate the challenges posed by the insistent syncopations of Brahms’s writing (now, where did you say that downbeat was?), and the orchestra tossed them off with joyful insouciance.

In other respects, though, we thought the performance was not quite in keeping with the overall tenor of the work. Sometimes — sometimes — the conventional wisdom has it right. The dynamics ran too often and too long on the loud side, with some rather harsh, unblended sonorities in what might have been too large an ensemble for this piece. The finale, too, succumbed to what constitutional lawyers call viewpoint discrimination: the opening melody, which we have always seen as a delightful tribute to the spirit of Haydn, was conveyed with uncomfortable stridency. The ending, fast and loud, was as always, enough to bring the audience to its feet, but color us unpersuaded.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

David Hoose conducts (Michael J. Lutch photo)

The Boston University Symphony Orchestra performs once a year at Symphony Hall, which they did on Monday night, April 2, a day when the other orchestra that customarily uses that venue was taking a day off. Together with BU’s Symphonic Chorus, the BUSO, under conductor David Hoose, presented a whopper of a program, comprising Rachmaninov’s The Bells, op. 35, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 in G minor, op. 103, and thoroughly justified using the exalted venue, though they far from filled it.

As an appetizer for the hefty meal to follow, the BU School of Music dispatched Prof. Patrick Wood Uribe to walk the rather scant pre-concert audience through the background of the pieces. For the Rachmaninov, he discussed the setting of the text, which was Konstantin Balmont’s (shall we say) rhapsodic interpretation of the classic Edgar Allan Poe poem. The history of Rachmaninov’s engagement on the work is rather entertaining: it transpired that a female fan of his, a cello student of one of Rachmaninov’s students, found the Balmont work and sent Rachmaninov a gushing but anonymous letter enclosing the poem and urging him to write a piece based on it. Rachmaninov, who had always had a fascination with bells, seized on the suggestion. There is no evidence that he ever read, in the original or in translation, Poe’s actual poem. That is why it seemed odd to us that when Wood Uribe (a double barrel, apparently, like Vaughan Williams) illustrated his points with quotations from Poe rather than the English translation of Balmont by Keith Langston, of the University of (US) Georgia, printed in the program book.

For the Shostakovich, Wood Uribe provided a sonic Baedeker to the many found-object tunes from which the symphony was constructed — a very useful exercise indeed for us non-Russians unfamiliar with the sources. Less helpfully, he approached the always-thorny questions concerning the “real” meaning of the music with a rather wishy-washy “some say-others say” dichotomy that provides tacit validation for a “Shostakovich as apparatchik” reading that, in these ostensibly learned precincts, ought to be as stomped-upon as Creationism in the public schools.

Before leaving the lecture, we should mention that, apropos of some commentary here in BMInt blogs concerning Symphony Hall’s pylon-shaped portable speaker system: we got our first opportunity to hear it in action. The results were appalling, whether owing to the quality of the speakers, the positioning of the microphones, the nose-in-the-text posture and general lack of projection by the (human) speaker, or the effect of a sparsely-filled hall, we don’t know. We found the only way to gather in any intelligible sound was to cup our ears, and this from a pretty prime location in the front center section of the hall. Back to the drawing board!

Neither of the works on the program is what one would call standard rep for the respective composers. The BSO performed The Bells in 1979, and Boston hasn’t heard it since (disclaimer: we get these stats from the BUSO publicity materials and have no ready means to verify them), and Shostakovich No. 11 was, if not a Boston premiere, the debut performance in Symphony Hall. Our seatmate allowed as how he had heard it at least twice in London, with major orchestras, so evidently Boston has some catching up to do.

Rachmaninov thought highly of his op. 35, dating from 1913, which he variously referred to as his Symphony No. 3 (before he wrote the one he officially called that), a choral symphony, or a cantata. It is in four movements, corresponding to the standard symphonic layout, as well as the general progression of the poem. Balmont’s goal, apparently, was to render in Russian the ingenious (or, if you are Ralph Waldo Emerson, egregious) sound effects Poe produced in English, corresponding to the size and construction of the bells depicted, and the moods of the various “chapters” of the poem. As a consequence, the actual meaning of Poe’s text was subordinated, and in evaluating Rachmaninov’s setting it is important to understand that it is Balmont’s, not Poe’s, work that the composer set. One curiosity to us is that Wood Uribe never mentioned the fact that each stanza gave a different substance and visual color to the bells: silver for the sleigh bells, gold for the wedding bells, bronze for the fire bells, and iron for the funeral bells; the effect of color and material on the actual sound, and the composer’s imagination of the sound, must have been considerable. In any event, on this redirection of the text Rachmaninov overlaid his own interpretive attitude, so that for example the second movement, about wedding bells, had a much more solemn tone than either Poe or Balmont gave it.

The work itself, as noted earlier, is in four movements, a light-toned sleigh ride, in which much of the vocal action is carried by the tenor solo, Yeghishe Manucharyan. His strong, projecting voice, firm resonant tone and excellent diction — at least to the extent a non-Russian speaker can tell — were wholly admirable. One nice touch of scoring was the use of a humming chorus in parts of the movement, the idea for which, Hoose’s program note suggests, Rachmaninov might have picked up from Puccini during the stay in Italy when Rachmaninov began writing the work.

Hoose did something unusual with his soloists, by the way: instead of positioning them in a row in front of or alongside the conductor, they sat in the orchestra and stood up on benches to perform; it worked rather well. For his part, Hoose kept commendable charge of maintaining orchestral, solo, and choral balances and paced the music well, especially noticeable in nice descents from climactic moments.

