Recently by Lani Willis

Lyra Baroque Orchestra opened its season Saturday at Hamline’s Sundin Hall with a French flair.

The first half featured ten of the orchestra’s musicians ­—two violins, a cello, viola da gamba, harpsichord, bassoon, and a pair each of flutes and oboes—on Francois Couperin’s Apothéoses.

Lyra’s artistic director, Jacques Ogg, gave some helpful verbal notes before the concert began, explaining the fascinating period of musical partisanship and nationalism in the early years of the eighteenth century that spawned the work.

During the reign of Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste de Lully controlled all the musical output of France, and because in those days the world revolved around the Sun King, it was illegal to compose music in the Italian style. (This is just a tad ironic, given that Lully was born Giovanni Battista di Lulli in Florence in 1632.) But Lully died in 1687, and Louis XIV in 1715, and after that, the strictures loosened to the point that Couperin (also ironically, born in Paris), could introduce the Italian trio sonata form to France, which he did by way of the Apothéoses.

The apotheoses are that of Lully, the poster child of French musical Académie, and Arcangelo Corelli, who defined Italian music in the same era. Both composers join Apollo and the muses on Mount Parnassus, and at the god’s persuasion, join the tastes of French and Italian music to create the perfection of music itself.

While the music is enjoyable on its own, knowing the story behind a programmatic work like this is the perfect way to get to know musical idioms. Given a helpful handle or two, it’s easy to identify the characters, and emotions and dramatic situations are vivid. A tiny flurry in the treble depicts Mercury’s descent to the Elysian Fields to announce the descent of Apollo from Parnassus, and the following grand gestures indicate the arrival of the god himself. There are even lesser mortal composers, gossiping and whining away.

Lyra’s playing was a little ragged at the start, with unsteady ensemble and intonation issues that are difficult to mask when only a handful of players are involved. But the group quickly gelled and gave a fine, spirited performance that was vivid and convincing. To me, the best moments were in the end of the second suite, when Lully (represented by the concertmaster, Lucinda Marvin) was accompanied by Corelli (played by principal second violin Inger Dahlin), and vice versa. Theirs was truly stunning, stylish playing that would have made Apollo smile.

The second half of the program was an instrumental suite from the opera Alcione by Marin Marais, another major musical figure in the courts of Louis XIV and XV.

The composer, depicted by Gérard Depardieu in the 1991 film Tous les matins du monde, was a student of Lully and a contemporary of Couperin, and as much of a superstar as a viol player has ever been. Alcione traces the myth of the lovers Ceyx and Alcyone as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ceyx dies in a storm at sea, and the bereft Alcyone tries to join him in death, but the gods change them both into sea birds whose presence signifies calm, “halcyon” waters. For this, four more violins, two violas and a bass added rich, fleshy depth to the band. 

You can tell that Marais was a viol player—he gives them shapely florid lines, which were gorgeously rendered by Lyra’s low strings.

There was some really brilliant virtuosic playing in the upper strings and winds, especially during the tempest movement (which was a bit drowned out by the wind machine, a wonderful eighteenth-century special effect), and in the joyous final movement’s flute duet, sweetly played by Paul Jacobson and Rachel Hest, that undoubtedly characterizes the reunited lovers.

Lyra really has a perfect venue in Sundin Hall—it’s a bright, clean acoustic, and the size is appropriate to the smaller scale of sound that period instruments put out. The audience fills out the space rather than being overwhelmed by it, as well.

I found myself driving home wondering why early music has a niche following. But maybe it’s not a bad thing to be gelato in a world of Dairy Queen.

Last night, Habib Koité and Bamada kicked off the Twin Cities Pan African Festival, a six-day feast of music, dance, film, and visual art organized by the Diverse Emerging Music Organization (DEMO) to “celebrate the African diaspora and Twin Cities’ African community.”

The Malian band drew an all-ages—but predominantly white—crowd to the Cedar Cultural Center, which is usually dark in July and August but has turned the lights on for the event. (However, they did not turn on the AC, if they have any—the thermostat on the wall said 85 degrees when the concert ended around 10 p.m.)

The first thing I noticed when I walked into the hall was that there was a narrow fringe of chairs trimming the walls, far from the stage. As more people arrived and found chairs stacked in the corners, they created more rows—until the announcement was made that the floor would be needed for dancing and they might want to move. It turned out the predication was right—the band was hotter than the room, propelling the evening with a driving and mesmerizing groove that is at once regional and worldly and had the packed floor moving.

