March 2, 2009

Collage Offers Bold Gestures, Hints of Opera, and a Knockout

by Adam Baratz / The Boston Musical Intelligencer

Collage New Music concluded its 2008-09 season on March 2. Despite Monday’s weather, the concert went on as scheduled, and few people seemed deterred from coming to see it.

It opened with Donald Crockett’s Pilgrimage for solo piano. It was a piece made primarily of bold gestures. They swept through the instrument’s entire range, initially making a strong impression, but never quite forming a larger progression.

Andrew Imbrie’s Chicago Bells was a violin/piano duo. The bells of the title were reflected in a recurring piano motive. The slow-fast-slow arrangement of movements suggested a large-scale swinging, a journey outwards followed by inner contemplation. Catherine French’s silky tone complemented the rhapsodic writing that emerged in the middle movement.

Two pieces by Tobias Picker followed. His writing hints at the operas in his catalog: clarity of texture and scale of emotion that can withstand enlargement to full orchestra. The two songs from Rain in the Trees, in fact, were from an orchestral song cycle. Judith Bettina sang with the nostalgia called for by the texts, but with a degree of restraint. Christopher Oldfather’s accompaniment pointed at much vaster instrumentation. The Blue Hula brought the entire Collage group together (Pierrot plus percussion). It was a “fun” piece, highlighting virtuosic ensemble playing.

Following intermission were two Collage commissions for full ensemble, one new and one old. David Rakowski’s Phillis Levin Songs (the premiere) was really a knockout. Levin’s writing occupied an interior space, looking out to nature for metaphors to explicate personal situations. The music was vividly pictorial, nimbly conjuring forest scenes, subatomic reactions, snowfall, and other snapshot moments.

The program closed with another Pilgrimage, this one by Imbrie. It cast the group as a bunch of boisterous characters (not unlike what Elliott Carter might do) pushing past each other towards the proverbial pearly gates.

The ensemble played throughout with precision, posture, and poise, attentive to the unique demands of each piece. A very fine way to cap off a season.

 

Collage New Music attends to works of the recent past

By Jeremy Eichler Globe Staff / January 28, 2009

CAMBRIDGE - Must "new music" always be brand new? Presenting world premieres is naturally a bread-and-butter activity for an ensemble like Collage New Music. But this venerable group, now in its 37th season, also has broader goals in mind: tending reputations and keeping in circulation a substantial body of music by the composers it champions. That means works written yesterday, but also the day before yesterday.

And so it was at Monday's performance in the Longy School's Pickman Hall that four of the five works on the program were composed in the 1990s. Two pieces were by Andrew Imbrie, who died in December 2007 and was an important composer in the Collage pantheon, one of the few in that group who was not based in Boston. Music director David Hoose spoke at length from the stage about Imbrie and his work, praising the way the composer used a modern non-tonal idiom while still maintaining a deep consonance with the forms and expressive grammar of music's past. For Imbrie, the high-modernist dream of stripping away all links to the art form's history was never more than a chimera.An example of his sympathetic blend of old and new came by way of "Earplay Fantasy," an appealing work in which Imbrie's often astringent language is ladled into clear and familiar vessels with movement titles like Allegro Assai and Adagio. The melodic writing is tart yet lyrically generous both here and also in his "Roethke Songs," which received an eloquent performance by soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Christopher Oldfather.

Narucki, in bright voice, also sang the "Haiku Cycle" of James Yannatos. In the Boston area, Yannatos is best known for his 45 years spent as music director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, a position from which he will step down at the end of this season. But Yannatos has also remained a busy composer throughout and this piece from 1994 colorfully knits together a series of eight Haikus into a single elegantly contoured stretch of music. Narucki and the Collage players gave it a vibrant reading.

In Richard Cornell's richly textured work, "The Light of October," the ever-receding sunlight of that fall month becomes a metaphor for musical change. Jacob Druckman's expansive and absorbing three-movement piece "Come Round" had its own ideas about variation, and the way a single set of musical ideas can be observed from six different vantage points, like windows overlooking a single square. The piece also brims with remarkable timbral detail.

Throughout the night, Hoose led the ensemble with his signature blend of unshowy concision and missionary zeal. His dedicated musicians, in addition to Oldfather on piano, were Catherine French (violin), Joel Moerschel (cello), Robert Annis (clarinet), Christopher Krueger (flute), and Craig McNutt (percussion).

 

Whimsy, resonance on night 2 of Ditson fest

By Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff  |  September 20, 2008

Any festival worth its keep will deepen and intensify as it goes. So it was for the second evening of the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music underway at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Last night, three veteran local ensembles were showcased: Dinosaur Annex, Collage New Music, and Cantata Singers. A good-size crowd showed at both concerts. Deadline pressures required an early exit before the end of the night, but this double bill had already lived up to high expectations.

The night began with a Dinosaur Annex program that was thoroughly entertaining - a word you won't find often in reviews of serious new-music concerts. But composer (and conductor) Scott Wheeler's assembly of works had a high wit and whimsy quotient, beginning with his own delightful setting for bass (here, David Kravitz) and tenor (Frank Kelley) of Kenneth Koch's "Gold Standard," an utterly fanciful text rendered uncomfortably topical by recent convulsions in the global financial markets.

Barbara White's work "My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon" was the one straight-laced piece on the program; its spare textures and delicately etched piano runs gave it a post-impressionistic feel, but it would have been stronger at a fraction of the length. Richard Beaudoin's "Eunoia Songs" were highly skilled settings of five poems by Christian Bök that had the audience laughing in their seats, thanks to Bök's orthographic virtuosity: Each poem uses only a single vowel but still manages to romp around with abandon ("such tumult upturns unsunk hulls").

For his new "Danca da Tranquilidade," Brian Robison imagined a "low-gravity samba" danced across the surface of the moon. The work's dazed, off-kilter repetitions and halting instrumental dialogue brought the image across, with help from a prominent theremin part performed last night by the composer.  The freewheeling and sometimes raucous collage of "Alice Hawthorne in memoriam," by the microtonalist Ezra Sims, ended the first program on an appropriately light note.

In the second concert, conducted by David Hoose, three of the works were by Donald Sur, a Boston composer who died in 1999 and whose music has an affectionate place in the repertoire of both Collage and Cantata Singers. Last night's program opened with his dry-witted "Satori on Park Avenue" (of 1984), which tries to conjure a tale of New York socialites watching King Kong and discovering existential truths. Written only eight years earlier but hailing from a different harmonic universe was "Catena III," a game of fast-paced instrumental tag.

