An easy initial response to a question often asked by my students — “What is it that makes it Romantic?”— is that Romantic music tends to be involved in some kind of story. European Romanticism also has been called the cult of the individual, each containing the spark of divinity, linking all in a vast chain ultimately connected to “Truth.” Nature was a constant companion and teacher. In the case of the Schubert cycle, the first of its kind in Western music, this is illustrated by an array of characters that contribute to a tale in distinct ways.

The multitalented poet Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827), who lived approximately the same years as Franz Schubert (1797-1828), is highly representative by making his story a personal experience. It is he who becomes excited by the brook and is enticed to follow its path through the woods. Schubert shared his love of nature with the poet; his deeply felt sense of the poem is essential for an effective transfer to the aural medium. Using the piano as his voice, he communicates the poet’s longing.

The brook, a lively representation of Nature with its ever-changing character in both sound and physical constitution, plays a central role in the drama. (Without the brook, there is no wandering.) The itinerant miller’s sensitivity toward nature pulls him to his wanderlust and adventure. He encounters a local miller, whose daughter becomes the object of his affection. (A mill is not a mill without a miller and a miller’s daughter.) Here again, the Romantic soul is stimulated by encounters both natural and human.

Nature contains many secondary roles: trees, flowers, birds, moon and stars, barking dogs, even the natural green color (which becomes an obsession for the wandering miller), all taking part in the unfolding story. But hold; he is not alone in his quest for the miller’s daughter’s affection. A hunter appears at the millstream and the miller-poet tells him boldly to stay in his own forest preserve. He chastises the wildly raging stream. “Are you chasing after bold Brother Hunter?” A foreshadowing of the miller’s fate occurs at this point; he asks the brook to not tell the miller’s daughter of his sadness.

All of the parts work together to bring the sad tale to its ultimate conclusion. In actual performance, the stage is bare other than a piano and the two performers, the singer and the pianist (not accompanist), and they are totally responsible for communicating the poet’s message. No stage props or decoration. Each performer must collaborate with great sensitivity to unify each minute particle of the total experience. Kelley’s and Sherman’s flexibility and accommodation to each other in subtle tempo changes and dynamics were remarkable, and a union was achieved not easily obtained in performance.

Kelley’s sensitivity to the text was more readily recognized, but the non-verbal piano also exhibited the necessary qualities in rhythm and tone. The opening lied illustrates how the piano as one-half of the narration sets the stage. Rapid arpeggios mimicked the bubbling brook, enticing the miller to wander as the brook wanders. Staccato singing reinforced the excitement the brook represents to the miller. In the second lied, Kelley became more lyrical, extending the metaphor of piano and rushing brook. “Tell me, brook, where are we going?” Sherman continued the arpeggios, sustaining the question. (It is now apparent that there may be much in store for the miller as he comes upon a mill glinting in the sunlight.)

As the story continued, the subtle differences in tone, tempo, dynamics, and articulation were effectively illustrated; Kelley and Sherman both made much of the poem’s contrasts. The fifth lied demanded and received the necessary mood changes (as the miller-poet realizes his strength is ordinary and others could do as well, turning the millstones, yet returns to belief in his own strength, to reveal his true purpose to the miller’s daughter).

And so the tale continues to express the poet’s longing, his lack of assurance that the miller’s daughter could love him, his quest to the brook to give him answers, and the constant dialogue with the brook to help him understand his fate. Ultimately, it is the brook that has the final lied singing a lullaby to the weary traveler.

A tale well told, sensitively, musically, and aesthetically satisfying. Kelley and Sherman transported us to a different plane, where we could forget the cold outside and take respite in a sincere expression of unrequited love.

Anthony J. Palmer, presently a Visiting Scholar at Boston University, has a BA in vocal/choral studies and MA in composition from California State University, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. from UCLA. He retired from college teaching in 1998.

Haydn composed the Mass in D minor, subtitled Missa Angustiis (“Mass in Time of Distress”), Hob. XXII:11 towards the end of his life, while Austria and most of Europe shook in anticipation of Napoleon’s next conquest. Financial pressures led his patron Nikolaus II Prince Esterházy to fire the wind players from the orchestra at his Eisenstadt estate, which forced Haydn to forego some lighter textures in his setting of the Mass. Lord Nelson’s stunning victory against the French shortly before the work’s premiere gave the piece its more popular moniker, while emphasizing the fine line between tragedy and triumph that trumpeter and artistic co-director David Kjar spoke of during an engaging pre-concert talk.

From the gripping, beseeching “Kyrie” and sweetly ascendant “Gloria” that followed, the eight voices and 13 instruments under Rifkin’s baton proved more than sufficient for this score’s emotional intricacies. Rifkin’s propulsive tempos made this a mass to tap your feet to, while offering orchestral transparency and dramatic plausibility. Glass-toned trumpets in the “Gloria” sounded fitting praises for the Maker, and the fugue “Credo” benefitted from translucent part separation as well as assertive rhythm. The small body of strings relished Haydn’s writing, providing a rocketing ascent for the “Et Resurrexit” and providing plush harmonies on the “Sanctus.” The full orchestra blasted out God’s entrance with beautiful foreboding in the “Benedictus.”

Given that the four soloists joined the four-voice choir for all of Haydn’s choruses, the stamina on stage was nearly as impressive as the voices filling the church. Haydn included several soaring moments for soprano, and Margot Rood’s resplendent voice illuminated the music while her sense of proportion and dramatic instincts never overshadowed her colleagues. The soprano feature “Et Incarnatus” revealed even more of this incredible voice: firm yet sweet, with a confident top, the sheer strength never overwhelmed Haydn’s lithe textures. Rood’s emphasis on “homo” (“man”) unearthed layers of tenderness and vulnerability. Her fellow vocalists were equally emotive in solo and ensemble, for example in bass Ulysses Thomas’s imploring “Miserere nobis” (“Have mercy on us”) and imposing “Qui sedes, ad dexteram Patris” (“You who sit, at the right hand of the Father”) during the “Qui Tollis.” Chorus, soloists and orchestra alike highlighted the fear, reverence, and ultimate resolve behind Haydn’s troubled Mass.

It was preceded Haydn’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in C Major (Hob. VIIa) for four strings, featuring violin soloist Marika Holmqvist. Despite the quartet’s springing introduction, Holmqvist got off to a rough start, with slips in intonation and rushed figures. Unfortunately, Haydn’s tuneful, spry “Allegro Moderato” didn’t lend itself to Holmqvist’s aggressive bowing, and fleet passages sounded rote rather than spontaneous. She relaxed her approach for the curves of Haydn’s Italianate second movement, and by the closing “Presto,” Holmqvist’s passages tumbled playfully, but problems in the upper register plagued her entire performance.

Throughout the concerto, four strings accompanied Holmqvist with a precise, lush sound, filling the space without overwhelming it. Like the robust yet nimble Mass to come, and as many sports fans would come to learn later that evening, size didn’t matter when it came to making an impact.

Andrew J. Sammut also writes for Early Music America and All About Jazz and blogs on a variety of music at clefpalette.wordpress.com. He also plays clarinet and lives in Cambridge.

All the same, I couldn’t help wondering whether “Telemann vs. Bach” was a legitimate musical juxtaposition or a gimmicky comparison. The supposedly contentious nature of the Bach/Telemann pairing was further emphasized when violinist Sarah Darling turned to the audience after the first piece and encouraged active participation, urging us to join the “debate” and choose a “winner.” A bit contrived? Perhaps, but the pairings did highlight the stylistic differences between the two composers and asked us to grapple with issues we might otherwise overlook. We tend to think of Bach’s music as rigorously demanding, academic, and “serious,” while Telemann’s pieces are charming, accessible, and (dare I say) a little superficial. This program challenged those notions.

The evening began with Telemann’s Concerto for Strings in A Major (TWV 43:A4) and featured Sarah Darling and Megumi Stohs Lewis (violins), Emily Rideout (viola), Rebecca Shaw (cello) and Akiko Enoki Sato (harpsichord). While the piece was full of imaginative and whimsical playing from the outset, it was clear that the players really hit their stride in the final Allegro. It was as if the dial had been turned up a notch: the group performed with energy and enthusiasm, not to mention wit (a particularly playful transition in the cello elicited a few chuckles from the audience).

Originally written for organ, Bach’s Trio Sonata in D minor (BWV 527) featured a pared-down ensemble of two violins, cello, and harpsichord. The thinner texture highlighted the interplay between violinists Sarah Darling and Megumi Stohs Lewis; in the Andante I particularly enjoyed certain bow-strokes that seemed to emphasize expressiveness over sheer beauty. The players brought out the achingly beautiful suspensions in the Adagio e dolce and delivered a wonderful ending that seemed to simply evaporate into the hall. The Vivace found the upper voices weaving extensive filigree with a light touch as the movement modulated its way back to D minor.

The Concerto for Recorder and Strings (TWV 43:a3) brought Héloïse Degrugillier (recorder) on stage for the first time that evening. She played with a beautiful limpid tone and phrased the long lines of the Adagio and the lively Allegro superbly. In the following Adagio the players captured a mood of serenity, supported by sensitive accompaniment in the cello and harpsichord. The Vivace allowed each of the solo instruments to sing in virtuosic cadenza-like displays. While Degrugillier handled very difficult passages with ease and aplomb, Darling stole the show with gutsy, imaginative barriolage at a tempo teetering on the edge of comfort.

I was happy to see  Bach’s Trio Sonata in C Major (BWV 529) arranged for violin, viola, and cello, offering violist Emily Rideout a chance to come to the fore. While the contrapuntal Allegro was full of energy, Darling and Rideout complemented each other particularly well in the Largo, weaving long lines and melding smoothly into each others’ sounds. Unfortunately, I felt the final Allegro didn’t work as well as it could have because of different approaches to bow strokes. The contrast in approaches (only highlighted by the extensive imitative writing) somewhat detracted from the overall unity of the work.

Next came Telemann’s Quartet in G minor (TWV 43:g4) which was a lively, witty romp.  The Allegro was flashy and fast-paced, tempered by an Adagio that hinted at greater depth. The final Allegro felt brilliantly tossed-off; Darling’s panache and Degrugillier’s incisive, articulate playing made the whole thing sparkle.

While the Telemann’s Concerto in D major (TWV 43:D4) was the most unfamiliar, I also found it to be the most interesting piece programmed that night. Written early in his career, it reflects both French and Italian stylistic influences. The last Allegro was full of lightness and verve and had several audience members tapping their feet.

We were treated to an encore of a lively Bourrée, rollicking and full of abandon.

Elizabeth Oka is in the process of acquiring as many impractical degrees as she can. She holds a B.A. from Tufts University where she double majored in English and music and is pursuing a master’s degree at the New England Conservatory in viola performance.

The 16-year old prodigy George Li has already done it all, in pianistic terms. He has run off with the best prizes (since he was six), honors, appearances at the White House and with orchestras since he was nine, (Cleveland Orchestra recently), and has been the subject of repeated audience and reviewer adulation. One prize-giver even bent the rules so someone Li’s age could enter and win. I briefly thought about skipping his concert — did he really need another review?  — but am thrilled I didn’t miss it, because the concert on February 5 at the Isabella Stewart Museum Sunday Concert Series was one of the best piano recitals I have ever had the pleasure of hearing.

The bespectacled Li also has been appearing on television since he was nine, an adorable boy with a big smile and, until very recently, braces. A person hearing such a huge talent is bound to be mystified: how can a prodigy play all this so brilliantly and with such extraordinary musicianship? And one must keep in mind that this program is a different one than he played just a few months ago.

Li, who still looks much younger than his 16 years, began his program with Haydn’s Sonata in C Major, Hob. XVI:50. He sat down at the piano (the lid was removed) and simply played with stunning sensitivity and musicality so brilliantly that one is, at first, stunned. How can this youngster give the best of them a run for their money with Haydn, so seemingly straightforward and simple? (Like other pieces on this program, it appears with an even younger Li on YouTube).

Robert Schumann’s Abegg Variations, Op. 1 doesn’t get played very often, which is a shame. Schumann the dreamer drops in, but mostly there is a lot of technical brilliance. Even early Schumann is good Schumann, and Li reintroduced us so deftly to this piece.