Koité, who leads the band with vocals and guitar and an occasional recorder, is surrounded by five other musicians who play a blend of Western and Malian instruments: guitar, bass, violin, and a drum set were paired with a wooden xylophone called a balafón, a kora (a lute with a bowed neck and a gourd and cowskin resonator), a n’goni (an oblong wooden lute), and some talking drums.

Koité’s guitar playing was occasionally decorated with the light, ornamental turns of phrase common to Islamic musical styles, and his singing was sometimes earthy, sometimes nasal, and sometimes percussive and scatlike.

Their music has a dominant pop feel, and a secondary “ethnic” sound. Because African music had such an influence on the American folk and rock traditions, I found myself pondering chicken-and-egg questions about what I was hearing.

The melodic and rhythmic thoughts were short—anywhere from four beats to four bars—and ranged from simple to complex, and then repeated with little or no modification for the duration of the song. The tunes settle into a groove and stay there, their interest coming from the interplay of the layers laid down, and from virtuosic improvisational solos. The result was mesmerizing. As a listener (or dancer), you can follow or respond to any number of musical thoughts or combinations thereof.

There is also a conversational aspect to their music, coming from an almost gamelike call-and-response; Koité would challenge a band member to imitate a complex melody or play beyond their instrument’s range. (He played this game with the audience, too, but wisely kept it to simpler phrases.)

On vocals, Koité had these conversations with the percussionist, whose talking drum tucked under his armpit responded not only rhythmically but melodically note for note. He seemed to be the audience favorite, and had a charisma on stage that was impossible to take my eyes off—the level of physicality and intricacy of his drumming and the mystery of how he coaxed the different sounds and pitches from his instrument was fascinating.

The audience was a big part of the entertainment, too, as the band brought people up on stage one at a time to dance, the drums egging them on. Moves and grooves were coming out of the unlikeliest of people on the dance floor, as well. “You can tell who has taken African dance classes and who hasn’t,” my friend noticed. Regardless of ability, the music seemed to infect everyone with pure, unstoppable enjoyment, and the happy crowd coaxed a few encores from the band.

Last night at Orchestra Hall, Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest program highlighted Finnish fare. Osmo Vänskä, the favorite Finn of our Minnesota music scene, conducted a triptych of works by a three-generation lineage of his countrymen: The granddaddy, Jean Sibelius, his student Einojuhani Rautavaara, and Rautavaara’s protégée Kalevi Aho.

Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, Opus 61, opened the concert. Yes—for birds. Rautavaara recorded their songs in 1972 in the arctic marshlands nearby Finland’s northernmost university, the University of Oulu, which commissioned the work.

The first movement, “The Bog,” sets the scene, with gorgeously scored woodwinds coiling and uncoiling melodies. I could see a whole convention of winged beauties, congresses of various species from faraway places, gathering, communing and bickering. The shimmering of trilling flutes and clarinets merges into the recorded birdsong so effortlessly, and the orchestra’s imitations of their squawks, squeaks, and whistles was so spot-on that I found myself pondering the question, “Where does nature end and music begin?”

The sounds of real birds (on tape) open the second movement, “Melancholy,” with an unmistakable melody and rhythm to their songs. The orchestra takes more of a supporting role to the taped soloists here, anchoring the mood of the whole with hushed, slow-moving accompaniment.

Finally, “Swans Migrating” provides the drama of the landscape, aptly depicting the collection and departure of the great birds—the communication, the effort, and the movement are reflected in both real swan song and its counterfeit partner, the trombones.   

Cantus Arcticus is a feat of coordination, as the orchestra is divided into sub-groups and there’s a human being in charge of running the tape, which sometimes is heard alone and sometimes needs to be fully synchronized with the orchestra. Osmo gets my bouquet for this one, but it was a captivating performance all around. My favorite comment of the night, overheard during intermission, was:  “The bog part was very boggish, and I thought the migration went very well.”

Aho’s Symphony no. 9 for Trombone and Orchestra (Sinfonia Concertante no. 2), is for all intents and purposes a concerto for trombone, though the trombone functions for the majority of the work as a soloist within the texture and action of the music rather than showily sitting on top of it. The piece is a philosophical collision of new versus old, where new music flings itself forward with reckless nihilistic abandon, while Baroque dances persist gallantly. The debate thickens through the three-movement work, until the old music appears sort of sickly and gothic, constantly pummeled by the telegraphic pulse of the xylophone. But it persists to the end, leaving the argument unresolved.