Soprano Janna Baty (Michael J. Lutch photo)

The second movement, featuring soprano Janna Baty, whose tone and projection were also excellent but who subordinated diction to color, gave most of the larger musical argument to the orchestra, with the soloist offering mostly color commentary, except for a lovely lyrical coda. There were no big Rachmaninov tunes in this work, it must be admitted. Balance here got a little off track, as the cellos were occasionally subsumed. The “scherzo” movement, in which the chorus had all the vocal part, was about as wild a ride as Rachmaninov permitted himself, and was for us the musical highlight of the piece, with irregular accents and moments of careening hysteria and chromatic slides that in some ways foreshadow some of Shostakovich’s lunatic-asylum scherzos. One should mention at this point that Rachmaninov threaded the Dies Irae plainsong that was such a staple with him throughout the entire work; it became most prominent in this movement (oddly, since the finale was funereal), in this case rhythmically altered. One wishes that the composer had indulged the wild ride even more than he did; there were numerous places of relative musical repose, but Hoose kept the pace and volume at tooth-rattling intensity as much as possible.

Throughout, the chorus was fully engaged, fully together, and sounding splendid. The finale presented a few issues of interpretation, both Rachmaninov’s and Hoose’s. On the composer’s side (abetted by Balmont) the funereal conclusion to the poem’s (as life’s) progression is mitigated at the end by a shift to major mode to describe “the peace of the grave” — something totally absent from Poe. (Peace and repose, even in death, were not his long suit.) It’s a lovely moment, the transition to which Hoose managed quite skillfully, but it might have been better had he been more faithful to the lento lugubre tempo marking for the movement. As the soloist, baritone Anton Belov provided the solid and mellifluous genuine Russian sound and some evidently perfect diction — it could only have been better had the part called for Chaliapin-like depths. It is a somewhat unusual circumstance for a Rachmaninov work, but the overall orchestral sound of The Bells is so well blended that despite the composer’s customary brilliance of orchestration, there were seldom occasions in this piece where individual instruments or sections achieve prominence. In the finale, though, we can commend the gorgeous English horn solo of Kai-Chien Wang and the rich and pure sound of principal horn Parker Nelson.

Readers, if you’ve gotten this far, we thank you. It was a very long program and, because of the lecture and the fact that the works on the program are unfamiliar to local audiences, if you haven’t guessed it already, this is going to be a long report. The Rachmaninov ran on a bit over a half hour; the Shostakovich symphony that followed, subtitled The Year 1905, is in four attached movements that added up to over an hour’s worth of unbroken music. We’re not complaining, though, as it is one of this greatest of Soviet composers’ simultaneously most accessible and most mysterious works. Begun in 1955 in honor of the 50th anniversary of the so-called January Revolution or, more pertinently, “Bloody Sunday,” when unarmed protesters seeking to petition the Tsar were pitilessly gunned down by the Cossacks guarding the (as it happened) unoccupied royal palace in St. Petersburg. Shostakovich didn’t complete the work, however, until 1957, by which time it had become the 40th anniversary of the revolution that installed the Communists, who were looking for a bit of revolutionary bombast that might sweep some of the Stalinist dirt under the patriotic and proletarian rug.

Baritone Anton Belov (Michael J. Lutch photo)

Meanwhile, 1956 had presented its own piece of revolutionary history in the form of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian popular uprising. Against this background, Shostakovich did what he had become practiced at: producing work that purports to be one thing but leaves the strong impression that it was really something else. To achieve these ends, he did things that were quite unusual for him in an “abstract” symphony: he created a work with a clearly stated dramatic and pictorial program in a readily accessible harmonic idiom. It was based entirely on “found” melodic materials, almost entirely 19th-century Russian revolutionary songs that would resonate with the Russian audiences of 1957 (the remainder were chiefly the composer’s own tunes setting pre-Soviet revolutionary texts). This procedure resulted in a work that on its surface was the very model of a modern Socialist-Realist symphony, and indeed many in the Soviet musical world, whether they were delighted or appalled, took it as such. But was Shostakovich ever that simple? Both his biographer Solomon Volkov and Shostakovich’s son-in-law reported comments from the composer that he was thinking of the idea of recurrence: how time and again a people would rise in supplication and be brutally beaten into the ground by ruthless tyrants. Shostakovich did not live to know of the events in Tiananmen Square, but he would certainly have recognized the M.O.

The music of his 11th Symphony contains much that is stunningly striking, beginning instantly with the icy stillness of Palace Square (these events happened in January) the night before the great massacre. The seething resentments of a subjugated people are conveyed quietly as the tune “Listen!” is played and developed against the distant sound of a military encampment. Hoose and the orchestra maintained the eerie foreboding throughout, with the old revolutionary songs wafting like ghosts. Special praise is due to the percussion, much used in this work, and to principal timpanist Catherine Varvara; has any composer used timpani as a melody instrument as Shostakovich has?

The second movement, the “main event” as it were, saw impeccable pacing to the climaxes, though here Hoose was often seen exhorting the violins to put out more sound. There is some fearsomely active passagework for cellos and basses, both at the beginning of this movement signaling the protest, and then in its second half, depicting the actual slaughter, which were superbly played. As you may imagine, the second half of this 20-minute-long movement brought forth massive volumes of sound, all perfectly executed, and then even better executed when suddenly reverting to the post-carnage hush to which the first movement’s music returns. Just as the first movement bears a certain family resemblance to the ice music from Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, the third movement’s long-breathed dirge conjures the comparable bury-the-dead scene from that score. Shostakovich, though, does this in a far more epic and extended way, not with any “formalist” technique like a fugue, but with a gradual exfoliation throughout the orchestra (praise here to the violas, who perfectly carried the initial burden of the long line). The central section of the movement built to a noble, yet angry and insistent throbbing; the anger that permeates the entire symphony got its best expression in these restrained but passionate utterances.

The finale presented Shostakovich with his trickiest problem: how to create a convincingly heroic apotheosis without seeming to congratulate the Soviet inheritors of the tsars’ cruel proclivities. Just as in his also populist-sounding fifth symphony, where he achieved this effect with an incongruous tempo, here he did it with incongruous harmonic devices. Throughout the movement, Shostakovich has rescued the music from empty rhetoric with cutting harmonies and sheer vehemence (thank you, David Hoose); at the end, he sets up an unresolved conflict between G minor and G major, as the return of the first movement’s music reminds everyone that for the Russians it’s always the day before the massacre. The tonal ambiguity is left hanging at the end in the reverberation of the bells, as the orchestra pounds a single unharmonized G.