Yehudi Wyner's "On this most voluptuous night" is an arresting setting of poetry by William Carlos Williams (persuasively sung by soprano Karyl Ryczek), full of lean harmonies and sinewy expressive writing. The first movement, with its silvery sonorities and hushed violin arpeggios, seems to breathe the air of Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht." David Rakowski's "Imaginary Dances" were fast, dense, and vigorous.

All of the evening's performances were first-rate, and the theater of the ICA has an acoustic that's sufficiently clear. During the second show, when both glass walls were exposed, there were moments when architecture and music had an uncanny resonance.

 

Concert Review: Dinosaur Annex, Cantata Singers, and Collage New Music at the ICA

C. Fernsnebner, contributor, The Bostonist.com, September 23, 2008

Friday night's installment of the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music was all about text. Whole, grammatical sentences; comprehensible, English, (mostly) well-enunciated; no Italian arias, no liturgical Latin, no repurposed Sanskrit, neither Einstein nor beach—this is not what Bostonist has come to expect from classical music, contemporary or otherwise.

And Bostonist has never seen a tenor struggle to maintain a straight face, but Frank Kelley very nearly succumbed during Richard Beaudoin's "Eunoia Songs" (2004), a clever musical setting of Christian Bök's already-clever experiment with vowels—all five of them, but only one per poem. The audience was less successful in containing its mirth, as Kelley performed daring escapes in Oulipo-brand verbal handcuffs: "Ursus cubs plus Lupus pups hunt skunks / Curs skulk (such mutts lurk: ruff, ruff). Gnus munch kudzu." The score distilled each vowel to its essentials, with short pinpricks of notes for "I," dipping in "U" shapes, gaping open-mouthed at "O" ("...color photos of cocks, boobs, dorks or dongs / Homos shoot photos of foot-long schlongs").

"The Gold Standard" (Scott Wheeler, 2000) was a tiny, drama-free opera in which a (baritone) Buddhist monk attempted to explain American currency to a (tenor) colleague impervious to hypothetical illustration. Fortunately, we happened to be escorted to the ICA by a young man—we'll call him A.B.D. McHarvardpants—who remarked that it was odd to see such characters as economic naïfs, for as we all know from reading Marxist-leaning historian Jacques Gernet, Chinese Buddhist monastic treasuries functioned as primitive banks, lending out their vast stores of cash to the laity on collateral.

We—both Bostonist and A.B.D.—were nonetheless charmed.

Of the two wordless (and lunar-themed) performances in the set, one had words (only evident in the program) and a theremin (played the the composer, Brian Robison). The other, Barbara White's "My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon" (2008) was mesmerizing in its Boston premiere, gradually paring its glimmering and rumbling down to almost nothing, clusters of ringing piano notes concentrating our attention into one bright, shining point. ("That was really alarming," McHarvardpants told us. "It sounded like something was dying.")

Collage New Music began the second show of the evening with two suspenseful instrumental pieces by Donald Sur before a soprano arrived for Yehudi Wyner's "On this most voluptuous night" (1982). Exquisitely sung by Karyl Ryczek, it was pleasant to the ear but jarring in its use of William Carlos Williams' verse. Vocal embellishments and the forced repetition of lines seemed to work against that back-of-a-napkin brevity that puts Williams' poetry at the opposite end of the bookshelf from the operatic libretto.

The Cantata Singers, who had waited patiently on the bleachers, finally took the stage after half time, to sing Sur's very direct and rich setting of Sonnet 97, moving briskly through Shakespeare's text until picking apart the last line ("...tis with so dull a cheer / That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near") as if with gorgeous reluctance to let go. The singers and Collage New Music closed with Irving Fine's "Design for October," a wistful song about the end of summer and its attendant bird migrations. Delightful and, like summer, over too soon.

They speak Berio's language

Matthew Guerrieri, Globe Correspondent

January 31, 2008

CAMBRIDGE - In the fourth of the "Folk Songs" Luciano Berio arranged in 1964, a lover petitions a nightingale. "Apprends-moi ton langage," he implores, "teach me your language." On Monday, one could hear Berio asking the same of music itself. The concluding concert of Collage New Music's shortened, all-Berio season focused on works of the '50s and '60s, when the late Italian composer both honed his avant-garde expertise and began to stake his claim to the unexpected directions where his music subsequently would go.

 

Much of Berio's work was finding a new vernacular of virtuosity. "Sequenza I," the first of 14 celebrated solo instrument investigations, puts the flute through an array of unorthodox paces. It's designed to dazzle, and Christopher Krueger certainly did, with playing of confident proficiency; but a deeper emotional thread to the piece never emerged. "Sequenza II," for harp, triumphed both as etude and narrative; in Franziska Huhn's technically accomplished, superbly paced performance, the production of exotic sounds - buzzing strings, wavering pedals, crepuscular rustling - was adjunct to the drama of their interaction.

 

In 1959's "Differences," tape-recorded versions of five instruments morph into alien electronics as their live counterparts attempt communication with bristling urgency; in the end, Berio restores the music's initial common tongue. Collage's vibrant reading made for an intense conversation.

 

"Circles," from 1960, also seems designed to loop around - settings of three E.E. Cummings poems, the texts repeated to form a five-movement arch - but the effect is of a new language coming into existence. Soprano Janna Baty, expertly delighting in the deconstruction of each word into its constituent parts, began by trading phonemes with Huhn's harp; her sounds and choreographed gestures soon brought two percussionists (Douglas Perkins and Nicholas Tolle) to vociferous life. The pair's development of explosive autonomy prompted echoes of the opening: a creation myth acted out, then ritualized. The performance was terrific, wide-awake and strikingly entertaining.

 

With the "Folk Songs" (conducted, along with "Differences," by music director David Hoose), Berio began to apply his newfound vocabulary to the whole of human musical activity; Baty's traditional singing and the group's untraditional playing were united with seamless ingenuity. Berio never exhausted his curiosity. Collage opened with the 90-second-long "Autre Fois," a 1971 memorial to Stravinsky (performed twice). An unstable rocking interval in the harp that traditionally would resolve instead proves the music's unchanging core. The journey is the point; the goal is possibility.