I had my seat belt fastened for the tonal but seriously dissonant Bartók Sonata, and sure enough, Li delivered all the pyrotechnics needed when faced with its double octaves, percussiveness, and all the wild qualities that Bartok brings to the music he wrote for piano. It was terrific.

After a short intermission, Li played three famous piano preludes of Debussy. “General Lavine” – excentrique was played with exactly the nuttiness and humor necessary — a delight. The well-known La fille aux cheveux de lin (Girl with the flaxen hair) was also just right: not too much sentimentality, the right amount of rubato. Finally Feux d’artifice was played just perfectly; the myriad technical challenges, explosive moodiness were just nailed.

I always saw Schubert’s beloved Fantasy in C Major, D. 760 (“Wanderer”) as a mature pianist’s piece, perhaps because I grew up on an old Rubenstein record of it. Li opened it perfectly with a big, gorgeous sound and an ideal tempo. The lyrical passages were beautiful, the adagio unsentimental but lovely, the voices and passagework perfect. Shall I go on?

Two encores followed: Liszt’s La Campanella on YouTube) and Schubert/Liszt’s “Hark, Hark the Lark.” The audience was thrilled. I would guess that had a CD of George Li been on sale, it would have sold out in a heartbeat.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

When writing about such a profoundly influential work, one is tempted to focus on the piece itself at the expense of the specific performance. After all, Pierrot, which retains its freshness a century after its 1912 premiere, can be counted among the most impactful chamber pieces of the 20th century. Its visionary grouping of flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano created a new instrumental genre, and since its time, composers from Ravel and Stravinsky to Berio, Boulez, Carter, and Ferneyhough, have felt compelled to respond. In the 20th century, the “Pierrot Ensemble,” with various additions and subtractions to its core instrumentation, became ubiquitous in contemporary music and has become the most common instrumentation for new music ensembles in America and abroad.

But Pierrot was equally important to the advancement of vocal technique. Strauss and Humperdinck were experimenting with various types of recitation as early as 1897, and Schoenberg himself used spoken song in his first attempts at writing his Gurrelieder in 1900. However, at the time of Pierrot’s completion, it was the first piece of its scale to limit itself to sprechstimme, a combination of singing and speaking in which pitches are approximated and smeared via deep glissandos. The implications this had for 20th-century vocal music were far-reaching; and the well-defined extended techniques explored in music after Pierrot, including Luciano Berio’s collaborations with Cathy Berberian, owe a debt to the expanded set of possibilities unlocked by Schoenberg.

Historical importance aside, this particular performance of Pierrot was special. Paula Robison’s sprechstimme was alternately light, primal, wry, hysterical, and explosive. Robison’s physical manner was equally striking; she often surveyed, pranced about, and stalked the stage, making direct eye contact with the audience and members of the ensemble, unpredictably oscillating between seduction and menace.  In the third stanza of Der Dandy, one of the 21 poems that comprise the work, she conjured a satirical, mocking effect, while reciting part of a verse that translates to “Pierrot with waxen complexion/ Stands musing, and choosing/his makeup for tonight” (from Robison’s own translation). Later she was both terrifying and terror-stricken when practically screaming lines that translate to “His hand with godlike power/ Rips wide the priestly vestments.”

The brand new Calderwood Hall, surely one of the most beautiful, oddly conceived concert spaces in Boston, provided the perfect layout for witnessing the music’s hair-raising eruptions. Laid out as a cube with three balconies that surround and look directly down onto the stage, the hall amplified the voyeuristic nature of the experience. There was a befittingly exhibitionist quality to Robison’s fiery histrionics. Indeed, the experience lent itself to incredulous gawking, and the layout of the hall magnified this, positioning the virtuosic performers like savage, other-worldly creatures surrounded in an invisible cage.

The performance was not all ferocity and dread, though. The nimble ensemble produced elegiac and tranquil moments with equal effectiveness. Sooyun Kim could be full-bodied and lush with her flute or searing with her piccolo. Violinist David Fulmer was vivid and exacting, displaying an enthusiastic mastery over the colorful complement of string techniques called for by the score. At the beginning of Part Two, during a verse which includes the lines “Fearsome, gruesome giant black moths/ Killing out the shining sun,” cellist Michael Kannen and pianist Steven Beck fashioned a sound that crept through the hall like a dark, foreboding fog, signaling a shift in tone from Part One’s somewhat sunnier subjects to Part Two’s violence and intensity.

One of the most striking facets of Pierrot is its juxtaposition of extremes of emotions. The piece often shifts from grotesquely agitated, to serene, and back again with little if any transition between the poles. All of this is dizzying, yet hilarious, moving, yet strangely disaffecting.  The irony is that these extremes of human expressiveness can almost induce numbness. One observes an uncomfortably familiar caricature: a lustful, bloodthirsty, yet sensitive and self-pitying expressionist archetype. The foolish, naive commedia dell’Arte pantomime, Pierrot, is updated for the early 20th-century. In this incarnation he reflects and serves the self-deprecating, angst-ridden early modernist, and the agenda of Schoenberg’s panicked but often-ironic expressionism.

The first three pieces of the program, providing a clever warm-up to Pierrot, feature the contrasting styles of Schoenberg’s two most important students, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. Webern’s Two Pieces for Cello and Piano (1899) was completed when he was just 16. Tonal and rooted in the romanticism he absorbed during his youth, the piece is expressive and accomplished, but certainly not a mature work in the composer’s eyes. In fact, Webern did not begin assigning his pieces opus numbers until nine years later, effectively dismissing all he wrote before the age of 25.

Webern’s Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano, op. 11 (1914), presented the artist at full maturity. By this stage in his development, Webern had arrived at the style with which he is most associated — an intensely concise, sculpted pointillism. The three pieces together last approximately two minutes and are composed of a series of brief but vivid gestures. Webern consciously left behind the technique of lyrical expressive cello writing that was previously expected; instead he favored harmonics, sul ponticello, and isolated pitches, contextualized by brief non-tonal chords in the piano. This piece, like Pierrot, was written during a period when the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Webern and Berg) was using “free atonality,” before the systematization of post-tonal pitch structure through serialism. As the program notes mentioned, the second movement is notable for its use of 12 consecutive discreet pitches in the cello, the technique that Schoenberg would develop and formalize seven years later.

Though equally under the influence of Schoenberg’s advancements, Berg used liberation from tonality to contrasting ends. In Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, op. 5 (1913), Berg’s lines, though eschewing a pitch center, are lyrical and connected. Clarinetist Carol McGonnell displayed her world-class dynamism and dexterity in the animated first movement, and her extraordinary control and sensitivity in the fragile, whispery second. Berg’s eloquent hesitance, exquisitely rendered by McGonnell and Beck, provided the ideal contrast to Webern’s abstractions and left the audience in a state of eager suspense, awaiting Pierrot.

The decision to focus the program on post-tonal, pre-serial works written within a two-year period was an inspired one. The Berg and later Webern piece served as an informative contextualization for Pierrot. In discussions of the Second Viennese School, the topic of serialism often looms large, but these works, written before that codification of non-tonal technique may have more in common with the freer methods of today. They showcase each composer grappling with the problem of losing a widely accepted set of governing aesthetic and structural principles. The solutions each discovered provide composers a roadmap of possibilities that remain relevant in today’s complex musical landscape.

David Dominique is a composer living in Somerville, Massachusetts.  He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.

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.

The program started off with a short and pleasing Sinfonia in D Major by Antonio Brioschi, a prolific composer of early symphonies, which became popular all over Europe in the second quarter of the 18th century. The first movement, in abbreviated sonata form, veered toward the minor in its second section before a varied reprise of the opening. In the second movement, the ingratiating triple-time melodies of the opening were punctuated by strident descending unison arpeggios. The lively finale brought Biondi’s virtuosity to the fore, supported by adroit playing by the continuo group.

In the Vivaldi violin concerto that followed (no. 3 in L’Estro Armonico), Biondi had a double function to fill as soloist and leader of the ensemble, turning his back to the audience to give the down bow for each movement and again to coordinate its close. It’s worth noting that the Europa Galante violinists and violists play standing up, which may be closer to 18th-century ensemble practice than the more recent tradition of sitting. Not only did it seem to lead to a particularly energetic and coordinated style of playing, but it also allowed Biondi to move seamlessly between his roles as virtuoso soloist executing flights of passage work and leader of the ensemble in tutti sections.

Angelo Maria Scaccia was the son of a violinist and a member of the ducal orchestra in the 1750s. His Violin Concerto in E-flat Major featured solo passages employing double stops in the first movement and a highly ornamented aria for solo violin and ensemble in the second. The third movement included a short cadenza and a surprising pianissimo ending.

Haydn’s Concerto for Violin and Harpsichord is an early work, composed before he joined the Esterhàzy household in 1766. Continuo player Paola Poncet switched roles to join Fabio Bioni as soloist, while continuing to support the orchestra in tutti sections. The two soloists were heard both separately and together, vying in virtuosity and joining in double cadenzas near the end of both the first and the second movement. In the Presto Finale, Haydn’s toying with offbeat rhythms ended in a battle of wits between the two soloists.

After the intermission we were treated to a stellar performance of an old favorite, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor in which Biondi was joined by the ensemble’s principal second violinist, Andrea Rognoni. Taking the first movement at a brisk tempo, the well-matched pair brought out its fugal intricacies while maintaining a clear sense of the overall architecture, no mean feat. In the second movement, the exquisitely interweaving aria-duet in siciliano rhythm was set off sharply against brusque chordal passages with drone accompaniment. Tasteful variations ornamented the da capo repetition of the opening. In the Finale, the two soloists sounded as one in chordal accents over a lively walking bass, concluding one of the most satisfying performances of this concerto heard in a long time.

A suite of instrumental pieces from Handel’s early opera Roderigo concluded the program. Predictably, it opened with an Overture in the French manner, with slow, dotted-rhythm, duple-time opening and concluding sections enclosing a faster triple-time fugue. In the dance movements that followed, Biondi and his ensemble had a chance to show off their stylistic mastery of the French manner. A lively Gigue and a slower Sarabande in “walking” tempo, played by the smaller concertino group of two violins, viola, and continuo, were followed by a toe-tapping Matelot (the French equivalent of a Hornpipe) for full orchestra. The next group consisted of two minuets for the concertino group enclosing an energetic Bourrée for full orchestra. In the final Passacaille, the recurrent refrain over a ground bass alternated with virtuosic solo couplets for the violin in dialogue with other instruments.

As an encore, Biondi announced “a little surprise:” the fast and furious storm Allegro movement from Vivaldi’s Winter concerto from the Four Seasons. In a tour de force of ensemble and solo playing, this was presented as a programmatic character piece, its chromatically descending harmonies as threatening as could be.

Virginia Newes lives in Cambridge. She was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Arriving for the Needham concert, I studied the program and was surprised to learn that it was the same program I reviewed last summer, when the Boston Cello Quartet performed at Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, on July 29 (“Smörgåsbord of Celli Pyrotechnics,” July 30). I am happy to report that I stand by my earlier review, and with the editor’s permission this review focuses on Boston Cello Quartet over time.

The order of pieces on the program has been re-arranged, so the concert began with Pärt, Fratres. This work exists in multiple instrumentations, dating from 1977 to around 1992, and exemplifies Pärt’s “tintinnabula” style of composition – minimalist works built around a tonic triad and diatonic stepwise motion, reflecting Pärt’s long engagement with Gregorian chant. The union of four celli heightens the mysticism embedded in this music, increasing the aural play of similarity within the minimally changing soundscape. It is also a wonderful beginning for a concert. I wish the Boston Cello Quartet had performed this work without vibrato, which I understand to be Pärt’s preferred performance practice. This would require absolute precision of intonation and a heightened, almost mechanical, level of coherence among the ensemble. Such simplicity making more complex the piece as a whole does better serve this gorgeous music.

I found both the J. S. Bach, Toccata and Fugue in d, BWV 565, and the four movements from the Mussorgsky,  Pictures at an Exhibition — namely, Promenade, Tuileries, Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells, & The Great Gate of Kiev — more effective than in July. The smaller and more intimate space in Needham enabled four celli to produce a richness and volume of sound more closely approaching that of a pipe organ or full orchestra. It was that large sound I missed when I heard these works in Ozawa Hall. The hall really is a crucial determinant in a concert, and here it worked to their advantage.