Both the Rachmaninov and Shostakovich works should get more performances, especially the latter, whose greatness the poet Anna Akhmatova acknowledged even amid the cries of betrayal from the rest of the chattering classes. The level of performance by the BUSO and the chorus, whose conductor Ann Howard Jones received deserved cheers after The Bells, was up to the highest standards and, as we said, fully worthy of the venue in which it was presented.

Photographer Michael J. Lutch from lofty perspective.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Juraj Valcuha leads violinist Frank Peter Zimmerman (Stu Rosner photo)

For the March 22-24 weekend (We attended the performance on March 22)  the Boston Symphony brought in one BSO favorite and one BSO newbie, in the persons of violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann and conductor Juraj Valcuha respectively, for a very attractive program of Kodály, Dvorák and Mendelssohn. None of the works is new to the BSO but only Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony, has been performed here lately.

Valcuha, 45, is current principal conductor of the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI (the Italian radio symphony orchestra, though of course they principally perform live, in Turin). His US conducting gigs have been relatively few: Pittsburgh, LA, Washington. He presents with a youthful bounce and a clear beat, and at his best on Thursday he elicited carefully controlled phrasing and dynamics. Zimmermann, a still-youthful 56, was on hand for one of the least-performed of all the generally-acknowledged “great” Romantic violin concertos, Dvorák’s A minor.

The program began, however, with Zoltán Kodály’s Dances of Galánta, a kind of tone-poem-cum-suite he wrote to commemorate the Budapest Philharmonic’s 80^th anniversary in 1933, an occasion that also brought forth Bartók’s Dance Suite. Interestingly, for a composer who, like Bartók, sought to draw a distinction between the Mágyar and Roma folk traditions, the latter of which was what most people in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries thought was Hungarian music, Dances of Galánta is based on excerpts from a set of Gypsy dances from the Galánta area published in Vienna around 1800. Each of the tunes he chose is of the type of dance called verbunkos, or “recruiting,” from a bit of military marketing the Emperor used to show how cool military service was. A famous example in classical music is the first movement of Bartók’s Contrasts. Kodály arranged these verbunkos with flashy modern orchestration, updated tonal harmony (much plusher and less strident than Bartók’s) and in a logical sequence that simulates symphonic development rather like J. Strauss Junior’s elaborate waltz sets. Valcuha’s approach tended to favor elegance over power, with lots of appropriate rubato, but he produced some thrilling subito pianissimo phrase endings and overall excellent sculpting of both the larger and smaller musical building blocks. The central syncopated section was full of taut energy in the strings and brilliant climaxes. Kodály’s scoring called for much solo clarinet, with some beautiful but convoluted passagework; for this, principal clarinet William R. Hudgins received a well-deserved call-out.

The Dvorák Violin Concerto in A minor, op. 53, has had a fraught history. Widely admired, albeit often from afa, for its dash and fire as well as for the melodic beauty so characteristic of its composer, it has been, right from the beginning a little off-putting to performers. It is notoriously difficult; it requires a lot of juggling between solo and orchestral forces to get the balance right without loss of expressivity; and its opening movement is worked out rhapsodically, which is a euphemism meaning that structurally it’s a bit of a mess. This put off its dedicatee, Joseph Joachim, who, after giving Dvorák copious advice on technique and orchestration, never himself performed it. These details should be less important for modern performers and audiences, yet like another great Romantic violin concerto, Elgar’s, this one resists warhorse frequency of performance. Dvorák also instructed that the first two movements be run together, a technique that since Mendelssohn did it was a fashionable Romantic fillip — Bruch’s first concerto does the same. In Dvorák’s case, though, this can severely tax a soloist’s stamina. A gladiator like Zimmermann, however, is equal to all such challenges, and he put forward a virtuoso demonstration by turns fiery and sentimental. By and large, Valcuha did good work in suppressing the orchestra when the soloist was on and otherwise balancing the dynamics of all concerned. Zimmermann did have a few moments when his volume couldn’t quite keep up, but these were fortunately few — an indication of what a formidable challenge this work must be to mere mortals. We detected a few ragged moments in the orchestra, especially in the opening, but also some surpassingly fine playing by the horns in the famously infectious, bouncy, and rhythmically complex finale, as well as by the timpanist, Timothy Genis.

At intermission, we were all in high spirits, awaiting the application of all the brilliance and sound judgment we had just heard to Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 in A minor, op. 56, now, (with a cautious eye out to the SNP) called the “Scottish,” but long known to us troglodytes as the Scotch. Whoever inserted the fatuous footnote in the BSO program note describing the distinction between the adjectives for the people and the whisky as a “rule” rather than a convention should be laughed out of his or her safe editorial anonymity. And why shouldn’t one toast Mendelssohn for this brilliant work with a fine single malt?

As most studious fans of classical music know, No. 3 is really No. 5, but Mendelssohn only authorized publication of Nos. 1, 2 (the Lobgesang) and 3, while the earlier Reformation and Italian symphonies were published posthumously and received numbers 5 and 4, respectively, though they were second and third, respectively, in order of composition. Like most of his symphonies, this one gave Mendelssohn, a fearsomely self-critical artist, a fair amount of angst. Its artistic impetus was coeval with the Hebrides overture in his trip to Scotland in 1829, but gestated for over a dozen years. It is widely thought to be the best of his five numbered symphonies.

Valcuha got off to a no-nonsense opening in the andante introduction, with a dynamic rather louder than the score’s piano and a bit of a raw, ragged edge, with phrasing rather less shapely than he had brought to the Kodály or Dvorák. In the allegro, he interestingly brought out the clarinet line, when it coincided with the strings, more than most performances we have heard — more kudos to Hudgins. Another interpretive detail we liked, this from near the very end of the work, was the fine transition from the main body of the allegro guerriero to the Finale maestoso epilogue (the latter being another of those formal innovations, like the linked movements — used in this symphony as well — and the repositioning of the cadenza in the Violin Concerto, that were much noted in Mendelssohn’s day and taken for granted today).