Vänskä, in his remarks to the audience before the concert, said the score tells the percussionist to “kill the old music.” Sure enough, the timpani beat the harpsichord into submission with a few hard thwacks like a flyswatter to a butterfly. (Properly prepped, the audience giggled in appreciation, getting the joke.)

But it’s the trombone that truly tests the old order, even as the soloist—in last night’s case, the orchestra’s own Doug Wright—argues both sides, alternating between the modern trombone and its ancestor, the sackbut. While the sackbut sounded less native to him, his trombone was putty, easily stretched to the limits of high and low registers. The third movement’s cadenza offered Wright the opportunity to stun with showmanship—a grand oration with such extended techniques as multiphonics, flutter-tonguing and singing while playing, it is as bizarre and unaccountable as Heath Ledger’s Joker. Wright pulled sounds out of his horn ranging from a groaning hull of a great sinking ship to the throaty honking of an asthmatic goose. Between Batman and the trombone, it may be awhile before my dreams return to normal.

The audience shouted its appreciation before the last crashing note stopped reverberating—it is always gratifying to hear this sort of visceral response to new music. 

Finally, after intermission, was Sibelius’ Symphony no. 5 in E-flat major, Opus 82, written and revised during World War I. A late Romantic-era composer, Sibelius was such an important contributor to Finland’s cultural identity that he was, and is still, regarded as a national hero, much like Verdi to Italians.

Sibelius, not surprisingly, seems to pour out of maestro Vänskä’s pores. He has a clear passion on the podium, and this symphony offered the evening’s best spotlight on the orchestra. What I have heard change since Vänskä took the helm has been his impact on the exactitude and enormity of playing. There is greater precision to the ensemble, but what thrills me most is the extended dynamic range, especially the barely audible pianissimos. The sound is tiny, but not thin. It’s rich and clear like beef broth. On the other end of the spectrum, the full-bodied fortissimos make the air in Orchestra Hall crackle with explosive energy, to the point that the guy a row ahead of me actually plugged his ears. The first movement allows all of these to come to the fore with snapping rhythmic motives, lugubrious melodies and a sweet, fleet scherzo. The whole symphony brims with complex energy created from simple rhythmic and melodic building blocks, and its resolution moves from a sense of expansiveness to explosive conclusion.

All in all, I’d call it a stunning concert.

If Macy’s Day of Music is a marathon, I heard a 10k of it today. It’s the eighth year of this extravaganza on Peavey Plaza, where Minnesota Orchestra hosts a two-day festival of just about every type of music you can imagine. This is how I experienced the first six hours:

1:00 Walking onto Peavey Plaza, I was greeted by smiling volunteers in aqua T-shirts and handed a schedule. I had missed the first half of the e-Piano Competition finals, but after a healthy pause listening to the Mouldy Figs, I slipped in to stake a seat for the second half.

This international competition is unusual, in that while the contestants travel to compete, the international jury does not. Their performances are translated via Midi to the Internet, where not only the judges but thousands of people worldwide can listen. While the International e-Piano Competition has been around awhile, this is the first year of the junior competition, open to pianists seventeen and under.

I was surprised by the healthy size of the crowd, which was totally responsive to the kids playing their guts out on stage with the Minnesota Orchestra. I saw the fourth and fifth of the five finalists—Jan Lisiecki, a thirteen-year-old from Canada, and Frank Düpree, sixteen, from Germany. Jan, who has an adorable big scruff of golden hair, took the bench and I couldn’t help but think cute! But as soon as his fingers hit the keyboard for the first movement of Chopin’s Concerto no. 2 in F Minor, Opus 21, adorable turned into admirable pretty dang fast. Likewise, Düpree’s big, snapping arpeggios opening the iconic Tchaikovsky Concerto no. 1 were utterly impressive. Regardless of how mature these kids are offstage, their playing belies their age. What a rush they must be experiencing, competing at this level with Minnesota Orchestra as their back up band. (Düpree and Nansong Huang, a fourteen-year-old from China who played Rachmaninoff’s Concerto no. 3, tied for first place and will play later tonight with Minnesota Orchestra.)

3:20 Outside, it’s hot. And sticky. The kind of day I was losing faith in last April. And somehow, the band I’ve stumbled on, Axis Mundi, totally suits the weather. There are influences of Latin, Middle Eastern, Afro-Cuban, and Haitian music, played by a very versatile bunch. I would totally seek out this band again. I’m trying to imagine hearing them inside, and it sounds a little disappointing as an idea. But then again, maybe some hot, humid music in the dead of winter would be just the thing. The siren call of happy hour broke through the music, so I heeded and got myself round one, feeling pretty smug I held out this long.