While the program was familiar, I am pleased to record that the Boston Cello Quartet is manifestly enjoying the music and is more comfortable with the arrangements. Each cellist seems to play to his comforts or strengths: Mihail Jojatu excels in absolutely even tone and regularity in fast passagework (as in the Flight of the Bumblebee), Blaise Déjardin demonstrates smooth bow changes and consistency of a pedal drone, Adam Esbensen a mastery of stopped harmonics (both in Pärt, Fratres), and Alexandre Lecarme showcases a rich legato playing (Bach, Sciortino). Shifting roles as they rotate parts throughout the concert allows each player to shine; I think it also increases their own ease, comfort, and joy in performing. They are establishing a group dynamic and an identity as a quartet, becoming a tighter and more cohesive ensemble and furthering their musicmaking. I look forward to many years of concerts to come.

Cashman Kerr Prince is trained in Classics and Comparative Literature and is now a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Classical Studies at Wellesley College.  He is also a cellist of some accomplishment, currently playing with the Brookline Symphony Orchestra.

Ravel’s second opera, l’Enfant et les sortilèges, premiered in 1925, with a beguiling libretto by Colette, is an entirely different kind of piece — a nightmare fantasy and cautionary tale at the same time, of the visual kind that Walt Disney could have done perfectly, as Ravel’s brother Édouard suggested after seeing Fantasia. Several of my fellow composers have argued that this is Ravel’s greatest work; it is certainly one of his most original, a triumph of his imagination in the years after the Great War when his style underwent rapid changes. Ravel’s love for the fantasy world of children shows up as memorably in this opera, despite a strain of sentimentality, as it does in Ma Mère l’Oye.

The Boston Conservatory, recognizing that Ravel’s operas are seldom heard in small theaters and are complicated to produce, has courageously mounted a double bill of these works, with conspicuous success in all dimensions. A double cast of singers, and a chorus and orchestra, have been assembled for four performances. From a vocal standpoint, both performances were absolutely excellent. (I heard the February 2 performance.) It would be hard to imagine more naturally expressive singing even from seasoned professionals, and all of these singers were students, undergraduate and graduate. The stage direction complemented the vocal gestures to best advantage as well.

The two sets required for l’Enfant, which was first on the program, were imaginatively blended into one, with some shifting and careful changes of lighting. (The chorus, pushing hands or heads through an assembly of horizontal white tapes that made up the walls, reminded me of a very mod production of Wozzeck that I saw in Basel in 1990; the idea really worked here, as it didn’t there.) The dreamlike quality of the first scene, in the Child’s room, was accentuated by having all the costumes of the various characters — armchair, grandfather clock, teapot, teacup, fire, shepherds, princess, Mr. Arithmetic — in white, while only the Child and Mom wear normal colors. In the second scene, in the garden at night, the lively cast of animals had delightful colored costumes, and this menagerie was well choreographed, especially during the “Valse américaine” and the Dance of the Frogs.

I was less pleased with some of the costumes in l’Heure. Granted the 18th-century setting, I wanted the mule driver to wear a working-class uniform, not a wig and waistcoat like George Washington. On the other hand, Gonzalve, the lover who would rather write poems to his girl friend than make love to her, looked just right, more like Lord North, and Don Inigo was a perfect stuffed shirt. Concepcion wore petticoats that were noisy and fuller than necessary for this seductress role, but vocally she was the star of the show. Her acrobatic gifts were almost as great, as the choreographer really put her through her paces.

The pit orchestra was only about half the size of what Ravel required, and there were many makeshifts, but these worked surprisingly well. The brass section, for instance, which calls for 4-3-3-1, weighed in at 2-1-1-0, but these skilled players worked overtime to fill the missing roles, and the result was good most of the time. I missed Don Inigo’s lonely tuba solo, but the horn stood well in its stead. l’Heure espagnole may be the first opera to use trombone glissandi, at the point early in Scene 1 when Ramiro, the mule driver, tells how his pocket watch saved his toreador uncle from being gored in the bullring. (“Mais si le monstre par la montre fut arrêté, c’est à présent la montre qui s’arrête.”) Because this opera, more than l’Enfant, depends more of the time on a fuller orchestral sound, this particular glissando moment suffered. But Ravel’s rich divisi strings came out nicely with solo strings. In l’Enfant et les sortileges, the lack of a full orchestral sound was less of a problem because so much of this opera is accompanied with high-register and chamber-music-like textures, along with successful orchestral devices that Ravel never tried before. The beginning of the opera is the source of a trick question in orchestration classes: what is the flutelike sound joining with the two high oboes, and why is it flat? In fact, it’s a solo double bass, playing natural harmonics in something like the 21st position. During the foxtrot (dialogue between the teapot and the teacup, the scene with the fractured English and fake Chinese text) Ravel calls for a cheese grater (râpe à fromage) in the percussion section. A notched gourd (râpe guero) was substituted — the same instrument that Stravinsky used in The Rite of Spring.

Congratulations to Andrew Altenbach, who conducted ably and steered through the often risky balance problems with skill. But congratulations above all to everyone, to the large team of performers and production who worked so well together to bring off this complex event so fearlessly.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Artists used to program transcriptions with greater frequency, but that changed along with the rise of internationally renowned soloists and the proliferation of sound recordings. Except for the Crumb sonata, this was a recital of transcriptions, recalling recitals of yore. The program opened with the Johannes Brahms Violin Sonata no.1 in G, op. 78, “Regen,” arranged in D for cello and piano. The transcription, once attributed to the composer, is known now to be the work of Paul Klengel; it was first published in 1897, the year of Brahms’s death. Wispelwey and Giacometti gave a melancholic and subdued reading of this work, technically masterful and musically phrased. Performed mostly on the cello’s upper two strings, the sonic world is far distant from that of the two Brahms cello sonatas: absent was the depth and richness of the cello’s lower register, such a marked feature of Brahms’s writing for the instrument. This arrangement calls for steady command of the absolute upper reaches of the cello, which Wispelwey amply demonstrated. I also found the change to the brighter (on the cello) key of D and the resulting change of timbre to be an obstacle in this piece.

The second work on the program was an unqualified success: the Franz Schubert Fantasy in C for violin and piano, D. 934 (op. posth. no. 159), arranged for cello and piano. The unattributed arrangement of this virtuosic showpiece, inspired by Schubert hearing Paganini perform in Vienna, is by Wispelwey himself. The work is technically challenging, but that did not stop him and Giacometti from having fun performing it. The shifts from legato lyricism to rapid passagework were all shaped into lovely musical phrases. This arrangement is a more successful transcription than the Brahms that opened the program; the Schubert highlighted the performers’ technical prowess and musical strengths but also deployed the richness and wealth of cello and piano in a manner more respectful of each instrument’s capacities.

Following intermission, Wispelwey returned to the stage for the George Crumb Sonata for Solo Cello (1955). This modernist work, marked by a recurring neo-romantic theme, fit nicely with the first half of the program; and the audience, despite some initial trepidation, embraced the music and the performance. Drawing on the cello’s lower and middle range, the sonata requires some extended technique (notably left-hand pizzicato), as it presents both harmony and melody. Wispelwey articulated all voices well, warming to the andante espressivo, milking the tema pastorale, swelling in the largo, and sprinting in the vivace of the finale.

Giacometti returned to the stage for the Igor Stravinsky Suite Italienne, after Pulcinella (1934), arranged by the composer with the cellist Gregor Piatagorsky. This playful work recalls Boccherini’s writing for the cello as it skips, traipses, dances around thematic ideas drawn from Pergolesi (or so Stravinsky thought; we now know many are of spurious authorship). Spiccato and sautillé bowing in the Tarantella and Introduzione, legato in the Aria, a Serenata in a Neapolitan vein: this Suite Italienne encapsulates in miniature the possible sound-worlds of a cello and served as a fitting summation to the formal program of this recital.

We were treated to two encores. In the Gabriel Fauré, Après un rêve (transcribed for cello and piano by Pablo Casals) we heard Wispelwey give throaty voice to lush and soaring lyricism, his smooth bow-changes sustaining this song. The final piece of the evening was the Frédéric Chopin, Grande Valse Brillante in E-flat, op. 18 transcribed for cello and piano. The brilliant clarity of this final piece, beautifully realized, shone us out into the wintry night.

Cashman Kerr Prince is trained in Classics and Comparative Literature and is now a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Classical Studies at Wellesley College.  He is also a cellist of some accomplishment, currently playing with the Brookline Symphony Orchestra

Experience and empathy of a profound order prevailed in a seascape as majestic as it was elusive. I cannot remember a performance, live or recorded, that reached so far and wide as did this paradigmatic performance of La Mer. Ancient Greek historian and biographer Plutarch said “all things are subject to motion.” This could not have been more obvious than in the uncountable moving parts of the French Impressionist’s celebrated orchestral tone poem as revealed so incomparably by conductor and orchestra.

If you were there at Symphony Hall you may have also found it nearly impossible to take your eyes off one of the most admired conductors of our time, especially when it comes to the French repertoire. He is a sight to behold, a choreographer extraordinaire. You have to see with your own eyes what he does to believe it! A gentilhomme, Maître Dutoit, right from the start of the concert, exchanged pleasantries with Principal Cellist Jules Eskin and others who were flanking his pathway to the podium. From that moment on, a rare relaxed and refreshing air emanated from an orchestra that has been obliged to play under an unusual number of batons during this current season.

The BSO could not have made a greater sound than it did in La Mer. From the staggered bowing of the first violins on a pianissimo high harmonic sustained during the last movement, “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea,” to its massed, monumental climactic close, an orchestral euphoria reigned. The gentilhomme in Dutoit yet again shone through as he deferred to the orchestra, stepping back from the podium and inviting soloists and all to stand to acknowledge ovations from what I would like to believe was a genuinely astounded Boston audience.

A slower global motion rolled on throughout Tout un monde lointain. Thirty-one-year-old  Capuçon, on his 1701 Matteo Goffriller cello — an instrument that surprised with its capacity for a good deal of power if not with its played-down brightness, a kind of  mellowed brilliance — spun out the soul-searching circles of Dutilleux. Capuçon effusively seized the striving and the unattainable state that is everywhere expressed in the five-movement concerto-like work (dating from 1970). His ardent playing drew upon a solid technique, even at the highest possible point on the fingerboard. Sometimes the fleet passages were too fast to discern, and so a touch less enticing. Like distant atmospheres and lustrous stellar objects, the orchestral commentaries were captured through the fine esthetically tuned telescopic lens of the BSO and Dutoit.

Curious was the programming of a throwback such as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme suite — its nine movements made up the first half of the concert — with the likes of the two French composers. I could have done without the Strauss, even its crazy flutes and clarinets, odd percussion sounds, and extended solo work by Eskin and Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe, all of whom kept me occupied with their stylistic takes on a time capsule staking its now questionably relevant claims. Not all went perfectly: imbalances of brass over strings over piano, a prominent high oboe fluff, and a weird upward blurt from the trumpet in the opening of “The Fencing Master.” These were insignificant in an emotionless exercise of old quasi-courtly meddling.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net

The performers also had the advantage of the acoustics of Zero Garden Street’s Christ Church, which when courted assiduously revealed a wonderful degree of clarity and fidelity to the group’s sound. The string quartet is an ensemble upon which the period-instrument movement has perhaps made the least inroads, no doubt due to the comparative lateness of its body of repertoire. So when the quartet’s dramatically cued beginning of Op. 76, No. 2 in D minor (“The Fifths”) resulted in the subdued volume and tone of gut strings played with Classical bows, I experienced something of a disconnect between visuals and sound. Possibly to counter such preconceptions, the players went for bold gestures, fast bows, and ringing notes, most markedly in a chorale-like chord progression later in the exposition that was executed with repeated, swooping up-bows. This was an edgy decision intonation-wise, especially in the initial settling-in period, for under such pressure gut strings reveal not only hairline inaccuracies on the performers’ parts but any defects of their own (notoriously persnickety) selves. However, by the time the recap rolled around, the players seemed well on their way to finding an ideal consensus of dynamics, balance, and grittiness as well as intonation. The sustained suspensions of one transitional section gave the first glimpse of the truly unique sounds available to the quartet, and the growl of pedal tones hinted at quirky possibilities of character.