We don’t do footnotes here at BMInt, so for lack of a better place, we’ll wonder out loud here where that colorful “allegro guerriero” designation comes from, conjuring images of Mel Gibson and his Men in Blue. The 1842 Breitkopf & Härtel first edition of the score marks the movement allegro vivacissimo. The 1877 B&H edition, which is probably what the BSO used for its 1883 first performance, had the claymore-rattling title, but that just pushes the question of where B&H got the idea. Erudite readers, speak!

If I were inclined to talk like a Valley Girl, my overall reaction to the BSO’s performance of the Mendelssohn might be summarized as “so first I was like uh-oh, and then I was like oh no, and then I was like eeeeuw!” Exegesis: that raggedy opening and lack of dynamic subtlety was not the only instance encountered; the tempi were somewhere between brisk and here-come-the-blue-flashing-lights, with concomitant loss of linear detail; there was, it almost goes without saying, no exposition repeat in the first movement. The Scotch snaps (that’s a rhythm, not a cookie) in the scherzo were taken staccato, and they’re not marked that way in the score. It matters, because it robs them of some of their authenticity, and we presume that Mendelssohn wrote it as he heard it. And, while Valcuha was fine in the big climaxes in the slow movement, the bits in between seemed rather perfunctory. The fourth movement’s main section, while the strings were properly tight, was again too fast to permit any subtlety. Finally, the grand maestoso apotheosis, which should ring nobly like church bells through the glens, was so rapidly and brusquely taken that it seemed an arbitrary and artificial appendage. Overall, our impression was that Valcuha doesn’t really like this piece, and had someplace else he needed to be at 10:00 Thursday night. The whole thing seemed not well considered and under-prepared. Bottom line: as the symphony’s dedicatee, HM Victoria R., might have said, we were not amused. Let’s get it better tomorrow, OK?

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Steve Reich does "Clapping Music" (Stephanie Mitchell photo)

We have been attending new-music concerts for over 40 years now, but we were not prepared for the scene that we encountered on March 10, when Bang on a Can All-Stars performed, among other things, a mini-retrospective on the work of Steve Reich, with a pre-concert talk by The Man Himself. Now in the second year of a three-year residency at MIT, Bang on a Can (the shorter name is for the presenting/commissioning unit, the longer one for the performing ensemble. Some New York tax lawyer must have set that system up) has obviously developed a cult-like following. By 6:05 pm, when we arrived at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, a substantial crowd has already assembled for the 6:30 talk — enough that multiple lines had formed and one could appreciate the efficiency of the ticketing and ushering staff. By the time the talk began, the hall, which seats over 1,200, was at least four-fifths full. By the concert itself an hour later, it was stuffed to the nonexistent rafters — a total sell-out of the best possible kind.

Reich, now in his 76^th year but remarkably youthful (in more ways than one, as we will demonstrate below), gave one of those oral-program-notes interviews with BOACAS music director Julia Wolfe on the three works of his that filled the post-intermission half of the program: Clapping Music, Electric Counterpoint, and 2×5. There were some tidbits of note, though we doubt they came as revelations to the fan base: Clapping Music was inspired by a flamenco performance; Pat Metheny, for whom Electric Counterpoint was written, insisted that his live part consist only of single notes (an injunction Reich disregarded only for a bit of the final movement). We’ll integrate other of Reich’s remarks in the individual discussions farther down the page.

The opening half of the program was given to the first performance of a collective work-in-progress called Field Recordings, funded by Bang on a Can itself and through its People’s Commissioning Fund, and also the Barbican Centre in London. The idea is for composers to create works based on audio and video, either pre-existing or purpose-recorded “in the wild.” This performance featured the first nine of these works: Wolfe’s Reeling, based on the sounds of country fiddling and its vocal accompaniment; Florent Ghys’s An Open Cage, setting a reading by John Cage from his Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse); Christian Marclay’s Fade to Slide, with a video gallimaufry stylistically reminiscent of Kenneth Anger; Mira Calix’s Meeting You Seemed Easy, on recordings taken aboard an airplane; David Lang’s Unused Swan, set to the sounds of knives being sharpened (Is that a reference to Carmina Burana we detected?); Evan Ziporyn’s Wargasari on a 1928 recording of Balinese singing and instrumentals; Michael Gordon’s Gene Takes a Drink, a cat’s-eye view of an urban garden; Tyondai Braxton’s Casino Trem, on the sounds of… guess what? and Nick Zammuto’s Real Beauty Turns, with video clips of mostly self-inflicted personal beautification operations culled from commercials and movies.

These nine works were played by the All-Stars group, comprising Ziporyn on clarinet and bass clarinet, Mark Stewart on guitars, Vicky Chow on piano and electronic keyboards, with cellist Ashley Bathgate, contrabassist Robert Black, and percussionist David Cossin. Zammuto, on electric guitar, joined in for his own piece. The pieces were taken together as a suite, with as little pause between them as the machinations of the technology permitted. Because there were so many of them (and they were not miniatures by any means), and because the house lights were too low to permit extensive note-taking, we can only give a few impressions. Overall, the composers’ musical responses to these “found object” sources were sophisticated and sensitive; we were especially impressed by Ghys’s brilliant prosody, eventually hitting every syllable and inflection in Cage’s voice with an appropriate musical equivalent. The video settings were all interesting — and we are extremely curious how Gordon managed to obtain the cooperation of his videographer — but they were of varying degrees of musical success. Many of the images in Marclay’s Fade to Slide had musical connections, and the most successful, whatever the subject, had a strong percussive feel. The other pieces all had strong points: Lang’s Unused Swan, for example, begins with a strongly evocative chorale-like melody in monophony and ends with a clever percussive use of chains sliding around and dropped on a metal sheet.