4:00 I found a great spot in semi-shade for the next act. I wouldn’t miss the Charles Lazarus Group, and not just because Chuck, in three weeks, will morph from boyfriend-in-law to brother-in-law. Chuck plays in the trumpet section of Minnesota Orchestra, and his original music is always individual, interesting and satisfyingly virtuosic. The group has its own sound whether playing a New Orleans funeral march or lounge exotica or channeling Duke or the Buena Vista Social Club—it’s jazz, but all funked up.

It is so hot, and though the wind is trying to compensate for the brick oven effect of the tiles that form Peavey Plaza, the crowd is all cozied up in a sticky cluster on the shady Nicollet Mall side to listen. The thing that is amazing me most of all is that the keyboardist, Peter Schimpke, can wear black pants on a day like today.

It was a little funny listening to normal-size Chuck play while looking at the giant Chuck emblazoned on the side of Orchestra Hall. But you know it’s good when I’d rather sit here and enjoy the music than go for round two of happy hour.

5:10 For a change of scenery, I head over to the WCCO Stage to take in some salsa. Charanga Tropical, a nine-piece band featuring a flutist as lead, is entertaining, as are the gaggle of glamorous dancers that showed up in full salsa regalia (spike heels and all).

Those in the band who play standing dance —even the trio of violinists have moves like backup singers. I find it nearly impossible not to stand still listening to salsa, and tonight is no exception. However, after a bit, the hunger pangs finally get me dancing back across the street to the Kramarczak’s stand for a brat.

6:02 I’m feeling a bit wilty, but revived with the vitamin G (grease). Davina and the Vagabonds are up on the south stage. She’s amazing! I’m loving this. It’s jazzy and bluesy, and Davina Sowers sings like a gravelly trumpet, and has an occasionally spastic vibrato a la Elvis, but a voice that actually does sound like her write-up says – a little Bonnie Raitt, a little Ella Fitzgerald. She’s so infectious that my husband whisked me away from my laptop for a swingy whirl. Several other couples take the floor close to the stage, and are a blast to watch.

6:25 Still dancing. Back in a sec.

6:35 I don’t think I’m going to score a seat for the 8 p.m. orchestra concert. Since it’s free, people go in early to stake out a spot, but I just can’t go inside yet.

7:05 Once again I’m on the back side of the next band, featuring the twenty-four-year-old Haley Bonar. Her music is sweet, poppy, and folksy. From this position I can’t make out the lyrics, but the front side of this stage is absolutely packed with people. So I opt to stay put and enjoy some strawberry ice cream, which is melting quickly. The big, dark clouds billowing over Brits held off through the rest of her performance, but the storm reports we’re watching on my husband’s Blackberry help make the decision to give up our table before Honeydogs start outside. After six hours of urban musical fun in the sun, I vow to train for the full marathon next year.

VocalEssence concluded their American Masterpieces tour (a season-long series of concerts and educational programs throughout the Midwest) last night in Stillwater at Trinity Lutheran Church with a program called A Slice of Americana. The concert and tour were part of a wider National Endowment for the Arts initiative designed to celebrate our national musical heritage by highlighting significant American choral composers and works.

A note from NEA Chairman Dana Gioia applauding VocalEssence artistic director and founder Philip Brunelle for his national leadership of the choral component of this endeavor read, “Not only do we want more Americans to hear this great music, we want to cultivate a love and appreciation for it for future generations.”

Knowing this intention, I listened to the concert with perhaps a different filter than I would have had the concert been conceived as a sampler rather than a cross-section, and found myself pondering, what defines “Americana?” And whose Americana is it?

The first half of the concert was dedicated to “classical” American choral repertoire (perhaps choral art music would be a better way to describe it) and showed the group’s strengths to great effect–the sense of ensemble and highly polished details, diction so impeccable you don’t really need to follow the lyrics in the program, and the expert attention to the text that brings the music to life. Oh, and the chocolaty warmth of the bass section. That especially.

The opening selection, “O Praise the Lord of Heaven,” written by William Billings in 1794, was the only work on this half composed before I graduated from high school. The rest, while a very small sliver of our American choral pie, shows that modern American composers still are still making discoveries in choral music as they keenly explore the delta of music and language in rangy and highly individual ways.