The second movement, Andante o più tosto allegretto, as its title suggests, was not one of Haydn’s operatic slow movements, but moved along at a relaxed clip. (Throughout the program, in fact, the performers never seemed to be trying to impress with the easy out of extreme tempi.) First violinist Ogata navigated the many principal-line stylings with a pleasingly matter-of-fact honesty, neither making too much of the handfuls of notes nor indulging in overly ornate affectation. The minuet, with its snappy low-versus-high-strings chase, showcased some remarkably crisp and well-synced turns, and the trio offered a chance for the different players’ personalities to emerge. Freivogel and Fishman, when surfacing from their supporting roles, attacked their interjections with gleeful intensity, pouncing on the notes in an irresistibly gremlin-like fashion. Fox, in contrast, was a constant paradigm of grace, even when coaxing snarls from her instrument. This characteristic divergence made the unity of the minuet more powerful by contrast — the purpose of the form made practice. The concluding Vivace assai gave Ogata the opportunity to get a little crazy, popping out lightening-quick glissandi and engaging in feisty, rough bow strokes right on top of the frog — the kind of daredevilry that makes playing on period instruments seem like a blast.

The next selection was Op. 33, No. 2 in E-flat Major (“The Joke” of well-worn punchline). Freivogel’s program notes (copious additional notes were provided by CSEM manager Flynn Warmington) encouraged readers to look beyond the obvious for touches of subtler panache. The quartet made the unusual decision to switch violin parts with every piece, a technique which worked quite well, giving the new selection an added component of originality. As first violinist, Freivogel’s sound was lush where Ogata’s had been crisper; Freivogel treated her melodies with a richer, rounder tone and didn’t shy away from the occasional hint of portamento on shifts. On fast notes she let loose with a volley of bow speed, an impressively energetic display. A more compact bow would certainly have been cleaner, but would have lacked the sense of abandon that revealed her romantic streak. Likewise, Freivogel obviously had fun with the slides indicated by Haydn in the Scherzo, varying the degree of schmaltz with impeccable taste.

The Largo brought the pure intervallic pleasure of two-voice counterpoint, beginning with low strings and continuing with violins. Demonstrating the continuing blossoming of their sonic and emotional range, the players dug into the declamatory chords that came in striking contrast to the movement’s predominant melodic lyricism. Fox had no trouble owning the melody in when it appeared in her instrument’s voice, proof of both her skill as soloist and of the group’s consistently egalitarian balance. The final cadence was a satisfying demonstration of group cohesion achieved, impeccable in both timing and balance. Freivogel set into the goofy, rollicking theme of the Presto with a loose-limbed, sardonic ease, tossing off turns and ornaments, and showed her own particular comic timing with a deprecatory little shrug after the concluding half-cadence. Although audience members began chuckling in an in-the-know kind of way as soon as the final rhythmic hiccups started, my seatmate and I spent the beginning of intermission speculating on the layers of wit that weren’t so blatant — for instance, the fact that the final semi-phrase wouldn’t have been half so witty had Haydn written a less cheerfully moronic theme (amplified by the dictatorial nature of rondo form).

Ogata returned to the top seat for Op. 103 in D minor, Haydn’s last quartet, unfinished and consisting of two inner movements: Andante and Menuetto. Maybe because of the lack of neat bookending movements, maybe because of the composer’s proximity to the hereafter, this quartet was by far the darkest and most chaotic. The Andante was contrapuntally rich and involved introspective and unexpected harmonic changes, for which the quartet put to use their well-developed, organ-like chorale sound. It also afforded Fishman his most lyrical moments. The quartet seated themselves antiphonally, with violins on the outside and the cello next to the first violin; the grace of their interaction and balance soon made me forget all about any oddities of seating, but it did mean that the cello was in my blind spot from my seat at the left of the house. Thus I was pleased to have my attention drawn to Fishman again in the minuet, where he finally got a chance to show off some virtuosity, leaping from sinister low range to raw high notes with masterful changes of color. The movement was a chance for such virtuosity, both individual and communal, being uncommonly deep and intricate for a minuet.

I’m not alone in ranking the Andante of Coriolanus’s last selection, Op. 77, No. 2 in F Major, on my all-time favorite list; Freivogel gushed about it also, in her notes, justifiably extolling the whole quartet as a gem of the literature. Her notes were full of passion for the “amazingly special” experience that is string quartet playing, which, to the lone instrumentalist, can inspire a feeling akin to that of the romantically single person observing a pair of newlyweds. The good news was that Coriolanus was not just talk, but action, demonstrating in their final selection love of the music, respect for each other, and joy at sharing it with the audience. In this piece they reached their greatest heights of sensitivity, the deepest contrasts of fire and sublimity. Though the opening Allegro moderato is monothematic, they invested the second strain with a deeply touching tenderness. Color and character changes were executed with even more nimbleness in the minuet, creating moments of both perfect homophony and dry banter. The tempo of the celebrated Andante was rendered on the quick side, giving it a feeling of lightness, warmth, and resilience rather than bittersweet joy. The finale was, as any good concert finale should be, rollicking and rather messy, the players proving the totality of their exertion on behalf of the music.

The Coriolanus Quartet presented a lovely concert in every way, leaving me with the energetic hope that this “debut” will truly be the beginning of a long and productive collaboration.

Zoe Kemmerling is a recent graduate of the Boston Conservatory and a freelance violist, Baroque violinist, writer, and string instructor.

So the appearance of a new sung, orchestrated work based on a tale like that of Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil at Harvard’s Memorial Church this past Sunday, January 29, had venerable precedent in the dramatic works of its agonists’ own time. Edward E. Jones conducted members of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and the Harvard University Choir in Heloise and Abelard, composed by John Austin with a libretto by Christine Froula. It had many strengths, but its greatest and most serious weakness could have been amended by attending to the older plays’ greater textural variety, not so much in the silliness of comic foils, but in making more room for nuance, using more judicious restraint in scope and scale, letting all parts serve the whole equally well. A hard-working ensemble and a writing team of no small repute saw a very mixed result, I would say, between triumph and dissipation of effort.

As Catholic a space as a Unitarian campus could have mustered in the early 1900s, the church’s shallow fore-choir apron made things more than a bit tight, and other choices might have allowed for more dimensionality in the presentation as well as the placement of the performance. Now that its lacy fenestrated rood screen is unfettered, the use of Appleton Chapel for the choir and orchestra could have made a necessary difference in balance, blend, and ventilation for the performers. Jones seemed to see no reason for considering the soloists at all, except to start and end with them. Shaping phrases with wonderful gestures, his absorption in his own chirognomy and his apparent willed ignorance of the singers’ need for clear airspace reduced the orchestra’s contribution, capable as it was, to a noisy narcissism that fought with, rather than offering a complementary voice to, the operatic score.

Covalent balance would in fact be the thing this score and its performance needed most throughout. A first opera — a first anything — reveals both its own and its genre’s strengths and weaknesses in both the begetting and the realization. Composer John Austin’s first operatic work at times soared and strode forward with aplomb. But too often the score fell victim to a stylistic choice that weighed it down: his syllabic setting of the text plodded on, unrelentingly pedestrian where it might have benefited from a more textured ventilation of line and rhythm. Even the most playful passages, where polyphonic voices in the choir lilted a folk-song-like stanza, were dragged down by the dirge-like ground against which they were set. This also had the unfortunate effect of lengthening the work: any one-and-a-half hours of it would be a reasonable offering, but its own ponderous self-importance began to get in the way. Occasional glimpses of beguiling tone poetry were overwhelmed by the quarter-note’s unrelieved dominance. Heloise is said to be bright and articulate, but no quicksilver melismatic passages bespeak this. Fulbert’s excellent, blocky lines are denatured by giving all the other male characters (and Heloise) lines written just like them. Perhaps a stodginess — of the characters’ inexorable oppositions, the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s grinding judgmentalism — is intended, but it is overdrawn.

A smaller orchestra and choir would allow for the kind of transparency that advocates of historically informed performance have shown us can work for other kinds of music as well. This lighter approach would have given the singers room, both dynamically and within the shifts and colors of their registers, to develop more nuanced characters in conversation with each other. As it was, they all had to fight the band.

The vexed philosophers, Abelard (tenor Matthew Anderson) and Heloise (soprano Tony Arnold) whose love of thought begets a love for each other — and a child, Astrolabe — are opposed, first by her uncle, Fulbert (bass-baritone Jonathan Mark Roberts) and then by the reformer Bernard (bass-baritone Paul Guttry). Roberts’s upper range was adequate for declaiming Fulbert’s steady love and reasoned pride in his niece in the first scenes. As events unfolded, his resonant profundo was more and more fully engaged, growling out his furious grief at Abelard’s betrayal and a clangorous opposition to their marriage.

On the other hand, Guttry and Anderson both sang the notes, but not the music. It is more difficult to portray character in an oratorio-style performance — and Acis and Galatea this was not — but these two barely seemed to be trying. Anderson’s Abelard put me in mind of a male soloist with the Moscow Ballet, many years ago, who danced his entire leading role in Swan Lake without looking at his partner more than once or twice. Guttry seemed content with a workmanlike rendering of a role that is ripe for more expressive characterization: Bernard, the smug, self-righteous spoiler whose vaunted zeal for reform depended on his hypocritical denouncement of others for their basic humanity — the Newt Gingrich of his time — hounded Abelard, some might say to his grave, unrelentingly. The character of Ralph de Bricassart in The Thorne Birds might have been written with him in mind: ambition was his sin, and it is not clear that he ever repented of it. None of this bravado, judgementalism, piety or gall was apparent in Guttry’s portrayal.

(As an indication of how wrong-headed Bernard could be, see Guy Lobrichon’s article on Bernard’s —and his emissary monks’ — mutilation of chants in liturgical manuscripts whose older melodic lines he mistook for more recent innovations, and whose witness to earlier musical practices he thus destroyed: Les cahiers de musique médiévale, vol. 1: Le siècle de St. Bernard, “Bernard de Clairvaux : la réforme et la modernité” Centre de musique médiévale de Paris [see here].)

I had fewer quibbles with Froula’s libretto. Its slight ending — perhaps over-edited to accommodate the score’s thick-noted weight and length elsewhere — does not clarify the significance of Abelard’s last, devastating trial (not that much is known of it: only a short list of the topics on which he was accused has survived). The penultimate Easter scene, joined to a better-sequenced last scene (and scored more lightly) might tie off some of the emotional and logical loose ends. And some small attention could at least be given to providing a more reasonable basis for Heloise’s line “…I shall implore my friend Bernard…” When and how did he become a friend? This seems improbable from his earlier conduct…what happened?

But overall, if one can accept the mechanical premise that Bernard the reformer and Suger the embroiderer (tenor Charles Blandy) kept affable company, which seems belied by Bernard’s railings against any but the negative aesthetic we have come to identify as Cistercian, the text’s reasonableness and attention to its historical sources cannot be faulted.

And it gives both Heloise and the composer those moments of realization and self-revelation that brought Arnold’s tireless work as a singer and actor to the fore. Also like Nina Ananiashvili — the partner-spurned Odette I saw at the Wang Center so long ago — Arnold carried an unflinching commitment to the strength of her role in her very bones. And her work in this case was much harder: most of Swan Lake’s choreographic rough edges have been knocked off for over a century now. Constrained by a too-narrow stage, an impassive protagonist and an unresponsive conductor, she somehow still found the freedom to move. She bent, turned, bowed her head, and let her face be disfigured; she wailed and whispered her love, her fear, and her intelligent awareness of the complex grasp in which life seemed to hold her. Some of the faults of the work — its length, its stodginess, its pudding-thick texture — paralleled the nature of the society in which Heloise was trapped, and within which she yet found growth and a voice.