 

 

Boston Lyric Opera's latest La bohème; plus Collage's Berio, and Markus Stenz at the BSO (excerpt)
Lloyd Schwartz, The Phoenix
November 6, 2007

Collage New Music has pared its season down to two concerts, both featuring the music of Luciano Berio, who died in 2003. Berio was always full of surprises, and the first Collage program, devoted to his piano music, had plenty of them. Christopher Oldfather led off with the 1965 Rounds, for harpsichord, which allows the performer to make lots of free choices - like slapping the keyboard with the flat of the hands. After intermission, Donald Berman played Berio's 1967 revision, in which everything is completely annotated - like pounding the keyboard with an entire arm. Both pianists conveyed the piece's wild jazz element and ticklish refinement. "Scarlatti meets Monk," music director David Hoose quoted Berman. (Between pieces, he also quoted some of Berio's delicious remarks.) Oldfather was complete master of Berio's masterpiece of keyboard exploration, Sequenza IV; then Berman returned with Six Encores, exquisite short nature pieces dating between 1965 and 1990, alternately jumpy and flowing, thumping and rustling, and written in styles as diverse as Debussy and Tchaikovsky.

One high point was the first American concert performance of Berio's last purely electronic piece, the 1957 Moment, for pre-recorded tape. Ranging from baby burbles to spacy space music, with abrupt changes from sustained "notes" to quicksilver "pizzicatos," it all sounded unmistakably like Berio. The playback machine won a big hand. The evening ended with Hoose conducting with both delicacy and tremendous, climactic force the two pianists and percussionists Craig McNutt (marimba) and Nicholas Tolle (vibraphone) in the 1973 Linea, in which Berio sometimes ominously, sometimes whimsically reminded me of W.H. Auden's lines about how "all the clocks in the city/Began to whirr and chime:/'O let not Time deceive you,/You cannot conquer Time.' " These wonderful musicians seemed to make time stop.

Berio works get their due in compelling Collage program
David Weininger, Globe Correspondent
November 1, 2007

CAMBRIDGE - Luciano Berio stands apart from other composers of the postwar European avant-garde for the vividly theatrical character that infuses his music. At a time when other composers were making personality secondary to process, Berio was delivering his experiments with a sly nod and wink.

Collage New Music is devoting its season to Berio, and its first concert was devoted mostly to keyboard works, which were in the very capable hands of pianists Christopher Oldfather and Donald Berman. It's harder to pick up Berio's expressive persona in these pieces, which are somewhat restrained in palette and lack texts. Nevertheless, they made for a compelling entree into his world.

Each half of the concert began with a piece called "Rounds," first in a version for harpsichord (played by Oldfather) and then in a revision for piano (played by Berman). In both, the musical language is spiky and abstruse, with skittish motives threading through thickly clotted chords. There's a certain playfulness with which ideas appear and then submerge themselves into the musical flow.

The largest solo piano work on the program was the fourth of Berio's series of "Sequenzas." "Sequenza IV" plays like virtuoso fare for the intellectually inclined, with glinting colors, oddly swinging rhythms, and scampering runs. Yet there's also a sense in which Berio seems to be wondering what all of the acrobatics are really for. Oldfather's performance was completely mesmerizing.

A set of six encores, written over a period of 25 years, showed the composer's less frenzied side. The third, "Water-Piano," was gentle and poignant, the nostalgia heightened by its simple tonal language.

At the end of the evening came "Linea," a marvelously poetic work for two pianos, marimba, and vibraphone. It is sonically gorgeous, the instruments creating a warm, inviting space for a listener to inhabit. At times the music has an almost fairy-tale quality. Even at its most furious - a middle section for the pianists sounds like Liszt on amphetamines - the music retains a sense of grace and heart.

One immensely forgettable piece for prerecorded tape was included, for reasons not immediately clear. Written in the 1950s, it was receiving its American premiere, according to Collage's notes. Suffice it to say that it has not aged well.

Oldfather and Berman gave powerful, involved performances throughout. Craig McNutt and Nicholas Tolle were the percussionists for "Linea," which music director David Hoose conducted. The second and final Berio concert is Jan. 28, when the "Folk Songs," his greatest hit, will be performed.

Old-school modern vision sees beauteous results
Matthew Guerreri, Boston Globe
January 31, 2007

CAMBRIDGE -- On Monday, Collage New Music and its music director, David Hoose, performed old-school modern music of mostly recent vintage and, in their hands, bracing beauty.

British composer Julian Anderson is a recent addition to the Harvard faculty. His episodic "Towards Poetry" (1999) began with evocative gestures that wandered and a fractured waltz tune that became lost in its own fog. But the music eventually found its footing in a vivid riot of folk-inspired juxtapositions. The ending is terrific: A melancholy clarinet nocturne is suddenly extinguished by glassy strings, fluttering woodwinds, and buzzing harp, in an eerie metallic burst.

Martin Brody's "Millennium Sightings," originally commissioned by Collage in 1999, sets apocalyptic texts by medieval mystics: Joachim of Fiore's "Trina Voce" exults, while Abraham Abulafia's "Zechariahu the Deliverer" preaches divine vengeance. Brody's gorgeous music captures the double edge of each vision, the gilded shimmer of the first hiding quiet unease, the fury of the second melting into rapturous stillness. In contrast, Urdu poet Miraji's "Solitude" meditates on the present, while the music surveys repeated gestures and harmonies from timbrally varied angles. The vocal writing is superb; mezzo-soprano Janice Felty sang with clarity and an unflagging commitment to the text.

Next came a world premiere: John Heiss's "Meditations and Arguments," an engaging instrumental dialogue that's a distant cousin of Charles Ives's "The Unanswered Question." Here the interlocutor was Frank Epstein's vibraphone, quietly but insistently provoking the rest of the ensemble. Expertly paced, the layered contrapuntal lines breathe free, but the dramatic thread remains taut. Hints of marches and ragtime pay subtle homage; indeed, the spirit of Ives, rather than hovering benevolently over the piece, descended into the fray to lend appropriate irascibility and, in the vibraphone's final phrase, enigmatic transcendence.

Olly Wilson's "A City Called Heaven," composed in 1989 for Boston Musica Viva, refracts the sounds of vernacular music through a prism of modernist rigor. In the middle, fragments of the title spiritual give way to pent-up tension, while in the outer movements, gestures borrowed from blues and boogie fuel virtuoso dynamos. The results were exhilarating. Hoose led a crack performance, with star turns from pianist Donald Berman and percussionist Craig McNutt. Eschewing a driving beat, Wilson's off-balance rhythms instead kept the players hurtling from one epiphany to the next; the sharp, spiky harmonies distilled from the source material the startling thrill of its own discovery.