Works by Twin Cities composers Stephen Paulus and Libby Larsen were placed alongside those of William Bolcom and Aaron Jay Kernis, but the two standouts for me were the lesser-known composers. Brent Michael Davids’ evocative “Zuni Sunrise Song” featured bird whistles handcrafted by the composer and spun by the singers, percussive and dancelike chanting by the men, and nasal incantations by the women. Unfortunately, the poetry was not listed in the program, but the work draws on a Native American song about the dawn. Eric Whitacre’s “Water Night,” which sets an English translation of an Octavio Paz poem, was musically as sensual as the text. Whenever I hear a Whitacre piece on a program, I kind of wonder why anyone ever programs anything else. He simply has a knack for setting gorgeous texts gorgeously.

The “intermission” of the seventy-five-minute concert was more of a break for the singers, who needed it more than the audience, was a treat: Charles Kemper played Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” and made it sound like Chopin. (Or perhaps Chopin with a martini.)

Brunelle introduced the second half, which was all folk songs and spirituals, to the mostly gray-haired audience, with a story about a high school choral conductor he met who didn’t know the folk songs on the program. He argued that this was our shared cultural heritage to celebrate and pass on to the next generation. This statement provided a lively debate with my concert buddy, who didn’t know the songs either, on the ride home. (He pointed out that if he was supposed to get to know them by coming to the concert, it would have been helpful to have the lyrics in the program.)

While VocalEssence sang arrangements of “Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?,” “Gentle Annie,” “Black is the Color,” “Cool Water,” and “Skip to My Lou,” I tried to determine, other than learning them in school, whether folk songs really played into my understanding of myself as an American. As much as I enjoy their nostalgic beauty, I couldn’t persuade myself that nineteenth-century American folk songs are relevant to my generation. We simply don’t sing them.

However, you can only appreciate your musical heritage if you are given the opportunity to hear it. Whether these tunes are masterpieces that will live on for generations is a matter of opinion and posterity, but Brunelle and VocalEssence gave us a wonderfully performed taste.

Last night’s Minnesota Orchestra concert at Orchestra Hall was a gut-wrenching experience I expect to be digesting for a very long while. It was a reprise of a major concert two seasons ago on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, which saw the premiere of To Be Certain of the Dawn, an hour-long oratorio with music by Stephen Paulus and words by Michael Dennis Browne. Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra are recording it this week. The oratorio formed the major part of the concert, and was psychologically set up by an extremely effective trio of works on the first half.

Olivier Messiaen’s Abyss of the Birds for solo clarinet from the Quartet for the End of Time, which was written in 1940 while the composer was a prisoner of war, was played gorgeously by Burt Hara, who coaxed supple pianissimos out of nothingness and formed a desolate, plaintive, and ultimately hopeful world with his range of expression. Hara’s solo merged into Steve Heitzeg’s Wounded Fields for string orchestra, which is an elegy to all the victims of war. Heitzeg has an utter mastery of emotional, sweeping gestures that are at once heartbreaking and ennobling. With Wounded Fields, so sensitively rendered by the orchestra, he created a nearly visible depiction of the landscape that inspired him—the battlefields of Gettysburg overgrown with wildflowers. Janet Horvath soloed on Max Bruch’s Kol Nidre for solo cello and orchestra. Kol Nidre, the prayer for absolution and release from oaths, is chanted on the Day of Atonement in the Jewish tradition and dates to the Spanish Inquisition, when Jews were forced to renounce their faith. This performance had additional layers of meaning—because Bruch wrote music on Hebrew themes, his children were nearly victims of the Third Reich, and Horvath’s own parents were Holocaust survivors. Whether that informs her performance of this somber work or not, her playing is infused with a heartfelt passion.

Father Michael O’Connell, rector of the Basilica of Saint Mary, commissioned To Be Certain of the Dawn as a gift to the Jewish community in general, and Temple Israel in particular, in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the death camps. It is also inspired by Pope John Paul II’s 1998 statement on the Shoah, acknowledging that Jews were not responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.

The oratorio begins (and ends) with the sound of the shofar, or ram’s horn, and Hebrew chanting by Barry Abelson, Temple Israel’s cantor. The first of the work’s three major sections, “Teshuvah (Renewal),” begins with the choir pleading to God to “create a great emptiness in me.” It is a desperate prayer that is answered ferociously—Paulus provides a violent acid torrent to wash out the wound. The self-reflective text is heavy with grief and guilt, and asks, "How did we think we might be recognized as You in all we failed to do?" A simple commandment from the Book of Leviticus, “You should love your neighbor as yourself,” that was found scrawled in both Hebrew and German on the ruins of a temple following Kristallnacht, serves as a leitmotif and is sung throughout the work in Hebrew, German, and English.