Economical casting also afforded an Odette/Odile paring of the roles of Fulbert and Peter the Venerable — in some, but not all ways, the villain and the hero of the piece — which would have assuredly been more clearly brought out had Roberts had more rehearsal time with the score. As it was, taking over at very short notice for Sumner Thompson, who had fallen ill, Roberts started with slight insecurities but came so fully into his own as Fulbert that he matched Arnold’s Heloise for intensity by the end of the first act, giving her more to pit herself against than Anderson’s too-placid Abelard, and seemingly finding resources for expressivity and characterization before the audience’s very eyes. The lamentably truncated dénouement gave him no time to develop Peter the Venerable’s charity; an important foil within the story, the abbot of Cluny, battle-scarred from jousts with Bernard, gave Abelard safe haven and a place of peace in which to die when he could not reach Rome and the hope of a reversal of his excommunication at Sens.

The score, interpreted with more flexibility and given a more textured attention to rhythmic and dynamic variation, could yet become, like those older plays, both instructive and satisfying. Its real communicative potential, which Roberts and Arnold worked hard to realize, and which called forth discipline from the choir and the instrumentalists, did bring to the conclusion something of fire and soul. When Arnold as Heloise sang a final, tortured Credo in the face of all that had happened, and then bowed her head in grief, I recalled the physical wrench that Ananiashvili, with a single, final impulse of her arm, had conveyed in her death at the end of Swan Lake. Like the dancer, Arnold had taken a body of work into herself and brought it to birth; finally, literally, she projected Abelard’s death into life and made us care. Like Heloise, she risked her soul.

Donna La Rue researches, writes and presents on the medieval liturgical arts, focusing on the town of Sens. She has published critical reviews for the Boston Phoenix and has taught integrated arts and art history courses for local universities.

The concert opened with Luciano Berio’s Chemins II su Sequenza VI, the one work of dusty 20^th-century provenance, with John Stulz nimbly and at times ferociously executing the tremulous solo part. Berio is well known for his comprehensive series of studies for solo instruments entitled Sequenza, and several of these pieces became the basis for ensemble works entitled Chemins. Here, his Sequenza VI for viola is expanded to include a chamber accompaniment of nine instruments, shaking and palpitating through a succession of tonal plateaus for nearly the entire duration of the piece. The sputtering and sizzling textures, with occasional interjections in the form of clarinet jabs or flute flourishes, gave way slightly towards the end for some slow and thoughtful ruminations from the viola. A marvel in its own right, the piece also served to foreshadow the newer pieces on the program.

Keeril Makan’s Dream Lightly for electric guitar and orchestra featured none of the histrionics that its instrumentation might suggest. The electric guitar part, deftly rendered by Seth Josel, was performed almost entirely on harmonics. This exercise in understatement lived up to its title, as passages hung, dreamlike, in the air, not so much developing as recurring, half-remembered. The piece opened as shimmering strings and harp harmonics provided a bed for a simple diatonic motif, the guitar’s delicate timbres evoking distant chimes, or perhaps a kind of change ringing. The pure intervals of the guitar harmonics occasionally stirred ripples when pitted against the equal temperament of the accompanying instruments, contributing to the hazy atmosphere. Rumblings from the winds were not enough to break the sense of rapt serenity of this gorgeous reverie.

Avner Dorman’s Mandolin Concerto, featuring soloist Avi Avital, was perhaps the most flamboyant and best-received piece of the evening. In its idiomatic tremolos, it harkened back to the Berio that opened the program, and in its diatonic passages also evoked the Makan piece. The orchestral accompaniment, for strings alone, hung in perfect counterbalance against the solo part, serving at times as a distorting gauze that expanded upon and framed the more plaintive, folkloric melodies of the mandolin, and sometimes as a more muscular sheen, thumping a steady, rhythmic pizzicato groove to drive the momentum forward.

Andrew Norman’s Air: for Theremin and Orchestra, featuring soloist Dalit Warshaw, took full advantage of the unique orchestral possibilities afforded by this unique pairing. The theremin’s tone, evocative of the human voice in the lyrically arioso passages composed for it, is nonetheless rather narrow in its spectral contour, opening up a wide range of possibilities for instrumental pairings, of which the composer made dazzling use. It was thrilling to hear the theremin’s mid-range tone suddenly blossom with the higher overtones of the strings, and the strings returned the favor by evoking in cascading portamenti the theremin’s lithe continuum of pitch. Norman composed with a clear sense of the historicity of his featured instrument, favored of sci-fi composers and avant-garde provocateurs alike, with the vibes part in particular propositioning listeners back to a half-remembered space age bachelor pad in downtown Utopia.

Eric Chasalow’s Horn Concerto was in some ways the most traditionally modernist piece of the evening; the horn soloist emerged gradually on a single note from a jungle of sharp jabs from the orchestra. The piece subsided into a reverie in the two slow middle movements, in which gossamer strings provided a backdrop for searing lyricism in the horn part. Soloist Bruno Schneider executed the demanding score with breathtaking agility, extracting an exhilarating range of color from his instrument, even before making use of the handsome mute he wore in a holster on his hip.

As my concert-going companion commented after the show, “Strange bedfellows, indeed!”

Ben Houge, a composer, digital media artist, and instructor of video game audio at Berklee College of Music and Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts, is currently an artist-in-residence at MIT. He will present his work with the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group at a public talk at MIT’s Bartos Theater on February 15 – information here.

George Li performed with nuanced mastery two pieces from Debussy Préludes, Book II:  “Général Lavine – excentrique,” a lively humoresque, and “Feux d’artifice,” alternately meditative and explosive. The concert continued with the second movement (“Interlude: Tempo di minuetto”) and third (“Finale: Allegro moderato ma risoluto”) of Debussy, Sonata for flute, viola, and harp, performed with great sensitivity by Nina Barwell, flute, Rebecca Bogers, harp, & Elisabeth Christensen, viola. This piece has an atypical yet lovely instrumentation; it is fluid and mellow, playing with traditional tonality. Third up, Massenet: Yeghishe Manucharyan, tenor, and the wonderfully sensitive Dudochkin took the stage for the arias “En fermant les yeux (Le rêve)” from Manon and “Pourquoi me réveiller” from Werther, both arias marked by their musical phrasing. Tamara Smirnova, Associate Concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, joined Dudochkin for a tender and intense performance of Debussy’s Clair de lune. The dreamscape of Debussy continued with Sam Ou, cello, and Rebecca Bogers, harp, in Reverie, uniting the former’s passion and the latter’s playfulness into a fascinating musical miniature. Timur Rubinshteyn gave a bravura performance of Debussy, Arabesque No.1, Andantino con moto transcribed for marimba; marimba and Debussy make a truly beautiful pairing, especially when performed so magisterially. Mikhail Svetlov, a bass with a dark profondo voice, and Dudochkin offered a sweet and nocturnal take on Massenet’s “Sérénade: Quand apparaissent les étoiles” from Don Quichotte; the duo were joined by Ou for the Elégie from the same opera, making a lovely ensemble. In the Debussy, En blanc et noir, for two pianos, L.134, Dudochkin and Roberto Poli offered a tight and well-matched collaboration, in a work which points towards the later work of Satie. Rounding out the first half of the program was Debussy’s Danse profane, danced by Miriam Izmaylova, Ronen Zinshtain, Julia Rudyak, and Jason Sydorchenko to an unattributed recording; the talented dancers faced an insurmountable challenge in the small size of Jordan Hall’s stage.

Following intermission, the NEC Youth Symphony also populated that stage. Under the direction of Steven Karidoyanes, the tight and responsive ensemble gave a vigorous reading of Debussy, “Nuages” and “Fêtes” from Three Nocturnes. Yuki Beppu, violin, and members of the NEC Concert Choir and Chamber Singers (for the original, wordless chorus) joined the already densely packed stage for Massenet’s “Méditation” from Thaïs. Beppu has an expressive and beautifully singing tone, here highlighted. The singers remained on stage for Massenet, “Je marche sur tous les chemins…. Obéissons, quand leur voix appelle” from Manon, sung by soprano Yelena Dudochkin, who has a full-bodied, supple voice. (She debuted on Opera Boston’s production of The Nose last year and will surely be heard more often in future.) The concert concluded with the NEC Youth Symphony in a spirited reading of Debussy, Marche écossaise, sur un thème populaire; this musical curiosity opens sounding neither Scottish nor like Debussy, although both musical signatures appear in the piece before its end.

Obviously in such a concert, there are lots of stage changes for the different ensembles and combinations of musicians. This is not the first time I have noticed the paucity of stagehands in Jordan Hall. With only two men, changes took time and interrupted the flow of the evening; I hope in future Jordan Hall will have a more appropriate complement of stage-hands, for everyone’s sake.

The concert included some well-known pieces and some rare gems. The performances were marked by a high level of artistry; personal favorites included the Debussy trio sonata (a piece I had not previously heard in concert), Rubinshteyn on marimba, and Yelena Dudochkin singing the aria from Massenet’s Manon. The lengthy concert was a worthy tribute to Debussy and Massenet.

Cashman Kerr Prince is trained in Classics and Comparative Literature and is now a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Classical Studies at Wellesley College.  He is also a cellist of some accomplishment, currently playing with the Brookline Symphony Orchestra.

Scholars have long used the designation “Anonymous IV” for the unidentified author of a 13th-century music treatise. An important source of information about music in Medieval Paris, it happened to be the fourth in a series of anonymous writings included in an eighteenth-century publication. Hence the name of the group is a learned pun, and a fitting one, given the group’s repertory and makeup. Much of what they perform is preserved anonymously, in manuscripts whose scribes are also unidentified. Founded in 1986, the group comprises Ruth Cunningham, Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek (who replaced Johanna Maria Rose).

According to the group’s website here, the program performed on Sunday has been taken on tour to celebrate their 25th anniversary, consists of six sets of two to six works each, on themes such as “Legends,” “Sisterhood,” and “Ardor.” A cynic might see this program in the same vein as pop-music concerts that are essentially marketing devices for CDs (or music downloads).  Indeed, the rather artificial headings for the sets did not entirely hide the essentially arbitrary character of the one-item-per-CD format. Yet to this listener the program, which lasted a little over an hour (without intermission), was in no way a jumble. This was so despite the fact that the thematic organization largely ignored chronology and style. For instance, it juxtaposed a chanted Marian antiphon from Medieval England (“Quae est ista?”) with the new work by Lang. Yet by the end of the program, I was beginning to feel that I had heard perhaps a bit too much of the same thing. The styles were diverse, yet slow tempos and the singers’ generally reserved approach to nearly all the selections made for limited variety of actual sound, however lovely.

I hasten to add that the group’s generally quiet approach seems to me entirely appropriate to most of this repertory. Their way of singing it highlighted connections between the medieval and the contemporary numbers on the program. David Lang’s engaging “the wood and the vine”— no capital letters in this title or in that of the larger work, love fail, of which it is a part — made much of a three-note melodic formula common in so-called Gregorian chant. Lang’s musical language, which combines elements of Neo-Classical Stravinsky and New York minimalism, seemed not entirely unlike the moderately dissonant idiom of a polyphonic conductus and a carol, both from Medieval England, which preceded it on the program.

The two other recent works were broadly similar to Lang’s. A sustained, largely consonant setting of the Lord’s Prayer by the British composer John Tavener (performed in Anonymous 4′s own arrangement) contained echoes of both Medieval conductus and an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century English hymn. More interesting to this reviewer was “The Scientist,” a movement from Richard Einhorn’s A Carnival of Miracles. The scientist in question is Galileo, whose supposed statement Eppur si muove (“but it does move,” referring to the earth) forms the sole text. Starting in unison, the four voices repeat the three Italian words over and over. They gradually diverge from one another, introducing increasingly complex musical ideas. The roughly five-minute work concluded with what was probably the most forceful singing on the program, although still restrained by the standards of mainstream concert performance.

The minimalist elements here and in the Lang composition, together with several folk works on the program, exemplify the crossover between classical and vernacular music that has been a recurring theme in the work of Anonymous 4. In this they resemble several equally eclectic ensembles that have achieved comparable success in recent decades; the Kronos Quartet comes to mind. Like Kronos, Anonymous 4 include their own arrangements — here of folksongs and hymns — in their concerts and recordings. But they take care to identify them as such in their program booklets, which are unfailingly generous in the amount of information they provide about their often esoteric selections. Not for them is the vague mix of folk, medieval, and “world” music that has become increasingly fashionable in early-music performance during the past two decades. To be sure, the popularity of that sort of programming helps explain their own commercial success.

