Boston Musica Viva Celtics

Friday, November 4, 2005, 8:00 PM
Tsai Performance Center at Boston University, Boston, MA

"Celtic" proved the perfect appellation for tonight's concert, as all four composers programmed hailed from Ireland , Wales , or Scotland . And the two pieces utilizing texts took the poetry of Emerald Isle Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney as their basis.

Commissioned for this occasion, Forget (2005) by Andy Vores is scored for soprano with Pierrot-plus-percussion ensemble. It's scalar and tonally focused like much of his oeuvre, though not quite as consonant sounding and reliant more strongly on patterned material than usual. Employment of prepared piano and ethnic percussion impart an unusual exoticism to this evocative opus. Frank Corcoran's Mad Sweeney (1996) consists of a raw, craggy narrator's part heavily imbued with Sprechstimme -style execution backed by a mixed nonet playing gruffly dissonant (if non-serial) percussive fare. This is the sort of compelling, caution-to-the-winds stuff that is heard all too rarely in Boston . Despite an opening section of brash music that goes on too long, it's a most worthy experience.

Orfeo (1975), for spatially mobile flautist buttressed by lighting effects and a tape derived from altered flute sounds, shows Thea Musgrave employing a dissonant scalar idiom with aplomb. And the tape's use of a recurrent upward-plodding stepwise figure imparts a welcome rondo foundation. To give credit where it's due, Judith Weir's piano quartet Distance and Enchantment (1989) handles its modal-based language with consistency and possesses more energy than much of her output. But harmonies are static and the piece spins its wheels rather than going somewhere.

Performances were mainly good. Corcoran took the narrator's reins in his composition, infusing loads of rugged yet well-nuanced allure to the part. Soprano Valdine Anderson unfortunately did not impress; while the owner of an attractive enough voice, she compromised it with a wobbly vibrato and mushy diction as well as distorted vowel projection the fault for which cannot be laid at the composer's feet. Richard Pittman conducted guests and ensemble regulars alike with precision and heart, every instrumentalist giving his all in finest Musica Viva tradition. And one should cite Alicia DiDonato for excellently evocative flute playing in the Musgrave.

--David Cleary