The second major section, “Remembrance,” is a beautiful and haunting homage to the victims of the Holocaust, especially the children. Pre-Holocaust photos from Roman Vishniac’s book, Children of a Vanished World, were projected and given imagined stories, poignantly told by a quartet of soloists (soprano Elizabeth Futral, mezzo Christina Baldwin, tenor John Tessier, and bass-baritone Philip Cokorinos).  I was struck by how quotidian the words Browne gave them were: two little girls eat bread and show off a new red coat; a boy wishes “it didn’t hurt where my tooth came out;” a grandfather dozes against a tree and dotes on his grandson. But each bears an undercurrent of hardship and dread, like fears of the knock on the door. These portraits are harshly punctuated by the chorus uttering the Nuremberg Laws, such as “Jews may not attend school; Jews may not ride bicycles...”

Throughout the work, the children’s voices (provided by the extremely well-prepared Minnesota Boychoir and Basilica’s Cathedral Choristers) offer blessings. The sublime words and music in the “Hymn to the Eternal Flame” sung by the Minnesota Chorale and the Basilica Cathedral Choir, children’s choruses and soprano solo, were what finally undid me, though—they called to mind both a potent symbol of not forgetting as well as the awful fire of the crematoriums—“every trembling in you, every blessing, every soul, every shining, woven into fire.”

The final major section, “Visions,” suggests peace rather than conflict, and also sets the words of Holocaust survivors. The last of those voices, Hinda Kibort’s, seems to sum up the spirit of the entire hour-long work: “I have lived in a world with no children . . . I would never live in a world of no children again.” The work’s final major chord alternates with the inherently unsettling tritone that by its nature defies resolution. The message is clear—the work of healing is not over, but rather it is handed to the listener. The final words, sung in Hebrew by the choruses and cantor, again call out the central commandment: “You should love your neighbor as yourself.”

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s artistic leadership model, rather than depending on one strong maestro to determine the organization’s musical character, engages a cadre of world-class musicians with star status and particular specialties. Friday night’s concert introduced the SPCO’s newest “artistic partner”–and also its first woman in that role–soprano Dawn Upshaw.

Upshaw was paired perfectly with pianist Pierre Laurent Aimard, who joined the orchestra as an artistic partner last year. The two have compatible visions and complementary personalities on stage. Both bring twin specialties of classical and contemporary music and both are considered important interpreters of Mozart. Aimard is identified as an acolyte of Boulez and a champion of contemporary composers, while Upshaw, who just won the prestigious MacArthur Genius Fellowship, is noted not just as a performer but as an integral and inspiring advocate for new music.

Where Aimard coolly captivates with a thrillingly articulate intent, Upshaw delivers her superhuman artistry with a warm, accessible humanity. She walked onstage as the anti-diva, unfussy and approachable in a little black dress with an artsy scarf draped around her. Her physical demeanor and engagement with the audience is simply likeable, and that quality matches her voice. She sings with a dancer’s flexibility, agility, and suppleness, and delivers text with an uncanny honesty and a range of expression that goes far beyond simple beauty. Beyond bringing her wide-ranging genius to concerts and programming, Upshaw is the perfect fit for the friendly neighborhood profile the SPCO has been working to grow.

Aimard conducted Haydn’s witty Symphony no. 60. Written as incidental music to a comic play by Regnard called The Absentminded Man, the symphony is an extended joke; the finale, essentially the punch line that derails the strings until they have to stop and retune, was camped up with the maestro’s mock frustration and embarrassment. Aimard also soloed on Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23, a perfect vehicle for the clarity of his playing. In his hands, the andante was magnetic with pathos. Both classical works showed off the ensemble’s cleanliness while also revealing its warmth.

While not new music, Upshaw’s selections for her debut in this new role were great showpieces for her range of expression. She began with Stravinsky’s Pribaoutki (nonsense rhymes), a miniature song cycle of Russian poems. Along the lines of “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” the poems’ wit comes from their sound rather than the meaning of the words, and delivered by Upshaw they were an instant delight.