James Levine and Deborah Voight, Collage New Music, Teatro Lirico's Turandot (excerpt)
Lloyd Schwartz, The Phoenix
February 6, 2007

Mezzo-soprano Janice Felty, absent too long from Boston, was featured in an enjoyably varied Collage New Music program at Longy School's Pickman Hall. She was the soloist in Martin Brody's powerful and eloquently orchestrated Millennium Sightings, a 1999 Collage commission dedicated to her and to Collage director David Hoose. In full-toned, glamorous voice, she delivered two contrasting mystical poems - an ecstatic passage from 12th-century Italian monk Joachim of Fiore's Latin depiction of a pilgrim's arrival in Heaven and 13th-century Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia's turbulent annunciation of the Apocalypse - answered by Urdu poet Miraji's mercurially conversational "Solitude" ("This much I can say:/I am neither evil, nor am I time/I'm not even the river's easy wash") in Brody's monumental setting. Would that Deborah Voigt had Felty's passionate poetic insight.

John Heiss's Meditations and Arguments (a Collage commission, in its world premiere) lasts only seven minutes but keeps you hypnotized as it travels through passages marked "Pensive," "Anxious," and "Bold and mysterious." The protagonist is a haunted vibraphone, and Heiss had in mind no one but Collage (and BSO) percussionist Frank Epstein. The performance was ravishing.

The concert began with skillful, vital performances of nine of the dozen gnomic, colorfully ekphrastic, lilting and moody movements from British-born Harvard composer Julian Anderson's Towards Poetry (1999) and ended with Olly Wilson's 1989 modernist/jazzy refraction of the famous spiritual A City Called Heaven (commissioned by Boston Musica Viva).

Ensemble shapes diverse parts into energetic whole
Richard Dyer, Boston Globe
March 30, 2006

CAMBRIDGE -- Collage New Music closed its season Monday night with four works composed for the group, three of them world premieres. The Collage instrumentalists and guests performed all four with their usual expertise, and David Hoose conducted with clarity and conviction.

Tod Machover's "Another Life" supplements live instrumentalists with electronics. The live instruments dominate; the electronics add atmosphere and reinforcement. Much of the work of MIT's Media Lab guru in the last decade has centered on exploration and experimentation, or on enabling others to express themselves. This piece revisits some of the musical concerns of his own youth with the resources and experience of maturity; it is about personal expression, full of exuberance and regret, nostalgia and celebration. Curtis K. Hughes, Collage's current composer-in-residence, came up with a little winner called "danger garden." In a way this was a collage for Collage, an engaging discourse among incompatible elements at some points audience members of a certain age may have thought the needle had skipped a few grooves. Yet Hughes manages to loop it all together.

Andrew Imbrie, who turns 85 next week, is a national treasure insufficiently recognized. "The Tyger," his latest piece, is a song cycle for soprano and baritone collecting poems by Blake, Wordsworth, and Thomas Moore. Guided both by inspiration and by impeccable craftsmanship, this is honest, eloquent music, full of internal energy. Soprano Elizabeth Keusch and baritone Mark McSweeney sang with communicative directness.
The revisited piece was Martin Brody's "Beasts" (2002). The title comes from a werewolf poem of the same name by Richard Wilbur. Brody's work cuts away from Wilbur's text for complementary poems by James Merrill and Walt Whitman, before moving in to the unnerving conclusion. The effect is to examine the subject of man's relationship to the animal world from multiple angles of vision. Brody is a composer of the brainiac school, but this piece becomes haunting because it is so lucid. Keusch sang with a serene security that left room for ecstatic flight.

Review of concert: March 27, 2006
David Cleary, New Music Connoisseur

For its season finale, Collage New Music decided to premiere three works newly minted for the occasion (two of which made for excellent listening) and reprise an older commission.

Scored for Pierrot ensemble plus percussion, danger garden (2006) by this year's composer in residence Curtis K. Hughes gleefully intertwines two seemingly incompatible kinds of music during the course of its pair of movements. Here, one encounters ideas that are by turns athletically driven and statically stubborn, stated in opposition and combined in a dizzying number of ways. Hughes handles these disparate threads with seasoned sureness, further casting them in intuitive formats rife with unusual twists and turns that nevertheless seem perfectly logical. This is energetic, compelling stuff that expresses its clangorous sound world expertly.

Tod Machover's music often exhibits an inimitably flinty take on scale-derived neo-process approaches, but in Another Life (2006) he looks nostalgically back to the even more rawboned ethos espoused by Paris IRCAM in the 1980s -- a time when Machover was in residence there. Cast in three interlocking movements that are respectively busy, more laid-back, and busier yet, this engrossing selection dares the listener to love its forceful, often unruly manner of speech and succeeds in all possible ways. Its mixed nonet scoring is combined with live computer electronics that simultaneously provide intriguing colors and sonic glue to bind together the wide ranging acoustic timbres.

Sad to say, the usually reliable Andrew Imbrie produced the concert's least engaging listen in The Tyger (2006), a setting of poetry by William Blake, Thomas Moore, and William Wordsworth for soprano, baritone, and ten players. Its Atlantic Seaboard writing, containing more simplified textures than usual, comes across as stiff and dry. Vocal writing, while idiomatic, is rhythmically awkward while instrumental doublings of the singers' lines seem obvious, uncrafty, and altogether too frequent and prominent.

The one item getting a repeat presentation this evening, Martin Brody's Beasts (2002), pleased much more. There's a clever overarching plan afoot here; the cycle's odd-numbered movements utilize the same Richard Wilbur poem, which freezes up partway through each time until its final appearance, all serving to frame complete verses by James Merrill and Walt Whitman. It manages the neat trick of combining a heavily clouded tonality with dark Expressionism while avoiding any toadying to Second Viennese School icons. In brief, an entity that eminently deserves a revival.

Members of Collage New Music, expertly led by David Hoose, played each work with equal parts accuracy and enthusiasm. Baritone Mark McSweeney sang quite well, though both his highest and lowest notes sometimes lacked grounded projection. Elizabeth Keusch's full throated soprano voice was a perfect combination of power, focus, and musicality. Crisp word enunciation was a hallmark of both singers.

Collage works its magic
Richard Dyer, Boston Globe
February 1, 2006

Grammy-nominated Collage New Music came up with a winner Monday night in Gunther Schuller's 1991 "Paradigm Exchanges."

This 25-minute, 14-movement suite is a knockout. It is formidably organized both in technique and in structure. Nearly every movement brings a fresh combination of timbres, and each instrument has a major solo. But the effect is of complete spontaneity. The new wine of contemporary expression goes into the old bottles of familiar forms ("Courante," "Passacaglia"), but those forms are renewed by what Schuller has poured into them. And the performance by Collage virtuosos under David Hoose's assured direction was superb: flutist Christopher Krueger, clarinetist Robert Annis, pianist Christopher Oldfather, cellist Joel Moerschel, and violinist Daniel Stepner. The 21st-century work on the program was by Eugene Birman, a young Russian-born composer. His piano trio "Rhapsodie" is an attractive post-Romantic work modeled on the form, if not the style, of a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody.