Musically, the contributions were mostly coming from the same place, with a greater stylistic affinity to smooth jazz than hard rock, but all obviously part of the evolving minimalist texture. That’s probably an oversimplification, but that was the surface impression. Wolfe’s Reeling, with country tropes turned in hand like cubist imagery, was therefore a bit of a ruse. The performances were all of a high order, although Chow’s visible frustration when technology failed her keyboard in one piece serves as a reminder that the art of musicianship often depends on a player’s exercising full control of his or her medium. This project bids fair to produce some exciting and original repertoire, although its successful dissemination may be hindered if, as here, the technical team must always far exceed the performing forces in number.

There was no question but that Steve Reich was the headliner for this event, and so the second half of this rather long program —a solid three hours — walked the audience through “The Story So Far,” beginning with the 1972 Clapping Music, which Reich and Cossin performed. This early work showcases a fairly pure minimalist esthetic, in which one player holds a fixed rhythm (hardly monotonous, as the “tune” is relatively complex) while the other periodically goes one beat out of phase, thus bringing the two lines together at fixed intervals. The striking thing about the piece, no pun intended,  and the performance, in which both participants would signal changes with nods and other body language — is how clearly it progresses and achieves something like cadential section closings. For a piece of minimalist music using minimal performance resources (the only four-hand piece we know of that requires no, you know, instruments), it is a well-saturated experience.

Electric Counterpoint, from 1987, was one of Reich’s earliest works in which he consciously sought to break down the walls the 20^th century had erected between classical and popular music. In it, the guitarist has pre-recorded 10 tracks that serve as the accompaniment to the live performance. The original Metheny recording of the work, which like many later Reich works is broken into three attached movements marked Fast-Slow-Fast, is available on online streaming services, so you can check it out, as well as one or two others. Lest anyone think that interpretation is irrelevant in minimalism, we give thumbs up to guitarist Stewart for his exceptionally crisp and incisive rendition on both the live and prerecorded lines. Again, it is remarkable how thoughtfully composed this music is, with some delightfully evolved melodic ideas, particularly in the slow movement, and again in the finale, with even something one could call a development section, offset against the characteristic driving rhythm.

The jumpin' joint (Stephanie Mitchell photo)

The grand finale of the program was the Boston premiere of 2×5, a work written for BOACAS in 2008 and premiered by them the following year. One of Reich’s comments in the pre-concert session was that he is uncomfortable writing for single instruments, preferring that each part in a work be at least doubled. (Thus, his Pulitzer Prize winner Double Sextet, written for the ensemble eighth blackbird, could only have been done when that sextet agreed to have electronic doppelgangers.) For 2×5, then, Reich not only for independent reasons omitted the cello part in favor of a second electric guitar (Derek Johnson), but also put Ziporyn on piano opposite Chow, rather than on reeds. OK, we did the math as well: that still comes to six players, not five, and they also have their electronic counterparts (maybe not the pianos, which would then get to ten total “tracks”).

Esthetically, 2×5 continues Reich’s dialogue with popular idioms, in that, apart from the mechanical pianos, the ensemble thus created is essentially a rock band (Black having switched to electric bass). The music confirms this: the rhythms and melodic lines, as well as the timbres, reflect the rock sensibility. Against this Reich applied rhythmic irregularities, an enriched harmonic palette and a genuine harmonic motion absent from your typical evening at the Middle East.

We don’t know how much farther Reich intends to go along these lines, and his willingness to do so at his age is a remarkable thing as well, but the result was a highly engaging and rewarding exchange of ideas that even maximalists can get behind. The performances were as formidable as the music, which in this case is high praise. Our only quibble would be for better balance between the electric instruments and the pianos, which tended to get submerged too often.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Michael J. Lutch photo

As a lagniappe to his week of conducting the BSO, Christoph Eschenbach appeared on March 4 in his original pianist guise as accompanist to BSO Assistant Principal Oboe Keisuke Wakao in a recital sponsored by the American-Japanese Cultural Concert Series at Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill. Wakao runs this series as well as the church’s own concert programs. This one was billed as a benefit concert, although neither the program nor the signage at the event specified qui bonit. We were told unofficially that the benefit was for victims of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The series itself predates these events and was described as the third annual one, although the next program to be held in April is listed as number four. Whatever the chronology, this event attracted a large audience that appeared to contain significant numbers of Boston’s small but active Japanese community.

The program consisted entirely of work from the Western classical canon: Schumann’s Three Romances for oboe and piano, op. 94, and oboe transcriptions of his op. 70 Adagio and Allegro in A-flat, originally for horn, and Mozart’s Violin Sonata in B-flat, K. 454. The transcriber(s) of the latter two were not credited. The former has been recorded by various artists, so must be a staple item, whereas the latter has not; is Wakao’s the hand at work? The collaboration between Wakao and Eschenbach reflects their long history (they first met when Wakao was a member of the New World Symphony 25 years ago) and an avuncular professional relationship of friendship and tutelage.

The Schumann Romances exist in versions for clarinet and violin, but in their original form represent a rare composition for oboe by a composer of the German Romantic era. They date from 1849 and appear to have been intended as a set, which is a bit odd in that they are mostly similar in affect: slow and contemplative, with some contrasting elements, notably in the third. Wakao produced a suitably dreamy and liquid sound, sometimes so wistful that in low registers one could confound it with an English horn. His changes of register were effortless and inaudible, and he exhibited delicacy and prudence in phrasing, particularly in the gentle tailing-off that demands precise mouth and breath control. For his part, Eschenbach kept discreetly in the shadows, aided (if that’s the right word) by the strange positioning of the piano at something like two o’clock to the audience, with the player’s back to the house, so that even at full stick most of the sound hove off to the side.

