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Crumbs and whistles
Auros Group for New Music, plus a French Invasion
BY DAVID WEININGER

Next Saturday, at Longy School of Music, the Auros Group for New Music presents a bold program with two idiosyncratic vocal works at its core that show the deep interiority of late-20th-century vocal music and the astonishingly dissimilar sound worlds available to its composers, even in such an orthodox genre as the song cycle. George Crumb’s Apparition, from 1980, is a set of "elegiac songs and vocalises for soprano and amplified piano." It’s one of many musical settings of Walt Whitman’s "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d," Walt Whitman’s noble and poignant elegy for Abraham Lincoln. But unlike more conventional settings of this memorable text — such as Hindemith’s A Requiem for Those We Love — Crumb’s de-emphasizes its communal, ritualistic aspect. Instead of a national act of mourning, Crumb offers a hermetic, lonely meditation on the nature of death itself. Hindemith’s work comforts; Crumb’s haunts, even when the poetry moves from the mournful to the transcendent.

As in many of his works, the composer fills the musical texture with an expansive palette of sounds. The amplification of the piano allows its eerie chords and glissandi to resonate longer in the ear. Crumb’s spectral sound world also calls for the pianist to brush and pluck the piano strings and knock on its exterior. The vocal line rocks back and forth between close intervals ("undulate, undulate around the world," the soprano sings in the fifth song) and slithering through chromatics. The vocalises feature wordless syllables designed to sound more like animal sounds than singing. Yet for all the spooky sounds, the cycle’s musical language is straightforward and largely tonal. It simply refracts Whitman’s sorrowful text through a ghostly lens.

Even sparer is Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker, for soprano and cello. Niedecker (1903–1970) lived almost her whole life on Blackhawk Island in Wisconsin, and her terse poetry mingles reflections on nature with a disarming emotional directness. "O late fall/Marsh -/I/Raped by the dry/Weed stalk" reads the eighth poem of the cycle. The composer molds his music to reflect this concise expressive intensity, one that takes its bearings from Webern, the master of concision. The cycle lasts a mere 12 minutes and runs to only eight pages of score. Where Crumb wraps Whitman’s text in layers of sound, Birtwistle presents Niedecker’s text in an almost disturbingly plain way, with a minimum of accompaniment. The cello provides unadorned counterpoint, pointing up the fragility at the heart of her verse. "Hear where her snow grave is," the soprano sings in the fourth song as the cello slides in quarter tones around her note. There’s a minimum of color variation, and the freely atonal music never rises above mezzo-forte. The songs were composed as a birthday tribute for Elliott Carter, and Birtwistle says he thinks of them "as being like a bunch of flowers." If so their scent is far more rarefied than the air most compositions breathe.

It’s hard to know what the other works on the program — by Libby Larsen and Gao Ping, the latter the winner of Auros’s composition competition — will add, but it should be fascinating to hear the two cycles side by side. The concert is February 26 at 8 p.m., Longy is at 27 Garden Street in Cambridge (just outside Harvard Square), and tickets are $20, $10 for students and seniors; call (617) 323-5444.

ALL FRENCH, MOST OF THE TIME. Gallic fervor breaks out next week. First, Kurt Masur stops through on his first tour with his new band, the Orchestre National de France, bringing us Debussy’s Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra and Ravel’s G-major Piano Concerto (both with the Lyon-born soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet) and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade. That’s Sunday February 27 at 3 p.m. at Symphony Hall (301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston), courtesy of the Bank of America Celebrity Series. Tickets are $37 to $77; call (617) 482-6661.

Moving backward in time, the recently formed early-music chorus Exsultemus visits the Burgundian court at Dijon during the Renaissance. The centerpiece of this concert is a Mass setting by court composer Pierre de la Rue, and anyone who worked in the court of a king called Philip the Handsome has got to be worth your time. That’s Friday February 25 at 8 p.m. at the First Lutheran Church of Boston (299 Berkeley Street), and tickets are $10 to $20; call (857) 998-0219.

Finally, Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra’s "Masterpieces in Miniature" starts in France with Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Then it stops off in Germany (Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll) and Austria (Schoenberg’s Fünf Orchesterstücke) before emigrating to America (the original chamber instrumentation of Appalachian Spring). Principal guest conductor Gunther Schuller leads the 3 p.m. concert on February 27 at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre (just north of Harvard Yard), and tickets run from $9 to $45; call (617) 661-7067.


Issue Date: February 18 - 24, 2005
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