The rest of the program offered opportunities to renew acquaintance with earlier works by three Boston composers. Marti Epstein's "Private Fantasy Booth" is minimalistic in that it implies far more than it states. David Rakowski's "Dances in the Dark," drawn from a ballet for children, is accessible, energetic, and dodgy. The centerpiece of Peter Child's "Tableaux I" is an eloquent "Elegy in Time of War" flanked by two entertaining movements, "Flight" (an ascending scale takes wing) and "Diddle-ee dee," a jazzy finale that ends with the performers scat singing. Charismatic young percussionist Sam Solomon seized his moment in the Child, and made the most of it. The musicians responded to the enthusiastic applause by reprising "Diddle-ee dee."

Review of concert: January 30, 2006
David Cleary, New Music Connoisseur

This latest offering by the Collage New Music group featured five Boston-area composers to fine effect, the latest bit of evidence that Beantown takes a back seat to no other city in the quality of its tonemeisters.

Of the five selections encountered, the three most convincing were scored for what is perhaps the late 20th century's most typical ensemble, Pierrot grouping plus percussion. David Rakowski's Dances in the Dark (1998) consists of four movements of incidental music from a children's ballet originally commissioned by Boston Music Viva. But like the best art for the moppet set, encompassing everything from Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh to Disney's The Lion King, this is intelligent, sophisticated stuff that will also please adults. It's energetic, wide-ranging, impeccably crafted music in a dissonant style that both engages and compels. Private Fantasy Booth (1993) by Marti Epstein shows this composer yet again creating a compelling personal utterance within her preferred Feldman-inflected approach. Low-key like many of this past master's pieces, it nevertheless contains some well placed forceful moments. Despite a good bit of variety in sound and gesture, there's a recurring expression of items clumped in pairs, derived from the opening series of two-chord gestures, all serving to anchor what might to the casual listener appear scattered. The fleet-footed, cheeky, and decidedly jazz-influenced outer movements of Peter Child's long-ago Collage commission Tableaux I (1991), provide a strong contrast to the work's slow and intense Elegy midpoint. More scalar and less Atlantic Seaboard sounding than much of this composer's output, it proves both hugely engrossing and sturdily built. The bouncy finale, heavily imbued with scat-style figuration, was reprised as an encore much to the audience's delight.

Paradigm Exchanges (1991) shows Gunther Schuller eschewing percussion while maintaining Schoenberg's original instrumental quintet. One encounters here a lengthy roster of character pieces, many derived from classic formats, which features a welter of solo cadenza writing. Despite compelling passages, this clangorous selection comes across as scattered and unfocused. Scored for piano trio, Eugene Birman's Rhapsodie (2004) was this year's winner of Collage's Young Composers Competition. Spiky verticals and a forthright common practice period gestural sense coexist quite well here. And Birman is creative in his architectural thinking, imposing elements of arch form over this trio's two-movement setup. In brief, an auspicious start to what will hopefully be a most fruitful career.

Performances were mostly excellent. Epstein's fragile piece initially suffered a bit from awkwardly balanced voicings and a somewhat cold sound, but gained confidence as it progressed. All the other items went terrifically well. Christopher Krueger (flutes), Robert Annis (clarinets), Daniel Stepner (violin), Joel Moerschel (cello), Christopher Oldfather (piano), and Sam Solomon (percussion) expertly brought conductor David Hoose's top-drawer conceptions to sonic reality.

Review of concert: October 17, 2004
David Cleary, New Music Connoisseur
January 3, 2005

The Collage New Music group's season opener concerned itself with composers at opposite ends of the age spectrum. Two elder statesmen offered up first-rate song cycles, while the rest of the program featured music by two teenagers and a college student.

Co-winners of the ensemble's latest young composer competition, Sebastian Chang's Resurrection and Zachary Bernstein's Star Music are scored for piano trio and were written in 2004. Both items demonstrate respectable craft and an earnest manner of speech that belies the fledgling status of their creators. Promising starts both. Montserrat Torras, a doctoral student at New England Conservatory and Collage's composer-in-residence for this year, was represented by a flute/piano duo Three Movements for Sarah (2003). Persian, Spanish, North Indian, French, and avant-garde elements insinuate themselves into the work's pages. Truth be told, this plethora of influences proves a little too wide ranging to mingle successfully, but one should also positively note Torras's effective feel for color and felicitous unfolding of material.

Both aging tonemeisters furnished infrequently encountered older pieces from their portfolios. Mario Davidovsky's Biblical Songs (1990) for soprano and Pierrot ensemble are dramatic and very appealing. Strong risks are taken in text setting here; moods suggested by the accompaniments sometimes seem rather at odds with the words, one example being the rather bouncy music underscoring Samson's boast of slaying thousands with the jawbone of an ass. But these apparent incongruities work surprisingly well, not appearing at all to be eccentric miscalculations. On This Most Voluptuous Night (1982) shows Yehudi Wyner setting William Carlos Williams's spare poetry to full bodied music of much personality, profile, and depth. Total and atonal idioms are neatly straddled here without seeming inelegant. And vernacular influences add tasty spice to this complex, delicious stew of a piece.

Performances were excellent throughout. David Hoose directed the Wyner and Davidovsky with a perceptive ear for color, texture, and mood. Among the players appearing, one can cite Catherine French (violin), Christopher Krueger (flute), Joel Moerschel (cello), and Christopher Oldfather (piano) for particularly memorable efforts. Ilana Davidson's voice was warm and light, less forceful than that of many sopranos, but demonstrated an appealing agility and nuance. Her diction was mainly all right.

Clearly, we had at this event the musical equivalent of the best baseball teams, a worthy balance of veterans and rookies. Accomplished, thought-provoking, and enjoyable indeed.