The critical element in listening to a transcription is to be persuaded that the work had always been meant for the instrument on which it is being performed. Considering the vast differences in sonority between the French horn and the oboe, that would be a fairly tall order in the case of the Adagio and Allegro, but we are pleased to report that not only the unnamed transcriber but Wakao too managed to achieve just this effect. His beautifully shaped phrases and dynamic inflections squeezed every drop of Romantic juice out of the slow introduction — more like a full movement — and then projected very creditable power out of the Allegro, where of course the oboe cannot fully emulate the horn’s capabilities. What it can do, however, is what Wakao did, which is to execute staccato passages nimbly through precision double-tonguing.

Michael J. Lutch photo

Substituting an oboe for a violin is in some respects an easier proposition than doing so for a horn. The second half of the program was given over to Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 32, dating from 1784. One unusual feature is the long slow introduction to the first movement. As mature Mozart, the entire work is that master’s characteristic blend of charm, depth, and perfect balance, demonstrating equal respect for both instruments. Eschenbach was all grace and discretion, being as good as he needed to be without unnecessary bravura. Wakao projected a powerful intensity in the introduction that is not so easy to achieve on the violin, and then again played to his instrument’s strengths in staccato passages. The fast music of the first and third movements evoked a kind of life-imitates-art sensibility, or at least one of the original imitating the copy: on an oboe, this echt-Mozart sounded to us like Poulenc’s evocations at a century and a half’s remove. One further observation should suffice: as we are not intimately familiar with this sonata in its original form, we can’t comment on the extent to which the transcription varied it, but the phrase lengths of the violin/oboe music were perfectly tailored to the wind player’s need to take breaths. This is either a nod to the transcriber in choosing what to tackle, or a sign of the transcriber’s skill in adapting one medium to another.

The duo concluded with two encores. The first, an unintentional one attributable to a spot of bother over music left in the green room, was a reprise of the Allegro from the Schumann op. 70, while the second was a most affecting rendition of “Das Wirtshaus” from Schubert’s Die Winterreise.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

First on the menu was Chorale Fantasy for String Quartet, a 2010 composition Fairouz wrote for the Borromeo and of which this performance was the Boston premiere. Fairouz, an NEC graduate now living in New York, is a composer with whom the Borromeo has established an ongoing relationship. The title “Chorale Fantasy” invokes the Bachian chorale prelude, but whatever his intentions (there were no program notes, but the blurb on the Borromeo’s NEC web page indicates that this was so), the “chorale” was more of an articulated (in the same sense that newer Green Line trolleys are) melody that he immediately begins amending with touches of Near-Eastern cantillation. After a gentle start, the energy level picks up and the melody is developed, not only contrapuntally, but in ways we would more closely associate with Romanticism. After a period of intensely throbbing rhythm, it ends quietly with what may be, Ives-style, a fragment of the chorale melody proper. This short piece was quite attractive overall, and it received as skillful and committed a reading from the Borromeo (for the record, comprising Nicholas Kitchen and Kristopher Tong, violins Mai Motobuchi, viola, and Yeesun Kim, cello) as one has come to expect from this top-drawer ensemble.

Walter Willson Cobbett (1847-1937), British industrialist and passionate musical amateur who, according to the 1927 edition of Grove’s, “has given to commerce what time [he] could spare from music,” established a prize for composers to write chamber works in the form of what he called a “phantasy,” which he imagined to be a 12-minute single-movement work encompassing a variety of tempi and moods. If you want to know more about this unique concept, you could read a whole thesis on it here. Among the composers who either won the prize or were specifically commissioned to write Cobbetoid phantasies are Frank Bridge, Haydn Wood, James Friskin, John Ireland, York Bowen, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ethel Barns, and, in 1932, the 19-year-old Benjamin Britten. Actually, Britten wrote two phantasies, the one for string quartet that won the prize, and the one for oboe and string trio, op. 2, that appeared on Sunday’s program with NEC undergraduate Elizabeth O’Neil joining Tong, Motobuchi, and Kim.

The Phantasy, an engaging and charming bit of early Britten, reveals the composer’s precocious cleverness. It begins with a march-like rhythm in the strings against which he sets a liquid and limpid melody in the oboe — and O’Neil’s playing of it merits the same adjectives. This opening passage begins from nothing, and in this performance it emerged from near silence, more so than in any recording we’ve heard. It recurs at the close, in reverse pattern, equally brilliantly carried off. The intervening passages both develop these ideas and sometimes invert them instrumentally and establish the varying moods as per Cobbett’s specifications. Our interest and, we suspect, Britten’s inspiration, flagged a bit in the center, but the performances were all first-rate, with polish to spare. O’Neil got the hearty hometown ovation she deserved.

Emely Phelps, pianist of the Cleonice Piano Trio, which is in residence at NEC while its members pursue master’s degrees, joined the quartet for Dvorák’s Piano Quintet in A major, op. 81 (properly the Quintet No. 2, but the composer withdrew his op. 5 effort in the same key) to finish the forepart of the program. This quintet is one of the most popular works in the genre — the theme of the “Furiant” Scherzo being one of Dvorák’s best known — and so little description is needed here. A brief but cogent description appears on Wikipedia here. Of the performance we can observe that Phelps took a while in the opening movement to find her voice, but find it she did, with an admirable display of chops in the fast bits and with a lovely delicacy in the second movement, “Dumka.” The strings produced an appropriately plummy Romantic sound, with Kim and Motobuchi especially evocative with well-gauged rubato. There was an element of perceived raggedness in the Finale, but we judge this to be less a matter of execution than a glitch in Dvorák’s writing: there are times when his string scoring is too “string quartetty,” with divided parts in rich counterpoint, without enough acknowledgment of that big booming black box alongside them. Luckily, Phelps was no cheap and chippy chopper, and declined to drown out her companions. And, in the end, Dvorák and the participants pulled together for the brilliant and fiery conclusion.