There is also, of course, a feminist element in what they do. In Sunday’s program it was evident in the inclusion of two chants by Hildegard of Bingen, a German twelfth-century abbess who was one of the few Medieval women composers who is identified by name. How much of the surviving medieval repertory was ever sung by women remains an open question. But its appropriation by four modern female musicians was probably a less momentous decision than the one to forego the instrumental accompaniment that 25 years ago was still practically required for early-music groups.

Scholarly opinion about historical practice already favored a cappella presentation of most of this repertory when Anonymous 4 began performing. But their decision to eschew instruments also melded happily with notions about the purity of unaccompanied voices, in music that is prevailingly sacred and frequently concerned with Mary and other female virgin saints. Of course, this manner of performance also meshes nicely with the type of folk singing that we think of as unspoiled and authentic because it is done without amplified or electric instruments, or with none at all. Marsha Gerensky offered an example in “You fair and pretty ladies,” sung alone in what seemed to these ears a fine imitation of southern Appalachian country singing.

Yet two other American songs, including Robert Lowry’s nineteenth-century hymn “Shall we gather at the river,” did not sound so very different from some of the medieval ones. One reason is that most were done so slowly. The American composer Charles Ives, who made his own idiosyncratic arrangement of this song for solo voice and piano, marked it Allegretto (moderately quick). The more traditional four-part harmonization sung on Sunday, although pretty, was practically funereal in character.

To be sure, the group has lost none of the pure intonation and precise diction, rhythm, and ensemble that have marked its performances from the beginning. But even Francesco Landini’s fourteenth-century ballata “Echo la primavera,” whose refrain has some catchy rhythms typical of this virtuoso late-Medieval Italian genre, would have needed more speed to invoke the “dance-like gestures” mentioned in the notes. The booklet duly reported that Hildegard’s chants are sometimes remarkably ornate, requiring virtuoso singers. But the two relatively brief examples chosen for this concert did not really bear out this side of her work.

I also was not entirely convinced by the approach taken to the ornate upper line of the twelfth-century Spanish or Aquitanian verse “Gratulantes celebremus festum.” This was sung in a way that was perhaps meant to sound like North-African or Andalusian folk singing. The result, however, struck me as harsh, reminiscent of the so-called open-throated technique made famous a while ago by The Bulgarian Women’s Choir.

These, however, are minor complaints. Perhaps because of the brevity of most of the Medieval selections and the fundamental similarity in sound of so many of them, no one item stood out as particularly striking in a program of many well-sung pieces. I certainly enjoyed the thirteenth-century three-voice French Christmas conductus “Nicholai presulis,” although what the booklet meant in describing it as “quirky” was unclear to me — perhaps referring to a few mildly crunchy dissonances and a long melisma on “Nunc” (“now”). Two or three decades ago the mention of instruments in the last two lines of the poem probably would have elicited some sort of orchestration from most medieval specialists. It is a mark of how far early music has come that no one misses instruments when the singing is as clear and assured as this.

As this was the first concert of this type to take place in the Calderwood hall, a word about the sound is in order. David Griesinger has just written a close-to-rave review of the hall itself for this publication here. His report, however, seems to have been on the basis of hearing a rehearsal by a large instrumental chamber group playing new music. I had no difficulty hearing one to four unaccompanied voices singing mostly quiet medieval songs. But this may have been because I was only about 20 feet away from them, in a corner of the ground floor that was reserved for the press.

Because the hall was nearly full for Sunday’s performance and there was no intermission, I didn’t have the opportunity to try out the sound in other locations. It was certainly dry, although not unpleasantly so. There was, perhaps, a certain historical aptness in the placement of the performers at the center of what was essentially an enclosed rectangular court. But only a fraction of this music is likely to have been originally performed in courtyards, and I would not have been happy to have been seated behind the four singers (who faced in my direction the entire time).

Although never histrionic, Anonymous 4′s singing is enriched by gesture, which has to be seen. Probably none of their music was meant to sound as if emanating from disembodied voices, however much one might like that romantic concept. Most of this program involved music whose poetry tells stories, whether in Latin, French, English, or Irish. One misses something of its conversational or presentational character if one cannot see the singers breathing and forming the sounds orally. I wonder, too, how much the hall’s ambience (or lack thereof) contributed to my sense of sonic sameness. Perhaps the inflections of dynamics and color that barely registered for me would have been easier to make out in a more conventionally resonant hall. Surely it will be advisable to consider adjusting the hall’s acoustic as it sees further offerings of various types.

David Schulenberg is a harpsichordist and author of Music of the Baroque and The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach. He teaches at Wagner College in New York City. His website is here.

Performances like Saturday’s remind us why Boston is a special place musically. It is, of course, one thing to have Stubbs co-direct the Boston Early Music Festival, but another thing entirely to have someone of Stubbs’s achievement and understanding performing on stage. But more: in addition to Stubbs, we are lucky to have the considerable talents of BEMF co-director Paul O’Dette, Erin Headley, and Kristian Bezuidenhout in performance with soprano Shannon Mercer and bass-baritone Douglas Williams. The ensemble Tragicomedia presented an evening of early cantatas by Handel and his contemporaries on Saturday, January 28.

It is no surprise, of course, that individual performances were particularly strong. O’Dette was featured on lute in a performance of Sonata à Mandolino e Basso by Handel’s collaborator (and competitor) Carlo Arrigoni, providing a sense of arch 18^th-century Italian drama. In contrast, Erin Headley, one of the co-founders of Tragicomedia, was featured in a re-purposing of Handel’s “Col partir la bella Clori” from Ah, che pur troppo è vero for viola da gamba. Headley’s wine-dark gamba achieved a stunningly vocal timbre in the wine-dark colors of the instruments, making the work ideal for stringed instrument yet cannily wary of the flexibility and direction of lyrical melodic line. Headley achieved a stunningly dramatic read of the aria on her instrument; it is easy to see why Stubbs terms this aria Headley’s “theme song”! Harpsichordist Bezuidenhout was of particular note, presenting a combination of movements from harpsichord suites by Handel. The works, ranging from tender to labyrinthine, culminated in a virtuosic variation set from the Suite No. 3 in D minor (HWV 428) that, in Bezuidenhout’s hands, achieved the fullest orchestral effect of the instrument.

Both Mercer and Williams provided a well-balanced performance, reveling in the rich timbres of both their voices, particularly in the lower registers, as in Strozzi’s Donna no sà che dice, no dice che sà. Williams seemed less comfortable in his high higher range. In contrast, Mercer showed remarkable control and flexibility in her glittering upper range, particularly in solo cantatas such as No se emenderá jamás, the only one of Handel’s Spanish cantatas, or in duet with Wheeler in Agostino Steffani’s Tengo per infallibile. As a duet, both Mercer and Williams fully portrayed the rich operatic drama of the works, be it in the tender moments of at the close of Tengo per infallibile, or the (again) arch Italian drama of Handel’s prayer to Cupid, Tacete, ohimè, tacete.

This is not to ignore to ignore the ensemble as a whole. This six-member group seemed to bear the brunt of the educational responsibilities of the evening, showing us the evolution of Handel’s cantata from its early form in the works Barbara Strozzi (practically Monteverdian seconda practica madrigal) through to the recit/da capo aria style characteristic of Handel and his contemporaries. Tragicomedia had some problems with balance early in the performance that appeared to fix itself quickly. The remainder of the performance remained faithful to a unified understanding of the music, supporting solo lines effectively particularly during instrumental solo lines, as Headley gave in Col partir la bella Clori and O’Dette in Sonata à Mandolino e Basso.

The expertise, sensitivity, and programming expertise demonstrated by Stubbs and the Tragicomedia ensemble were consistently appreciated by the audience that filled the pews of First Church, Cambridge. The ensemble’s well-deserved standing ovation was rewarded with a reprise of the lyrical and (frankly) touching reprise of the final lines of Steffani’s Tengo per infallibile.

Sudeep Agarwala is a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He performs with various choral groups throughout Boston and Cambridge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

File Image (Lynn Goldsmith photo)

Lise de la Salle’s Boston recital debut last night at Jordan Hall, presented by Celebrity Series, began with a genius at the keyboard expounding on Ravel’s Miroirs. Admittedly, her performance had me in tears, those that come with an awakening in life. Spasms of mirth, of sentimentality, and of nobility inherent in the Frenchman’s score were everywhere evident and at times rendered forth in the boldest, most remarkable power I have yet to encounter. The 23-year old de la Salle — yes! — delivered an incomparable message of piano passion and personality.

Surprisingly and disappointingly, that same passion and personality that she brought to the Ravel she also brought, and relentlessly so, to a selection of Debussy’s preludes. Ravel and Debussy are two completely different creatures. Naturalist and pundit on ancient Greek lore, Debussy could not withstand the overt, nearly romanticized deportment the young pianist was intent upon in redefining this composer’s character.

During intermission I found, not surprisingly, that I was not alone in my assessment of the first half of Lise de la Salle’s unveiling. At least for a few more concert-goers, elation also had turned to consternation. After her audacious performance of Beethoven’s Les Adieux, I began wondering what she would bring to the opening movement of the “Moonlight Sonata.” Romanticized it was not, modernized, yes: faster, more impersonalized and declarative, without cantabile.

Obviously, far too much power prevailed throughout the evening. (Is this the New Age, and am I falling behind?) Velocities to extremes were also in play, most startling so in de la Salle’s delivery of Debussy’s Feux d’artifice and Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest. In her first encore, the third movement from Bach’s Italian Concerto, scale passages morphed into glissandos. His sequential passages whizzed by, making the whole sound as if it could have been the perfect soundtrack to a cartoon. Two other encores followed: a Chopin nocturne and a Schumann Kinderszenen selection.

Truthfully, I like to root for the young, even more so for those who dare to take chances, go out on a limb in search of freshness, new life. In an interview that aired quite a few years ago, Broadway man Stephen Sondheim disclosed a few words for the wise, “I try to write music that is fresh yet inevitable.” So, I wonder, how do ratcheted power and velocity apply to this syllogism?

For Noctuelles and Une barque sûr l’ocean, de la Salle opted for tempos slower than most, or, given her prodigious piano agility, maybe it just seemed to me to be so. Ravel’s tempos, assez vif (rather fast) and plus lent (slower) for Alborado del gracioso felt fiery flamenco, leaving me breathless. And in this Spanish vista came the climax of the entire suite — with piano power, passion, and personality; all from hands smaller than you might expect! Les oiseaux tristes — unspeakable enrapture from the opening simple and quiet two-note calls to the sudden shock of a flock of fiercely chattering birds. Lise de la Salle neutralized the chimings in La vallée des cloches to close Miroirs on a middle ground, an ingenious move.

Last-minute changes on the program, the first, a reordering of the six Debussy preludes that made its way into an insert, the second, de la Salle herself announcing that the “Moonlight” would follow rather than precede Les Adieux. As you watch Lise de la Salle sitting at the keyboard, you cannot miss fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, back, and face enveloped in a creative surge. Could the creative urge be that which also dictated the shifts?

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net

Exsultemus’ Music Director and countertenor Martin Near described this program as a journey beginning in late Renaissance Venice and moving up north and forward chronologically to Germany during the early Baroque era.  This comparatively short historical period offered a wide musical survey, from the straightforward, solemn poly-chorality of Adrian Willaert’s Credidi, propter quod locutus sum (“I believed, therefore I have spoken”) to the intricate parts and pathos of Michael Praetorius’s Gelobet und gepreiset (“Hail and Praise.”)  Along the way polyphonic, homophonic, harmonic and concertante effects alternated and occasionally blended, indicating that stylistic transitions arise suddenly and don’t always die out before the next development comes around.

Near’s creativity in arranging these five voices and six instrumentalists, physically as well as musically, highlighted the variety of these mostly sacred works while never sacrificing their textual gravity.  Two stage-front choirs pitted against ethereal harmonies from a third choir at the back of the altar on Giovanni Gabrieli’s Magnificat, climaxing with a massive, “heavenly” 11-part tutti finale, illustrated the ensemble’s sheer power, while the voicing for two tenors with two sackbuts on Andrea Gabrieli’s Exsurgat Deus (“God, arise”) showcased this group’s ability to take an otherwise academic detail and underscore its importance as a captivating sound.