Festive and tragic spirits
Lloyd Schwartz, Boston Phoenix
January 16 - 22, 2004

COLLAGE NEW MUSIC began the new year with one of its most elegantly constructed and played programs. It started with the voice of mezzo-soprano Janna Baty (last June's oversexed Duchess in Thomas Adès's Powder Her Face) mouthing vowels that finally turn into the words "O King" in the late Luciano Berio's 1968 elegy for Martin Luther King, who had just been assassinated. (With eight voices, this became the second movement of Berio's Sinfonia.) And the concert ended with Baty's voice dissolving into wordless vocalise at the end of Pierre Boulez's Le marteau sans maître ("The Hammer Without a Master"). In between were Collage's young composer-in-residence Matthew Van Brink‚s engagingly jazzy Whims and Wisps, Bernard Rand's sumptuously evocative . . . in the receding mist . . . , and the late Donald Sur's very last piece, a mysteriously consoling yet unsettling lullaby, Berceuse, perhaps his own elegy. BSO violinist Catherine French and pianist Donald Berman gave it an unforgettable performance.

When I was coming of age, Le marteau, a nine-movement fantasy using three surrealist poems by René Char ("I dream my head on the tip of my Peruvian knife"), embodied my idea of "new music" ÷ the title'‚s unrestrained tool of destruction and creation an image of everything knocking around in an artist‚s brain. In the refined hands of Collage director David Hoose, Baty, and the captivating ensemble of guitar (William Buonocore), alto flute (Christopher Krueger), viola (Anne Black), xylophone (Craig McNutt), vibraphone (Robert Schulz), and percussion (Jeffrey Fischer), Boulez's half-century-old masterwork sounded fresher and more consistently startling than most pieces of newer music.

Collage puts pieces together masterfully
Richard Dyer, Boston Globe
January 13, 2004

CAMBRIDGE -- Collage New Music's program Sunday night was mostly a tribute to old masters of new music -- Pierre Boulez, Bernard Rands, and the late Luciano Berio and Donald Sur. But it was amiably introduced by Matthew Van Brink (born 1978), a graduate student at Boston University, and Collage's first-ever composer-in-residence.

Not much music can hold its own against Boulez's epochal "Le marteau sans maitre" ("The Hammer Without a Master"), which he began in 1953, when he was only a couple of years older than Van Brink is now. Collage music director David Hoose wisely chose to introduce it with shorter and mostly lighter works. Sur's "Berceuse," the composer's last completed music, is a lullaby for violin and piano; it is elegant and heartfelt and, like most of Sur's work, not as simple as it seems. It was sensitively played by violinist Catherine French and pianist Donald Berman.

Bernard Rands' ". . .in the receding mist. . ." is also a very elegant piece. Everything comes out of a short melodic line that is also a kind of jigsaw of two baroque musical figures. All three elements enter into a complex interplay before generating and resolving into a much more developed and experienced melodic line. Berio's "O King" is a sound-tapestry in which one of the threads presents the vowels and consonants of the name of Martin Luther King, vocalized atmospherically by soprano Janna Baty, the unforgettably concupiscent heroine of Thomas Ades's "Powder Her Face" at Opera Unlimited last spring.

Van Brink's piece, "Whims and Wisps" (1999), is for a seven-instrument ensemble. It comprises three brief, charming movements, as fleeting, personal, intimate, and offbeat as diary entries, and notated in a jazz idiom. In its bridge between sophisticated contemporary compositional technique and traditional jazz, it sounded like some of John Harbison's music for "The Great Gatsby." The performance was spiffy.

Boulez's half-hour work remains astonishing in its display of paradoxical qualities -- it is in-your-face and elusive; precise and glistening with intricate detail yet perpetually spontaneous in effect; formidably intellectual but furiously sensual.

The point of departure is a group of texts by the Surrealist poet Rene Char which are set for singer (one of them twice), but also probed, though not illustrated, through chameleonic instrumental movements -- each of the nine sections calls for a different combination of instruments. The performance Hoose drew out of the first-class Collage players was assured, lucid, and passionate, and the voluptuous tones of Baty (often singing an octave, or even two, below her usual range) made the poetry feel accessible, the music absolutely erotic.

Note Worthy (excerpt)
Lloyd Schwartz, Boston Phoenix
November 14 - 20, 2003

BACK TO ELLIOTT CARTER for a moment. It was after David Hoose's superlative performance of A Mirror on Which To Dwell that he decided to return to a Carter piece Collage had played before: the fiendishly tricky Triple Duo, in which pairs of winds, strings, and percussion (including piano) are like a pinball machine in which the musicians keep three (or is it six?) balls going at once. Some of the music is hilarious (think of Paul Klee's Twittering Machine). The opening maneuver is a slapstick triple play: piano to clarinet to flute to snare drum -bang! Later it becomes inscrutably indrawing, then even threatening, before its abrupt shutdown. All of this is captured on a recording by the Fires of London, the group (founded by Peter Maxwell Davies) to whom the piece is dedicated.

"There are a lot of notes," Hoose told the audience, and the Collage players didn't miss a single one. But the performance lacked a sense of event, of different things happening, of big changes in dynamics or pacing. It was work to hear and seemed like work to play (unlike Hoose's powerful, propulsive Mozart Requiem last week with the Cantata Singers, in which the forward momentum never overrode Mozart's radical mood shifts). The piece Hoose seemed to have the most feeling for was the late Donald Sur‚s beautifully spare and melancholy Catenas I-III - the third (1976) longer, denser, consolidating the evocations of the first two (1953). Special applause for William Buonocore on mandolin.

The three Boston premieres were Steven Mackey‚s 1999 Microconcerto, in which percussionist Craig MacNutt had a field day, and two prize winners, Ryan Gallagher's Burning in Water, Drowning in Fire, composed a year ago, when he was still in high school, and 33-year-old doctoral candidate Gregg Wramage's in shadows, in silence. (Is Carter's 1981 setting of Robert Lowell, In Sleep, in Thunder, the grandfather of these parallel prepositional- or participial-phrase titles?) It‚s hard to imagine more devoted performances.

Collage cultivates a lush bounty
Richard Buell, Boston Globe
April 1, 2003

CAMBRIDGE -- Wise the concertgoer who, anticipating something out of the ordinary from Collage New Music on Sunday night, took a nice long nap in the afternoon.

Deceivingly, the first two pieces, for instruments only -- Richard Cornell's ''New Tropes'' (a premiere) and Andrew Imbrie's ''Spring Fever'' (1996) -- had a spruce, walled-garden neatness to them, no matter what the arrangement (often playfully asymmetrical) or the material (garden varieties persuading you that they were weird mutations). You always knew where you were. Close attention was rewarded. Every gesture counted. This was the kind of music that leaves audiences feeling smarter than when they came in. It could have been exhausting. If it wasn't, this was because Collage's performances had the poetry of exactness, a palpable zest in getting it compellingly right.