She sang Ravel’s "Three Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé" with graceful subtlety, her delicate phrasing perfectly paired with the ethereal pointillism rendered by the SPCO instrumentalists (including Aimard at the piano).

The high, clear notes the audience was waiting for were saved for Mozart’s “Ch’io mi scordi di te?,” a song that bleeds with ardent youthfulness. Upshaw delivered them with clarity and grace. With such a beginning, Upshaw’s term as artistic partner promises to be fruitful and fascinating.

I am a sucker for a white Christmas. But last night, the snow seriously got in my way. Both my husband and mother pointed out I had been overly optimistic in planning a return flight from Santa Fe the same evening as I had planned a family outing to one of the concerts I had most highly anticipated this season: Cantus’s and Theater Latté Da’s All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914. Sure enough, our flight was delayed. So in full disclosure, this is a review of the half of the evening that I heard.

All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 is an unstaged but still dramatic telling of an extraordinary event in human history, when during the first year of World War I, thousands of young men lay down their arms and celebrated Christmas together in no man’s land.

Director Peter Rothstein chose to tell the story with the tool that would have been available to the story’s real-life characters—radio. So the concert took the form of a musical radio drama, featuring war documents and letters and journals of the young men in the trenches as text and Cantus’s arrangements of sentimental war-time songs and Christmas carols.

Actors John Catron, David Roberts, and Alan Sorensen narrated convincingly, alternating the voices of French, German, and British soldiers. The men of Cantus provided an effective soundtrack of quiet drones and harmonized hums in addition to the beautiful array of original arrangements in the three languages of the front that lent a compelling emotional through-line to the texts, which themselves were made more dramatic by virtue of their reality.

That cold night in 1914, the enemy troops traded carols, food, and drink, shared Mass and soccer matches, and helped each other bury their dead, who had lain frozen on the battlefield for weeks. They found points of connection in their stories, like the German whose uncle trimmed the beard of the Englishman’s father. These scenes were effectively painted, as spoken accounts mingled with music and a German carol (“In Dulci Jubilo”) merged into a British holiday drinking song (“Wassail”). Another fine moment was the recollection of one soldier’s awe in hearing a French opera star singing “O Holy Night” from across no man’s land. As if from afar, a single tenor voice quietly rang over the attentive hush of the rest of the “soldiers” in the ensemble, and the hush in the audience made me feel I was with them in the trenches.

Inevitably, the truce is ended, and by orders of their superiors, the battlefield they had made a soccer field and graveyard turned back into a battlefield. After the first shot was fired, the young men went back to war, according to one soldier’s account, with a vengeance. This scene was movingly depicted by several beautiful verses of "Auld Lang Syne," the last of which devolved into battle cries.

The concert wound down with a question—not a sappy sound bite, but a real question from a soldier as he reflects that it was as if they had decided to end the war all by themselves. He asked, “What if we’d all walked away and refused to fight? Could the war have ended in a truce?” The same voice admits probably not, but the niggling question lingers, rippling through history. The audience was left to imagine the faces of these young men—the faces of war, and the faces of peace, and again the faces of war. 

This Cantus/Theater Latté Da event came off less as a heart-warming holiday concert than as storytelling, and as such, it was a dramatic, real-life musing about the power this season has to make us stop, reflect, and decide to operate in a mode of peace, and the enormous impact those decision can have.

A buzz has been building around the National Lutheran Choir since David Cherwien joined as music director in the 2002-2003 season, and several in the choral community are calling him the next Dale Warland. Recently named the 2007 winner of the Raabe Prize for Excellence in Sacred Composition, Cherwien, who is a highly regarded organist, composer, conductor, and clinician in his own right, might not have a hard time achieving that distinction.

But there are similar expectations for the National Lutheran Choir to become the defining non-academic ensemble of the Lutheran choral tradition, taking up where the Dale Warland Singers left off in 2004. Judging from its recognition by Chorus America with the 2007 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence (an honor shared by other Twin Cities choral ensembles, including the former Dale Warland Singers and VocalEssence), it seems to be well on its way.

Because of all of this, I went to its Christmas festival concert, “Behold a Branch,” on Friday night with high expectations. I wasn’t disappointed—it was some of the best choral singing I’ve heard in a long time. The precision, control, uniformity of sound, diction, and rhythm were a pure pleasure to listen to. Though it was the choir’s second concert of the day, it sounded fresh, polished, and beautiful.