The second part of the concert was given over to a particular favorite of the Borromeo, the Mendelssohn Octet for Strings in E-flat, op. 20, and instead of staffing up with a second fully-formed string quartet, the Borromeo brought in the two strings from the Cleonice Trio, Ari Isaacman-Beck, violin, and Gwen Krosnick, cello, along with other NEC graduate students Rhiannon Bannerdt, violin and Wenting Kang, viola. It should be stressed that by referring to these young players as “students,” we are not suggesting that their quality is anything less than prodigiously professional — all are, in fact, extravagantly talented, exquisitely trained, and fast becoming performers of stature.

On earlier occasions the Borromeo has performed this Octet using Mendelssohn’s original 1825 score rather than the more usual 1832 revision; we don’t know which version they used on Sunday. Whichever it was, the first thing we noticed about the performance was that the sound was darker and heavier than what we are accustomed to hearing in this quintessentially elfin and diaphanous piece. Was this interpretive, or just lead-footed? Some of the “plus-four” players seemed to be holding their breath as they raced through the breaks. After a perfectly balanced and cozy slow movement, the Scherzo, the first of Mendelssohn’s patented fairyland wonders, which has to be soufflé-light, seemed at times too much like the soufflés we concoct, alas, but the ending of the movement was perfect. In the Finale, which overall was well done but not the best rendition we’ve ever heard, it seemed too often as if first violinist Kitchen was trying to hold the ensemble together with his pyrotechnics, which were formidable. There was also a bit of a balance problem, sonically and — perhaps because from where we sat it was so evident — visually, as one of the “plus-four,” with a big smile but flamboyant body English and beefy tone, grabbed rather more than an aliquot share of the cookies.

You, however, may beg to differ, and NEC has happily made it easy to do so, whether you were in attendance or not. This program is among those it has put on its InstantEncore site, here, where you can stream or even download the performances. It’s well worth the one-time bother of registering, and is, in our opinion, one of the best services NEC performs for the wider public.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Another first for us (guess we just don’t get out much) was the chamber orchestra arrangement Hugo Wolf made of his popular Italian Serenade for string quartet. The “serenade” title was, one might say, a bit aspirational as things worked out: only the first movement of the projected Mozart-like suite made it to paper before Wolf’s mind gave out. Still, its six-plus minutes are a perennial delight. NECCO approached it in a subdued, relaxed, gemächlich way, with superb dynamic nuance and balance (especially between strings and winds) and close attention to contrapuntal details, which Wolf’s expanded orchestration cleverly enhanced. There were well-deserved solo bows for violist Alice Marie Weber and cellist Dahae Kim.

Another possible first hearing for us, even less explicable than the Wolf, was Haydn’s Symphony No. 80 in D minor, Hob. I:80, a compact stunner of a masterpiece from 1784 (and apparently a favorite of Mozart as well). Minor-mode works by Haydn are comparatively rare, and this one is self-aware in an almost postmodern way. It opens with a stern and taut melody that NECCO’s unnamed program annotator (Palma?) suggests might even be a spoof of the younger composer; by its end it has, in Haydn’s ingenious way, morphed into a major cadence. The second subject seems almost a placeholder, while the surprise is a third melody, a waltz-like tune of sublime goofiness that, we’re happy to report, NECCO declined to ham up any further. What they did do, throughout the movement, was pay loving and expressive attention to Haydn’s numerous Luftpausen, to comic or thrilling effect (usually both).

The slow movement of Haydn’s no. 80 is its longest, charming and subtle, with some surprising chromatic passages. This evoked from NECCO its smartest and most elegant playing, well paced and keyed by concertmaster Kobi Malkin’s gestures (the seating in NECCO shifts for every piece, so Malkin shared duties with Jennifer Wey in the Wolf and Robyn Bollinger in the Bartók). The minuet returns to the Sturm und Drang of the opening D minor, with astonishing sleight-of-hand transitions from minor to major and back. The finale, though, is the work’s capstone, full of off-kilter rhythms and general snap, crackle and pop that displayed NECCO’s altogether superior ensemble work, including an audience-fooling false ending. This symphony has been under-recorded for its brilliance, but you should check it out on various streaming services. We’re sorry to report that this program seems not to have been put up on NEC’s InstantEncore station.

The single strings-only work on the program occupied the second half. Bartók’s Divertimento for String Orchestra was among his last works written in Europe, a second commission from Paul Sacher’s Basel Chamber Orchestra in 1939, following the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by three years. Sacher’s idea was to have something rather lightweight to complement the seriousness of the earlier piece, but just as it was almost impossible for Haydn to write music that was not at least witty when not funny, lighthearted is clearly a relative concept in Bartók’s output. The opening movement commits to a warm sonority, but is a bit heavy until the second subject. As with the Wolf, NECCO stressed contrapuntal lines; neither did it shy away from the score’s darker aspects. There was some gorgeous playing, as well, in the sectional duet of violas and cellos/bass in the movement’s coda.

The molto adagio middle movement is a classic bit of Bartók night music in the form of a slow fugue, somewhat reminiscent of MSPC. NECCO carefully controlled and sculpted the dynamics, with occasional piercing stabs. As one would expect, the work’s sprightliest music comes in the finale, but it struggles for dominance until the famous — and brief — pizzicato waltz ushers in the jubilant coda. We can find nothing whatever to complain about in NECCO’s execution.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The opening work was certainly representative, at least on the surface. Jean Sibelius’s Four Pieces for Cello and Piano, op. 78, got a robust and unimpeachable performance from cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer, with a solid if excessively deferential accompaniment by pianist Christopher Guzman. These pieces, written for either violin or cello, were intended as popular moneymakers, and by and large they avoid the brooding Nordic moods one thinks of as typically Sibelian. It opens with a brief and folkishly sprightly Impromptu, followed by a charming, romantic Romance of the “Melody in F” genre (it’s even in F!), which is sometimes performed as a stand-alone work. Popper-Keizer’s portamento here was admirable, as was the resonance of his lower register. The mood does deepen somewhat for the Religioso movement, with strong depth of feeling imparted by both players. The finale was a most un-Sibelian touch, a “Rigaudon,” to which Popper-Keizer brought as much oomph as the music could tolerate, as well as a few flashes of passion and a very adroitly carried-off passage with rapid alternations of arco and pizzicato.