Whereas the effect of ''Goback Goback,'' an Andy Vores piece also getting its premiere right after intermission, was to be flung from that walled garden into a huge, pullulating Amazonian lushness. With only a few more instruments at his disposal, Vores gave you the sense that he had an infinite number of orchestrational palettes at hand, that the challenge was not to take too much from any single one. This is not a composer for whom ideas -- or ways of expressing them -- are slow in coming.

The verses by W. S. Graham that Vores has set are of a specific place (Scotland) and time (the poet's childhood, between the wars), rendered through the prism of memory. As a setting, ''Goback Goback'' -- named for the inadvertently punning cry of the grouse -- jumbles its perspectives shrewdly, the middle-aged self playing off against the younger self without friction, and the linguistic regionalisms comfortably cheek by jowl with a rustically plain-spoken poetic style.

Mercifully, the composer does not drown the texts in instrumental comment. What's there is pungent, terse, text-specific, quickly out of the way. When he does indulge himself in introduction or epilogue, it's orchestral tone painting of a high order.

Admittedly, a price was paid for being so much at the service of the words. The rather neutral, nonvoluptuous cast of the vocal writing, beautifully rendered as this was by baritone David Kravitz, put a high value on aural legibility, not so high a one on crowd-pleasing qualities; folkishness never raised its cloying head.

This was one of Collage's stellar evenings. Nowadays we need them more than ever.

The Jazzy and the bardic
Lloyd Schwartz, Boston Phoenix
April 3 - 10, 2003

THE JAZZY AND THE BARDIC were primary colors in Collage New Music’s latest program. Music director David Hoose led two worldpremieres by Boston-area favorites Richard Cornell and Andy Vores and a 1996 Collage commission, Spring Fever, by the 82-year-oldAndrew Imbrie. New music, Hoose told the audience, has often been full of special effects. But the new music at this concert wasgoing to be devoted to traditional things like "pitches, rhythms, dramatic purposes, emotional interests, and narrative sensibility." The strangest sound we were going to hear would be Judi Saiki Couture tapping on the frame of her harp.

Cornell’s New Tropes, in three short movements, all of which end quietly, begins with a harp (the bardic element) and a quietunderpinning of tribal drum beats (percussionist Craig McNutt); that’s followed by a slow section for moody winds and strings. Abeautiful oboe song (Peggy Pearson) — almost blues — opens the next movement, with a series of iridescent variations, includingimaginative uses of tambourine, a jazzy drum set, and a passage something like the Chordettes singing "Mr. Sandman," with adifferent instrument making up each note in the tune. Cornell calls the last movement "meditative"; I found the shivery gongs quiteeerie, too.

Spring Fever swells the ensemble from eight to 10 players. It’s a denser, more angular piece, also in three movements, opening indarkness and winter and ending with a big bang in a new season of rebirth. Piano riffs (Chris Oldfather), another bluesy oboe lament,and witty syncopations (DAH-ta-ta-DAH, DAH-ta-ta-DAH) whiz by. There’s never a moment when something isn’t engaging your attention.

Vores’s Goback Goback is a setting of eight poems by the almost forgotten 20th-century Cornwall poet (born in Scotland) W. S.Graham. These are works that deal with the contrary pulls of returning to a ghostly childhood and trying to live more fully in thepresent. Several of the poems remind me of the folk songs Mahler uses in his Des Knaben Wunderhorn cycle: "How would you like tobe killed," says the mysterious voice at the beginning of "The Visit." The title is the call of the grouse in the last poem, both aseduction and a warning.

Goback Goback also begins with a harp, and here the bardic element is most explicit, reinforced by strumming strings, staccatobeats, and snaky, slithery winds. In a marvelous interlude between the second and third sections, plucked cello (Joel Moerschel) andrhythmic bass (Jim Orleans) dissolve into ravishingly lyrical strings.

Vores’s striking music conjures up the ghost worlds of Schumann, or Mahler, or Benjamin Britten, only on hallucinogens. "Imagine aforest,/A real forest," another poem begins, and the music wants to surround us in dark woods, submerge us in a fathomless sea,disintegrate us into an ephemeral cloud. And it captures Graham’s creepy comedy ( "Dear Bryan Winter" begins, "This is only anote/To say how sorry I am/You died" ).

Baritone David Kravitz was the eloquent singer, conveying the sense that he knew what lurked behind the words and letting us hearevery syllable. David Hoose led every piece with passion and precision. And the playing seemed flawless. It’s a rare new-music event that makes me want to hear each piece over again. And again.

Collage reveals rich textures
Richard Buell, Boston Globe
February 25, 2003

CAMBRIDGE - Collage New Music got down to business Sunday night, with a stunningly played program that seemed almost tauntingly ''new'' even if some of it dated from more than 40 years ago. And, crucially, the group knew a thing or two about audience psychology. When it came time for the piece by Elliott Carter - whose music composer/diarist Ned Rorem has likened to ''notated insanity'' - one's ears were as open as they were ever going to be.

''Chewy,'' it says in your reviewer's notes on Laura Elise Schwendinger's ''Fable'' (1994). This composer certainly had a knack of making you wonder what was lurking round the corner for her spirited little band of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion. Movement No. 1 began questioningly with a breathy tremolando for clarinet and ended, as if in answer, with a quiet, almost feathery drum roll. In between, a long-lined near-melodiousness runs up against violent disturbances in which agitated, high-pitched twitterings seem bent on sucking all the oxygen (and middle and low frequencies) from the air. Movement No. 2 was night music, lighted by phosphorescent swirls and arabesques. The finale was nasty from the start (wittily so, with registral extremes glowering at each other something awful) - and it kept up its punchy, irascible tone until it was quite through with us, thank you. This was shrewd composing, the genuine article. Onto the ''season's best'' list it goes.

Carter's 1975 settings of Elizabeth Bishop poems call for a soprano soloist along with the above instrumental setup plus oboe, viola, and bass. The music proves very Carterlike in its excitably supercharged instrumental textures but also lovingly sensitive to how the poet's rhythms, shifts of tone, silences, even the speed of utterance should go. Carter has a quite marvelous literary ear.

Lisa Saffer, in gleaming form, reveled in the opportunities this opened for her. From the instruments came a set of pungent tone-pictures, always clearing a space in which her voice could open up: the swooning density of morning city air in ''Anaphora,'' the drifting sound of a brass band in ''View of the Capitol,'' and the blowsily explicit eroticism of ''O Breath.'' Carter's masterpiece received the performance it deserved. This, too, goes onto that ''season's best'' list.