These multifaceted works galvanized the unity of sound and clarity of execution Exsultemus has come to be known for.  Near and soprano (as well as founder and General Director) Shannon Canavin provided full, focused leads in ensembles, especially Canavin’s ebullient lines in Dominique Phinot’s À Dieu, Loyse.  Tenors Jason McStoots and Zachary Wilder filled out middle parts seamlessly while offering assured solos, and Paul Max Tipton anchored the choir with his firm, mellifluous baritone. Heinrich Schütz’s Lobe den Herren (“Praise the Lord”) allowed more room to hear each voice one at a time, especially a lengthy, dramatic thanks to God from Wilder.  For Orlande de Lassus’ paean to wine (and the only secular text in the program) “Iam lucis orto sidere,”  the voices poured over one another with transparent sheen.

The addition of winds and brass allowed the choir an even wider palette of colors.  Michael Collver’s cornetto provided stirring, brassy commentary throughout, trading descending imitations with Near on Giovanni Gabrieli’s Hodie completi sunt (“Today they are full”) and Daniel Stillman’s alto and bass dulcians added rich, reedy interiors.  All four players broke out recorders for the playfully regal “Suite 15” from Johann Schein’s instrumental Banchetto Musicale.  The use of Andrus Madsen and Vivian Montgomery’s organ accompaniment throughout (based on Near’s theory that the Baroque continuo was merely a codification of earlier, more spontaneous practices) fleshed out the sound of the ensemble and provided further timbral contrast.  Madsen also ascended to the church’s pipe organ, playing with a spontaneity that made Claudio Merulo’s virtuosic Toccata none del non a Tono (“Tocatta Nine of the Ninth Tone”) sound improvised.

If a program of 16th-century sacred music for divided choir sounds limited, it was news Saturday night.  Exsultemus embraced this music with curiosity as well as technical confidence.  By the end of the evening, the sight of one player reading their part off of an iPad made perfect sense; the music seemed to belong as much to this age and its living, lively performers (and audience) as any other.

Andrew J. Sammut also writes for Early Music America and All About Jazz, and blogs on a variety of music at clefpalette.wordpress.com.  He also plays clarinet and lives in Cambridge.

TFC with Sopranos Camilla Tilling and Carolyn Sampson led by Bramwell Tovey (StuRosner)

Right to the point: there are two performances remaining, one tonight, and one on Tuesday, January 31^st. You should go.

At Symphony Hall last night the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Bramwell Tovey with three excellent soloists and John Oliver’s redoubtable Tanglewood Festival Chorus presented but one work — the 10-movement Lobgesang, or “Song of Praise” Op. 52 by Felix Mendelssohn. A more enriching experience at Symphony Hall would be hard to imagine.

This concert was the second of six Friday evening events called “Underscore Fridays” by the orchestra, which begin at 7:00 PM and feature from-the-stage introductions from orchestra members, and end in time for a generous — and gratis — food and wine buffet for the entire audience and performers, so the two constituencies can meet and schmooze post-concert. This is part of the orchestra’s earnest outreach efforts to begin to break down the traditional barriers that normally exist between audience and performers and also help make BSO concerts more accessible to their audiences. The many enthusiastic participants last night indicated that this gesture was very well received.

The orchestra’s experience with Mendelssohn’s remarkable score is limited. The BSO first played it while “on the road” in 1890 with its then-Music Director Arthur Nikisch, who had brought his orchestra to Old City Hall in Pittsburgh for a single performance on a Monday evening. In recent history, Seiji Ozawa conducted this music in subscription concert presentations in April of 1988. That’s all until this week’s revelatory concerts.

Revelatory? Yes, indeed. In his charming pre-concert introduction from the stage, 21-seasons veteran violist Edward Gazouleas told the audience how the orchestra’s reacquintance with Lobgesang was akin to visiting one’s cellar and stumbling across a long-forgotten bottle of extraordinary wine. In looking at the bottle, one remembered the occasion of having received it, but the contents had remained untasted until it was now finally opened, savored, and immediately recognized as superb — a wonderful gift finally realized.

And as fine wine is best enjoyed with appropriate vessels — fine crystal stemware, for instance — so too is music best appreciated when the vessel presenting it is of equal caliber to the notes printed on the page. The Boston Symphony Orchestra is certainly that vessel, and its many felicities of brass, woodwind, and strings — so aptly showcased in last week’s “conductorless” ensemble offerings — were united under the inspired leadership of Bramwell Tovey, a musician of impeccable taste.

Tovey, whose experience is worldwide, was first seen at a BSO performance at Tanglewood last summer where he led a very highly regarded performance of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in its composer’s intended grand opera version. When Riccardo Chailly unfortunately joined this season’s long list of cancelling conductors, Tovey was deputized to lead the concerts which Chailly had originally programmed. Frankly, it would be hard to imagine the absent Italian having had a greater success in presenting this remarkable music than Mr. Tovey’s, so strong and fluent was the latter’s leadership last night. He has fully internalized this wonderful score, and the forces on stage were “with him” for the span of the evening.

The 31-year-old Felix Mendelssohn wrote his Lobgesang in June, 1840 for a Lepzig festival that celebrated the 400^th anniversary of Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type and development of the printing press. Europeans felt then that this remarkable innovation, which, among many other possibilities allowed the words of the Lutheran Bible to be printed and then disseminated throughout the Christian world, was a symbol of German high-mindedness and worldly cultural enlightenment — erleuchten, “to cast light upon,” as the German text has it in a tenor aria. Such an invention at that time would have been equal in impact to the recent creation of the internet, suggested Maestro Tovey in his eloquent pre-concert talk.

Lobgesang’s wonderfully inventive score calls for a full classical orchestra, plus organ (handsomely played by James David Christie in these performances) and three vocal soloists. Well matched in timbre and musicianship were the two sopranos, Carolyn Sampson and Camilla Tilling. John Tessier, stepping in for yet another last-minute cancellation, was the lyric-voiced and sweet-toned tenor. While of these three, the Swedish soprano Tilling projected the most authentic-sounding declamation of the German language; together they formed an earnest and fully competent trio.

Mendelssohn’s music is constantly engaging, but in fact much more than that. It is inspired, moving, ceaselessly melodic and involving, and heart-touchingly beautiful. In addition to this, it inhabits a lofty spiritual and philosophical plane with its text, drawn from the scriptures yet also reflective of its metaphoric celebration of the cultural enlightenment mentioned above. Lobgesang is neither a true “symphony” nor an oratorio — on the title page of the urtext Mendelssohn called it Lobgesang. Eine Symphonie-Cantate nach Worten der heiligen Schrift. The inability of some listeners to “classify” this music is perhaps part of the reason for this score’s undeserved obscurity. Critics savaged it after its premiere, unfairly characterizing it as an unsuccessful attempt to imitate Beethoven’s ninth symphony. While Lobgesang surely does harbor several moments that may reflect homage to that earlier score, it is also surely no weak sister to the Beethoven. Lobgesang is fully capable of making its own salient points. There has been, in my opinion, too much bickering about this score over the years, even up to today, and not enough LISTENING. “Too much unending praise” is a major carp. Indeed, Maestro Tovey wittily brought this up before the music began. He characterized the score as “unrelievedly joyful,” and those coming to the concert looking for “unsupervised introspection” would not find it here. I say, more unrelievedly joyful music is just what this dreary world needs now and again, especially now.

The performance was superb from beginning to end. Maestro Tovey conducted as a man eager to proselytize for this score, mining its subtleties, reveling in its exquisite successions of melodic invention, underscoring the music’s drama and illuminating its reverence. His equal partner in this, along with the BSO, was the full-throated Tanglewood Festival Chorus, shaping and savoring its every phrase, powerful and focused when demanded, quiet and prayerful when appropriate. Among many choral highlights were the strong projection of the powerful fugal entrances in movements VII and X and the dead-on intonation in the a cappella passages of the seven-voiced chorale Nun Danket alle Gott in movement VIII. The final entrance of the TFC men near the music’s conclusion, singing the music’s recurring trombone motive heard at the work’s very beginning and now reprised at its end, nearly caused me to jump out of my chair in gratitude for their rich, sonorous sound and sheer commitment to their text.

The words that begin and end this remarkable piece are “Alles was Odem hat, lobet den Herrn – Let all those who hath breath praise the Lord!” To that is appended: “Hallelujah!”

Don’t miss these performances!

John W. Ehrlich is music director of Spectrum Singers, which he founded 32 years ago. He has been a singer and conductor in the Boston area for more than 32 years.

Roby Lakatos (Lakatos vzw)

On Friday night, thanks to Celebrity Series of Boston, Sanders Theatre resounded with the sounds of Hungarian Gypsy music masters, the Roby Lakatos Ensemble. The musical selections ranged from traditional to popular to classical to musical and film soundtrack. The musicians reveled in the music and the technical mastery of rapid passages or burnished lyricism, while the audience thrilled to the glorious sounds and excitement of the music.

Before the concert began, a gentleman behind me could be overheard saying to his companion, “Prepare yourself for some schmaltz.” Exiting the hall after the concert, I again heard someone use the term “schmaltz.” Pity, really: Roby Lakatos Ensemble possess a technical prowess and musical sensitivity any musician would envy, and they gave a lively performance of repertoire that these schmaltz-sayers enjoyed.

Typically, numbers alternated between fast and slow and most highlighted Roby Lakatos on violin, although the ensemble members each had their moment to shine during improvisations in each set.

Selections recalled the work of Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, and the Quintette du Hot Club de France. The evening opened with József Suha Balogh, Fire Dance/Gypsy Bolero/Cickom Paraphrase, and this medley introduced the ensemble. In Michel Legrand’s Papa can you hear me? Kalman Cséki, piano, collaborated with Roby Lakatos, violin, to bring out the pathos and anguish Barbra Streisand packed into this song in Yentl. Following this moment of legato lyricism, the mood shifted to one of Roby Lakatos’s own compositions, A Night in Marrakech, a jazzier number. Next, Ástor Piazzola, Oblivion, danced through our ears. The traditional Les Deux guitares brought into focus László Bóni, violin, as the two violins and guitar, masterfully played by László Balogh, traded off musical lines. In both of these pieces, László “Csorosz” Lajos Lisztes on double bass provided musical grounding, jazz-inflected pizzicati, or ambience matching the mood of the piece. Vladimir Cosma’s Le Grand blond avec une chaussure noire rounded out the first half of the program, opening with Lakatos on violin and Jenö István Lisztes, cimbalom, before the entrance of the whole ensemble, with Kalman Cséki, piano.

Following intermission, the ensemble returned to the stage in Lakatos’s own SK. Capricio, a piece combining widely recognized elements of Hungarian and gypsy music into an upbeat and thrilling whole. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee gave way to Fats Waller and Andy Razaf’s Honeysuckle Rose, which here brought out the whole ensemble in fine form. The traditional Russian tune, I’ve Met You–Mama gave all the players a chance to shine, and Ennio Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in America focused on Lakatos’s own violin playing. Vittorio Monti’s Csárdás finished off the announced program in rousing style. The thunderous applause brought the musicians back to the stage for encores of Ochi Chorne and The Lark.

Roby Lakatos is obviously the star attraction in this ensemble. His violin playing is technically marvelous, with mastery of the entire length of the bow, seamless bow changes, and a powerful tone throughout the instrument’s register. This sound dominated throughout the evening. Jenö István Lisztes on cimbalom, however, stole the show with his stupendous performance of the solo line from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee. With piano, guitar, and double bass for harmonic support, he gave an exhilarating performance. For those who think The Flight of the Bumblebee trite and over-performed, try sitting impassively by as Lisztes beats it out in quick tempo on a cimbalom or concert-hammered dulcimer. I once saw this piece performed on a marimba; that called for a combination musician and acrobat/dancer to master the larger size of the instrument. Lisztes gave the infinitely more virtuosic performance; the cimbalom is a smaller instrument and this piece requires inordinately precise fine-motor skills to execute, let alone to perform it, as Lisztes did, musically. This was a magical moment to experience.