As is Chameleon’s wont, the program featured both standard rep and newer works. Among the latter was the Welsh-born Hilary Tann’s From the Song of Amergin, a 10-year-old piece for the Debussyan trio of flute, viola and harp, in the persons of Deborah Boldin, Scott Woolweaver and Anna Reinersman, respectively. In five linked sections, this charming neo-tonal work addresses ideas conjured by phrases from the ancient Celtic calendar-alphabet poem for which the piece is named. The central sections feature the individual members of the trio: the harp for “wind on a deep lake,” the viola for “a tear the sun lets fall,” the flute for “a hawk above the cliff.” The music begins with a strongly modal element with occasional bluesy bends, with Boldin bold and Reinersman spooky. The music works wonders pairing the various instruments off as well as highlighting single ones. Boldin and Woolweaver had some wonderful duets, Reinersman had some licks that sounded straight out of Britten, and others that plumbed murky depths. In general, though, we got the sense that Tann wanted the instruments to retain distinct personalities. We were, overall, quite pleased with the piece and the performance, though there were times we felt that Boldin’s contribution could have benefited from greater subtlety of phrasing and tone.

The first half of this rather long program closed with A Voyage to Fair Isle for piano trio (Joanna Kurkowicz, violin, Popper-Keizer, and Guzman) by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. (A note to the program annotator: PMD does not have a compound last name, like Vaughan Williams; and a note to David Elliott, whose radio announcements for BLO’s production of The Lighthouse consistently mispronounce Davies’s last name: it’s said as if it were Davis). This 20-minute one-movement piece dates from 1995 and seeks to capture the flavor of the doughty natives of Fair Isle, a speck of land in the North Sea between Shetland and Orkney, on a latitude just about even with Oslo, Uppsala, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg. Davies does so in a typically oblique way: the piece is based on a plainsong having nothing to do with anything, except that it commemorates the “official” birthday of the Virgin, which also happened to be (a) the day Davies started work on the piece, and (b) his own birthday. As it undoubtedly — not just coincidentally — happened, the tune (we never hear it straight out) contains a nice turn and a rhythm that could stand in satisfactorily for a Scotch snap. All the materials are presented mysteriously in a slow introduction that one can imagine invoking the isolation of this remote and only arduously accessible place; and the rest of the piece, more often slow than fast, is its working out. The effect is like a chorale prelude where you never hear the chorale, unlike, say, Ives’s analogous structures where eventually you hear the principal tune. What Davies does instead is suddenly take his materials and convert them into authentic-sounding (though entirely made up) Scots folk music. This appears unannounced and unprepared after a great many jagged atonal (though by no means unintelligible) episodes, so to our ears it comes off a bit gimmicky. One could, however, discern audible relief from the room-filling audience when it happened. The first such episode was carried principally by Kurkowicz in lusty folk-fiddler style; after an intervening slow passage, the folk element returned in the cello, where Popper-Keizer beautifully evoked the mournful ones of a lone piper, replete with modal chanter against a steady plaintive drone. After this, and a hushed reverential bridge passage, a coda begins that emphasizes the Scotch snap, before fading off to the island’s desolate singularity. The performance by all three players was very strong; an even more passionate one by the work’s dedicatees, the Grieg Trio, has been recorded.

In addition to mixing up musical periods and genres, Chameleon likes to mix up its sonorities, and so the second half began with Carl Nielsen’s Wind Quintet, op. 43, with Boldin joined by Nancy Dimock, oboe, Kelli O’Connor, clarinet, Whitacre Hill, horn, and Margaret Phillips, bassoon. This piece typically ends a program by a wind quintet; it is the most famous one by an arguably Romantic-era composer. And, while the Danish Nielsen sits well, at least on paper with the theme of the program, the actual music — more abstract and neoclassical than Nielsen’s earlier work — is a less compelling addition to the boreal atmospherics of the evening’s plan, with the possible exception of the Danish-modern severity of the first movement’s gestures.

That said, the Chameleon quintet (which, interestingly, performed the work standing) conveyed it with technical precision and a solid sense of how the piece goes. Individuals within the group made some wonderful sounds, notably Dimock, Hill, and Phillips at various places, and as an ensemble the sound blended admirably in the finale’s chorale opening and closing — no mean feat in a wind quintet, where every instrument has a distinct timbre. At other times, as in parts of the first movement, there was shrillness when the flute, oboe and clarinet were all playing in the same register, a problem that might be better laid at Nielsen’s feet than at those of the players. There was also, at times, a balance problem. We approach the latter critique cautiously, as all the players are experienced and well-regarded professionals, and the acoustics of the Goethe-Institut’s concert room are notoriously flaky. Nevertheless, when solo or paired, as in one of the finale’s variations, Hill overwhelmed his companions and the space. Another concern we had was that the performance generally suffered from a lack of subtlety in dynamics and phrasing.

The closer for the evening was a horse of different hue. Kurkowicz and Guzman collaborated in a full-throated and kinetic performance of Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in C minor, op. 45, the last and most popular of Grieg’s violin sonatas, although not perhaps as often played as his cello sonata. Good for you, Chameleon, for programming it. It is, as the Wikipedia article asserts, Grieg’s last attempt at sonata form, and it must be acknowledged that such extended compositional utterances were not, with the early and extraordinary exception of his piano concerto, his long suit. The force of this sonata comes from its grabbing melodies and ingenious harmonization rather than any subtlety in their working out. These, and Grieg’s sheer insistence, create a charged atmosphere that Kurkowicz exploited with fire and bravura and a gorgeous, delicate and über-Romantic sheen in the alla romanza middle movement. Especially in the finale, she swung for the bleachers whenever the opportunity presented itself. Guzman, with occasional and welcome exceptions, remained in the shadows but provided a firm and steady foundation.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.