Though it’s not a unique construct, the staging and movement of the choir around the vast Basilica was effective and held the audience’s interest both visually and aurally. The concert began and ended with the choir out of sight, which magnified the reflective nature of the concert rather than making it feel like a holiday variety show. Especially impressive was the concert’s opening, which had the women in the choir balcony and the men in the aspe singing alternately at first and then together. The group handled the inherent difficulties of obscured sightlines and acoustical delay with nearly perfect precision of rhythm and intonation. (I admit my glee about that might be a little geeky.)

Poetry and audience-participation carols wrapped around a variety of reflective music with numbers ranging from familiar (“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”) to modern (“The Sky Can Still Remember Him”), and included some very effective pieces by Minnesota composers, such as the “Winter Solstice Carol” with a Latin antiphon for Christmas by William Beckstrand and a modern setting of Hildegard von Bingen’s “O Viridissima Virga” by Janika Vandervelde. One favorite moment was when the sweet and stunning “Boyo Balu” merged seamlessly into “Silent Night,” sung by the audience and choir together. For me, the highlight of the evening was a setting of an E. E. Cummings poem by Eric Whitacre, “I thank you god for most this amazing day.” It was gorgeous—choked-up, fighting-tears gorgeous.

Occasionally, the choir’s diction seemed a bit false and forced toward the dark side, but given its luxurious uniformity, it’s a small complaint. A larger complaint is: Why do the carols stall to a dirge just because the congregation joins in? The only weakness of the concert was the occasional instrumental accompaniment, which didn’t seem on a par with the vocal excellence.

I have sung in enough choirs to recognize the creases of angst in singers’ brows, and when their tightness of breath translates into a tightness of my gut, I find myself holding my own breath, hoping they can keep it together. The best part about this concert for me was that the National Lutheran Choir’s confidence and precision allowed me to relax and enjoy the evening thoroughly. It occurred to me when I left that I had just experienced not only great beauty but also the sense of peace that flows from such beauty.

Last night I had the pure privilege of experiencing Dhafer Youssef’s first concert in America. The Tunisian-born singer and oud (Arabic lute) virtuoso, appearing with a string quartet and percussionist, launched Walker Art Center’s New World Jazz Series.

It was also, according to Youssef, the first public performance by the band, which featured violinists Todd Reynolds and Daisy Jopling, violist Caleb Burhans, bassist Mark Helias and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi. It was a spectacular debut, and it was thrilling to be a witness to what happens when Sufi mysticism meets jazz, rock and electronica—in the hands of a master. The experience defies a pat definition, but it’s somewhere at the intersection of chamber music, improvisation, and spiritual journey.

A long vocal meditation opened the band’s first number, with Youssef first chanting in drones that were seamlessly picked up and carried by the strings, then soaring off with long and richly ornamental melismatic lines characteristic of the Sufi tradition. There was a hush in the audience that I’m not sure I have ever experienced, as if he’d spun us into a trance with him.

His voice is honey and harissa—smooth and sweet, but complex and foreign—and it’s beautiful to watch him sing. He has a magnetic presence, seemingly as much with his band as with the audience. With one slow, graceful gesture that reminded me of tai chi, he indicated his wishes, and the others dutifully responded. And Youssef’s facility with the oud is like he came out of the womb playing it.

The second piece the band played was typical of the musical structure for the rest of the concert. A rhythmically complex ground bass in an off-kilter compound meter was laid out in part or in full and developed, then layers of melodies, harmonies, and rhythms were built upon the groovy foundation. That structural similarity offered a helpful framework for me to get acquainted with the music, which is intricate and mesmerizing, but unsettling. The fact that the rhythms were never in a typical two- or four-beat pattern (in other words, not a beat for walking or waltzing), created a crackling energy that drove the night. Plus, it leaves you wanting to discover how to move to it.

A few times during the concert, Youssef employed a fascinating vocal technique, blocking one nasal passage and singing in a strange falsetto into his cupped hand. The resulting sound was something I can only describe as a combination of muted trumpet, harmonica, and Beijing opera with a cold—otherworldly and utterly captivating.

On a couple occasions, I sensed a lack of comfort in the violins, mostly around the devilishly tricky entrances, but I’m sure that will pass with more public performances. There were some truly thrilling moments, like Reynolds’ wild improvisation in a trio with Takeishi and Youssef, or Youssef laying down the groove for Helias’ bass solo.

My kudos to Philip Bither, Walker’s performing arts curator, for introducing Youssef to this country. If the remaining concerts in the New World Jazz Series are half this good, the series should be a huge success.