Roby Lakatos Ensemble (Lakatos vzw)

Western classical music has long flirted with the foreign and the exotic. Mozart turned to Turkish influence for his Rondo alla Turca and Die Entführung aus dem Serail. The later 19^th century turned to Bohemian musical influences and gypsy dances; Brahms, Hungarian Dances and Dvorák, Gypsy Songs, are only the most obvious examples. Of course, the history of musical exoticism is much more complex, and these are but small points on a much larger map. Dipping into the exotic soundscapes of other cultures recurs in music history, as part of a near-constant quest for new sounds and new instruments. This slumming, in a different cultural context, is often coupled with a dismissal of the other culture as frivolous, somehow not sufficiently serious. Personally, I think of the 19^th-century musical turn towards Eastern Europe as akin to Romanticism in poetry: a struggle against industrialization, a plea for a return to non-mechanized ways of construing the world, a re-introduction of play, serious fun, and an idealized innocence into the otherwise professional musical landscape. More than “schmaltz,” this evening offered the reflective listener the excitement and the visceral pleasure of music that was moving. I’m glad Celebrity Series of Boston brought Roby Lakatos Ensemble to us and hope many in the audience were able to rise to this glorious occasion and enjoy the evening’s music on its own terms.

Cashman Kerr Prince is trained in Classics and Comparative Literature and is now a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Classical Studies at Wellesley College.  He is also a cellist of some accomplishment, currently playing with the Brookline Symphony Orchestra.

Sauerwald and Weiss wrote in their program letter of introduction, “We use period instruments, but modern staging because we feel that the music is best served by the instruments for which it was written and that the drama is best served by staging that resonates with our audience.” The orchestra was of ample size, with a luxurious collection of period instruments played by Boston’s notable and richly talented community of early musicians, while indeed, the stage and costumes were minimalist and sparse — the cast dressed in black with key players wearing colored sashes, while a suspended silk parachute picking up the light of a modern, fluorescent color-wheel provided a backdrop, and a small platform and multi-purpose throne situated upstage served for a set. The warmly renovated interior of the church with a hint of frankincense still lingering in the air provided the right atmosphere.

The first act begins with a battle beautifully staged by Fight Choreographer (and Stage Manager!) Kateri Chambers. Although the libretto is a love story between two soldiers, and the primary action of the story centers on war, all battles are  dance-like pantomimes among choristers with only the protagonist and antagonist bearing real arms, which are never used for actual fencing.  Such is the nature of a low-budget production, but although this approach may sound questionable in written description, it was a working and highly effective solution to training a co-ed cast to present themselves as warriors. It would have been more effective if more members of the cast had been better able to move like warriors, but one of the great challenges of opera performance is putting the kind of time into stage movement that is demanded of  singers just to master their instruments in addition to words and diction in a foreign language. And then there’s the music!

Jake Cooper, as Saul, King of Israel, is a powerful baritone whose role demands displays of passionate anger and jealousy.  His singing was strong and expressive, but as an actor, his bodily movements onstage wanted for focus.  One of the great pitfalls of operatic acting is the way in which long orchestral phrases interspersed between vocal ones are a recipe for leaving the singing-actor feeling “hung out to dry.” It appears Mr. Cooper struggles in this capacity for a sense of emotional and thus physical direction, but if he were to gather his posture with calm, still dramatic intent, he would be a charismatic force onstage who looks as professional as he sounds.

One of the great joys of this performance as an audience member was the pleasure of hearing a stunningly beautiful ensemble with impeccable intonation, both instrumentally and vocally, with such moving sensitivity to the early operatic French style. Given that this style calls for minimal vibrato and leaning delicately against ornamental appoggiaturas, young singers are often especially suited for this music. But there was an element of disparity in vocal power between the leads and smaller roles — some of these roles required stronger voices. Sophie Michaux had a more commanding presence and posture as a warrior than any other chorister, and made an equally graceful and mesmerizing masked sorceress. Her musicianship in the role of La Pythonisse was excellent, but the acoustical problems with the venue in which anything blocked upstage under the dome was easily lost, did not do justice to her lighter contralto voice. James Dargon’s Ghost of Samuel, a strong performance, also experienced acoustical difficulties.

Keith Lam as Achis, and Marcio de Oliveira as Joadab, possessed lighter voices, but with great stage presence. Lam was extremely memorable for having tremendous poise onstage and especially beautiful facial expression. Mr. de Oliveira, although smaller in stature for a warrior, sang his role as villainous traitor with fiery enthusiasm.

The highlight of this production, a most stunning performance in every way, was given by Mr. Owen McIntosh as David. Stylistically impeccable, beautiful to watch and possessing an athletic physique, his strong yet sweet tenor voice executed Charpentier’s exquisitely inspired phrases with deeply sensitive musicianship. He was the center piece of this production, and as a sought-after artist in the Boston area, he is ready to move up into the next level of what promises to be an exceptional career. People should hear him now while he is still a relatively hidden treasure. Linda Tsatsanas as Jonathas had a strong voice, comparable in power to McIntosh’s, and very musical in her solo work,  but stylistically not as nuanced in her sensitivity to the French style, and her physical movements and facial expressions were less compelling.

Praise must be given lastly regarding the overall musicianship of the chorus , which was highly polished both in ensemble and intonation. Weiss elongated the appoggiaturas in places to capitalize on their dissonances, in alignment with practices she observed in other Charpentier works. The overall effect was dazzling and not to be missed. Of the many fine chorister soloists, let me single out Claire Raphaelson. Although a gentler, softer singer, she had an exceptionally lovely tone quality,  and sensitivity to the music as well as stage presence, and Erika Vogel, for her notable duet in Act I.

Overall, the simplicity that Director Aria Umezawa brought to the staging of this opera was visually beautiful. Sauerwald and Weiss stated in their introduction that the story of David and Jonathas “captivated [them as]…powerfully relevant to today’s audience, particularly to the younger generations.” It is a love story between two men in the tradition of Greek tragedy, and prophetically, in the Romantic ilk of public duty and political upheaval trumping private fulfillment and leaving the individual spiritually bankrupt. It is a production done artfully and with great care that should not be missed. It would certainly be a tragedy if there were any vacant seats tonight.

Janine Wanée holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Vocal Performance from University of Southern California and Master of Music degree in Vocal Performance from Boston University.  She is currently a member of the Copley Singers under Brian Jones.

At times, there were passages in the Beethoven that felt as though a bit more (lightness in the fifth movement, Presto) —sometimes a bit less (leaning on each and every note in the first movement’s fugue, Adagio ma non troppo e molto expressivo) —  could have still further heightened Beethoven’s late work’s thickly populated scheme. Besides that, all of the rest of their heady program, that included some of the most mature works around, made Jordan Hall a special space — the place to be. No doubt that for most, Zaïde has left its ineradicable footprint in Boston and the string quartet scene as a whole.

Zaïde also left its tracks with violinists Charlotte Juilliard and Pauline Fritsch flanked left and right respectively, leaving cellist Juliette Salmona and violist Sarah Chenaf between  them. Did the Mozart quartet suggest this? Recall that the composer’s Prussian quartets demand more cello participation while at the same time asking the viola to dip below in order to cover the bass lines usually taken up by the cello. But then why keep this arrangement for the Wolf and Beethoven? With Frisch’s violin facing away from us, certainly nothing at all was lost, power, nuance, and otherwise. But neither was experiencing this arrangement any trifling matter, so seemingly simple a reconfiguration it is.

In Hugo Wolf’s Serenade in G for String Quartet (Sérénade italienne), Zaïde could very well have been posing as that entire orchestra which we have heard in many of performances of the work. The quartet was composed in 1887 and later orchestrated in 1892. Zaïde inhabited the serenade with bigness and robustness, color gradations reaching from open, extroverted sunlight to delineated, introverted shadows.

Surrounding the lighter, shorter serenade were Mozart’s String Quartet No. 23 in F Major, K.590 and Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131. If Zaïde’s Mozart mined jewels well beneath its surfaces, their Beethoven plotted scenarios well into the human interior. Just how could Zaïde’s jeunes françaises have pulled all of this off? Wouldn’t it be something to go behind the scenes of their concertizing to uncover more about their abundantly evident remarkable powers of persuasion?

The program brochure reads: “Since 2003 New England Conservatory and the ProQuartet-European Center for Chamber Music (ProQuartet-CEMC) have collaborated in a unique exchange program for exceptional young chamber ensembles.” “Exceptional,” “young” are both spot on, yet just begin to tell the emerging story of Quatuor Zaïde. Hopefully the four will retrace their steps in frequent future returns to Boston. Encore!

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

The ingenious founding director of the New Gallery Concert Series, gifted pianist Sarah Bob, has run one of the city’s ambitious and delightful music-and-art series for several years, and she and her musicians and artists show no signs of running out of serious talent and imagination.

The concert itself was a mixed affair: two solo artists performed perilously difficult works at the beginning and end, sandwiching  two lovely pieces for viola, piano and percussion. The opening piece was a curiosity. I had heard of F. Murray Schafer’s (b. 1933) The Crown of Ariadne but had never heard — or heard of — a live performance of it. It will be a required piece on the upcoming Israel Harp Contest, so a few brave people will learn it, but until then Ina Zdorovetchi’s performance will set the bar very high for those contestants. Written for the renowned Canadian harpist, Judy Loman, The Crown of Ariadne Suite for Harp, Percussion and Tape (1979) is a six-movement tour de force.  Ms. Zdorovetchi got hold of the music three weeks ago and played it like she had had months to work out its many technical difficulties. A longtime member of BMOP (a double concerto commissioned for her and cellist Holgen Gjoni is in the works for next fall), Ms. Zdorovechi is no stranger to modern music, but she is also completely at home with Bach, which I have heard her play with great elegance.

The harp here was surrounded by an artillery of atmospheric percussion — a bell tree, crotales, suspended cymbals, bongos, and wood blocks. Mr. Schafer really took the trouble to find out what a harp can do, and he used his learning to brilliant effect (it helps to have had Ina, a spectacular harpist). There were vibrato effects caused by pulling the string under the top notch at the highest spot,  countless harmonics (not one missed) scordatura, putting bells on her ankles to they would jingle as the feet beat out complicated rhythms, in the second movement, hitting the soundboard while playing with the right hand, and lots and lots of fast playing. There were pedal glissandi, fast stretches of double octaves (not fun; buzzing is a worry), and playing (in the last movement) with a tape of herself, full of echoes. I was, quite simply, in awe. Dazzling.

The two pieces for viola, piano (the admirable Sara Bob), and percussion (Aaron Trant) were very lovely and beautifully played. Mark Berger (b.1977) played a double role in the next piece as composer and violist. He explained that his piece, Kaleidoscope for viola, piano and percussion (2011) originated as a commission by Middlesex Community College with the stipulation that he tie it into the concept of environmental sustainability. (I am not kidding). So, he devised the solution: to “recycle” a piece of older music, in this case, J. S. Bach’s Sarabande from the Fifth Suite for Solo Violoncello. “I was interested in putting Bach’s music under the microscope to find new materials to explore…Bach is rendered completely unrecognizable.” And so it was, but I found Berger’s piece in its world premiere really pleasurable to hear. The next piece, after a long intermission (a great time to ask questions of the Magna Doodle artist) was also a world premier, dedicated to Ms. Bob and Mr. Trant. Frozen Junctions for viola, piano and percussion (2009) by Lior Navok (b. 1971) was a perfect companion piece to Mr. Berger’s, and both of these pieces were given the kind of performance a composer hopes for.

Finally, George Aperghi’s Recitations was sung, whispered, whimpered, and babbled by the intrepid soprano Jennifer Ashe. His score, the program notes said, look like doodles. What these fourteen brief movements sound like is another story. I think this is the kind of piece that really divides an audience — some love it, some find five minutes of it headache-inducing and wonder how the soprano keeps going. In her own way, Ms. Ashe had to go through as many hoops as Ms. Zdorovechi did earlier. The piece was a monodrama of what struck me as a madwoman whose fractured personality wass going to very audible pieces as we stood by in horror. There were peals of crazed laughter mixed with anger, rage, and babbling in no particular language, then some French, cries, lots of intakes of breath, calm talk escalating into superfast babbling, and talking punctuated by very high sung notes, followed by lots of “ha ha ha ha.” Personality changes took place every few seconds. Several people stood cheering at the conclusion. I sat morosely, wondering if Ms. Ashe actually enjoyed putting herself through these bizarre paces.  In any case, she did it all very convincingly.

 Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.