Scott Wheeler’s Dinosaur Annex provided the festival’s most amusing concert, beginning with the Boston premiere of Wheeler’s The Gold Standard, a setting of the late Kenneth Koch’s timely satirical poem about two Chinese monks (tenor Frank Kelley and baritone David Kravitz) bewildered by the nature of American currency. Richard Beaudoin had to wait four years for the premiere of his Eunoia Songs (“eunoia” — “beautiful thinking” — is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels, which are also present in the name Beaudoin). Maybe his settings of five hilarious sonnets by Canadian poet Christian Bök (each one restricted to a single vowel) were deemed unfit for polite company (as in “a prurient debauch,” the “o” poem, in which “Johns who don condoms for blowjobs go/downtown to Soho to look for pornshops known/to stock lots of lowbrow schlock”). The concert ran twice as long as it should have, but how could you cut Brian Robison’s new Dança da Tranquilidade, for marimba, clarinet, cello, and theremin (played by the composer), the Barbara White premiere, or Ezra Sims’s delicious 1967 setting of Edward Gorey, Alice Hawthorne in memoriam?
The Collage/Cantata Singers concert kept to its time limit, but it started so late (after Dinosaur Annex), it seemed long. I loved the late Donald Sur’s 1984 Satori on Park Avenue, with its maddening repetitions of the back-and-forth opening notes of “Tea for Two” and its King Kong reference, and Sonnet 97, his very last piece, which ends with the heartbreaking choral repetition of Shakespeare’s final phrase, “dreading the winter’s near.” I also loved Yehudi Wyner’s gorgeous cycle of William Carlos Williams settings, On this most voluptuous night (1982), though I’d have liked to hear more consonants from soprano Karyl Ryczek, and more emotional color. I treasure Irving Fine’s elegant and elegiac choral settings of Ben Jonson (1949) and Jake Falstaff (1944). Dalit Warshaw’s ambitious Suite Française (The Unwritten Chapters), an evocation of never-written sections of Holocaust victim Irene Nemirovsky’s epic novel, was the piece most hurt by the late hour.
The quietest concert, by Stephen Drury’s Callithumpian Consort, had delicate nature pieces by John Luther Adams, Lei Liang, and Jo Kondo. The most roof-raising was the evening with the George Russell Living Time Orchestra. Perhaps the festival’s most poignant moment came when the legendary master of avant-garde jazz, now 85, got up from his first row seat and, a bit shaky, began to dance and conduct extended sections of his 1983 through-composed The African Game, which alternates sounds of the jungle (lion-roaring trombones) with the cacophony of modern technology, and his love letter to his wife, Alice, the ballad “It’s About Time.” Jazz singer Sheila Jordan wailing “You Are My Sunshine” created another sensation.
On the last day, cellist Matt Haimovitz offered the festival’s most varied program. Joined by pianist Geoffrey Burleson, he played the world premiere of August Read Thomas’s Cantos for Slava, a memorial piece for Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich that was both uncannily light on its syncopated feet and ravishing. Part I of David Sanford’s not-yet-finished funk-like 22 had a lively interchange between the two instruments. And Haimovitz, with DJ Olive’s electronic samplings, tore into Tod Machover’s exciting and very beautiful VinylCello (2007), the festival’s only truly avant-garde piece. Machover, one should not forget, can also be a great melodist.