Earlier, Anna Lindemann's Katz Award-winning ''Into the Underworld and Out Again'' (2002) showed an engaging compositional craft in the making, Stefan Wolpe's ''Piece for Two Instrumental Units'' (1962) a kind of bitty, quick-flash kineticism that refused to stay in the memory.

Collage delivers a spirited 'center'
Richard Dyer, Boston Globe
October 30, 2002

Collage New Music honored Tod Machover Sunday night by presenting "Towards the Center," a work he composed for the ensemble back in 1989. This was one of his earliest pieces for "hyperinstruments"; computer technology registers performance data from live musicians and contributes additional musical detail. The piece begins with tremendous motor energy and rhythmic life, continues with song, and concludes with a pounding passacagl ia that could rock the FleetCenter. Opposites play out their differences and move "towards the center" and common ground. Percussionist Frank Epstein and keyboardist Christopher Oldfather were the capable hyperinstrumentalists. As happens all too often at new-music events, the oldest piece was the strongest. Augusta Read Thomas's "Passion Prayers" (1999), heard at Tanglewood last summer, unfurls a long and eloquent cello line; the other instruments mirror it in other lights and perspectives. The music could almost have been written in 1899, but Joel Moerschel was an elegant and impassioned cellist. Sebastian Currier's "Vocalissimus" (1991), a group of 18 contrasting settings of the same 13-word poem by Wallace Stephens, felt deft, tricky, amusing, and shallow. What made one glad to hear it was the performance by reigning new-music diva Susan Narucki, making her Boston debut. The soprano has intelligence, wit, presence, drop-dead musicianship, and something one doesn't always expect from her kind: a voice you want to hear.

Collage gets truly modern, and richly so
Richard Dyer, Boston Globe
February 26, 2002

Collage New Music has sometimes been criticized for not playing enough really new music, but nothing in Sunday evening'‚s program was more than 10 years old.

"Come Round" was one of the late Jacob Druckman's last works, a set of six variations gathered into three movements for seven players. Like all of the composer‚s music, it is meticulous in craftsmanship, fascinating in construction, and aureate in sound. There is no theme for the variations; instead, there are six contrasting, complementary ways of looking at the same material. The performance, under David Hoose‚s direction, was full of skill, respect, and affection. The youngest composer represented was Marcus Macaulay, a 16-year-old high school junior from Seattle whose "To Walk in Wilderness" is the fourth winner of Collage‚s Natalie and Murray S. Katz Young Composers Competition. The music is attractively scored for clarinet, violin, cello, and tuned percussion. It presents flowing lines in elegant counterpoint moving across slightly angular harmonies that sound a little like early Cop land ("As It Fell Upon a Day"); the climax, reinforced by bells, is stirring.

Rodney Lister's "Somewhere to Get To" is a setting of four poems by W. H. Auden for mezzo-soprano and five instruments, written in 1996 as an 80th-birthday trib ute to Milton Babbitt. Two six-note sequences from Babbit'‚s "Composition for Viola and Piano" provide the score's fundamental musical material, and Lister directly quotes the end of Babbitt's piece. Lister observes the formalities - the instrumental interludes, he tells us, are isorhythmic motets - but the piece is most of all a demonstration of the composer's assimilative, individual, and quirky personality, and an intelligent response to the poems, particularly in the outer parts of the cycle, "Their Lonely Betters" and "Musee des Beaux-Arts." Mary Westbrook-Geha, a pillar of Boston's musical life for decades, has been doing most of her singing elsewhere lately, so it was nice to welcome her back. Her mezzo voice remains large, flexible, both deep and bright, and her musicianship is superior. Hoose and the players handled the intricacies with comparable commitment.

One new piece was "Elegy for the Future" by Lior Navok, a work for six players composed in Tel Aviv both before and after Sept. 11. The music is rich in emotion and instrumental coloration, and Navok poignantly evokes a melody from a Mozart piano concerto to make the statement that "the pure is now shadowed in darkness" - as if the pure had ever met any other fate; which is why we need music, both by Mozart and Navok.

A Collage tale of Irish sadness
Richard Dyer, Boston Globe
January 16, 2002

The big-ticket item at Collage New Music on Sunday night was the world premiere of Edward Cohen's one-act opera "The Bridal Night." Cohen based his work on a play by Paul Avila Mayer that in turn was based on Frank O'‚Connor's classic short story from 1944. The piercingly sad tale is about the descent of a young Irishman into madness, and the compassionate sacrifice the village schoolteacher, Miss Regan, makes in order to give him comfort before the police take him away to the asylum.

Most of O'‚Connor's story is narrated by the madman's mother; in a way, it is a story about her voice. Cohen carries this device over into his opera, which may seem undramatic, but it is hardly without precedent - significant stretches of Wagner's "Ring" Cycle are narrations, too. And oddly enough, "The Bridal Night" sometimes brings "Tristan und Isolde" to mind - both works concern unconsummated desire. A more obvious model is Debussy'‚s "Pelleas et Melisande," which is also an opera about frustration. Cohen'‚s music, scored for eight instrumentalists, is translucent, and by no means as direct as it appears; everything is refracted, on a slant, elusive. There is no attempt to create Irish local color, except in the score's intimate response to the rhythms of O‚Connor's language.

Nearly all the vocal lines are colored in subtle ways by the instrumentation; this is an opera of epic understatement.

Lynn Torgove devised a strong, simple, and supple staging, and there was a first-rate cast. Janice Felty sang and acted the mother with unaffected candor, and David Kravitz provided a nervy, well-sung characterization of the troubled child-man. Janet Brown is too elegant in appearance for O'‚Connor's large and jolly teacher, but she radiates simplicity and honesty, and her soprano shines with those qualities. David Ripley was a pillar of strength in the part of a neighbor, and David Hoose led the expert Collage ensemble with precision and conviction.

Cohen has taught at MIT for many years, so longtime Collage pianist Christopher Oldfather opened the program with a short recital of music by other MIT composers. All three pieces stand at an intersection between popular and high culture. Elena Ruehr's "Swing Set" ingeniously adapts Milton Babbitt's pointillistic 12-tone style to popular styles of the swing era. Excerpts from Peter Child‚s "Doubles" are character pieces ranging from adaptations of Chinese folk songs to literate references to Messiaen, the Berg Piano Sonata, and ragtime.

Oldfather closed with a tribute to one of his teachers, William Albright - his foot-stomping "Queen of Sheba" rag. One of Albright‚s organ pieces contains the performance direction "FREAK OUT!"; this irresistible piece might as well. Oldfather‚s pianism retains its famous X-ray vision, but in recent seasons it has put on flesh and blood too.