Greg Stepanich

Elvis Costello's 'Il Sogno': A path to the future

As an occasional composer myself, it's always with a keen pang of jealousy that I take the measure of a new classical work by a promising composer.

Frankly, it's hard for me to overcome my immediate, envy-fueled wish for the work's total failure, and the subsequent shredding of the hapless composer's reputation, along with that of the sycophant journalists who raised the composer to his or her precarious Icarian perch.

Eventually, however, intellectual honesty mounts the podium clad in a suit of rectitude, and banishes my backstabbing demon from the rehearsal hall, to resurface again whenever anyone stages an assault on Fortress Ego. Thereafter, I slink into my critic's chair and try to assess the new piece as intelligently and fairly as I can.

I've heard plenty of new classical music over the past 20 years, and written about a good deal of it, and I have to say that most of it was pretty mediocre when it wasn't downright bad. One of the few pieces I can recall to have lived up at least partly to its hype was the First Symphony of John Corigliano, a difficult, uncompromising but compelling piece that I first heard in its great Chicago Symphony recording, and then live in a blazing performance by the Florida Philharmonic under James Judd.

Although it had an au courant hook in its dedication to AIDS victims, as well as a touch of the cinema in its use of a disembodied, ghostly echo of the Albeniz Tango in D, the symphony didn't need any gimmicks: It was, and is, a fine piece of American classical composition.

It's not just classical composers who dream of adding something of significance to the repertory. Since at least the example of George Gershwin, writers of commercial popular music have tried to stretch their creative wings and essay a different aspect of their art. In Gershwin's day, as American popular music began its rise to global domination, classical composers such as Kurt Weill and Vernon Duke were turning their backs on their symphonies and string quartets and writing only for film and Broadway.

And pop composers tried to go the other way, too, with Richard Rodgers taking on Victory at Sea and a young Cole Porter writing a ballet score in 1923 called Within the Quota that a writer for Grove's notes as one of the first treatments in the literature of "symphonic jazz."

In more recent times, Sir Paul McCartney has cranked out, with much help, a few classical pieces including Standing Stone, a large oratorio; Billy Joel has issued an attractive album (Fantasies and Delusions) of 19th century-style classical piano pieces (the CD's graphic design borrowed the look of the yellow G. Schirmer volumes with which all American piano students are familiar); and Elvis Costello has been working on several classical projects for some time, including a song cycle with string quartet called Three Distracted Women.

Costello's latest venture is a work for ballet called Il Sogno (The Dream), based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and commissioned by an Italian dance company called Aterballetto. The work has gotten mixed reviews, from what I've seen, and here at The Post we ran a fairly negative brief about it when the CD of Costello's score was released back in September.

I picked up the disc a couple weeks ago (it features the London Symphony under part-time Miamian Michael Tilson Thomas) and I've been studying it with some interest. Looked at one way, it's an incoherent hodgepodge of non-related styles that does not illustrate the action of Shakespeare's play so much as it does the wide range of Costello's listening habits.

But considered from a different angle, Il Sogno points the way toward at least one successful path for contemporary classical music, unlike the work of the other two rockers. I found McCartney's Standing Stone unpersuasive except for the closing choral song, and while much of Joel's solo piano music is quite beautiful, it's also deeply derivative, and of Chopin in particular. That doesn't make the music meritless; it only means it's music of the past, no matter how lovely it admittedly is.

At this point, someone is likely to say: Ah, but all classical music is music of the past. Not so. What classical music has been waiting for is a composer with a sufficiently original voice who can bring together the various influences of his or her day and construct a vital message that will speak with the requisite memorability. I don't see how any composer can build a voice that will sound relevant to today's listeners without taking into account the language of popular music, and I think the composer who can do that truly will be someone to be reckoned with.

Costello isn't quite there, but he's got potential. It's critical to note that he wrote the score himself, orchestrations and all, without any assistance. Whereas McCartney refuses to learn notation on the superstitious grounds that it would make his talent evaporate, Costello simply buckled down and learned how to read and write music about 10 years ago. It's stalled his creativity not one bit; it has instead given him new avenues to explore.

Still, Il Sogno is a deeply frustrating score to listen to. There are passages in which Costello's music sounds congruent with that of 20th-century British classical composition, such as the material describing the fairy realm (Oberon and Titania) that opens Act II of the ballet. But no sooner does a gentle oboe tune ripen in the hands of the clarinet and the violins then Costello steps back, in an ostensible bid to describe the two fairy monarchs arguing, and writes an egregiously bad section of lame-o jazz riffs over what sounds like a Music for Young Orchestras arrangement of On Broadway.

He does the same thing earlier, in a section (The State of Affairs) describing the fight between Egeus and his daughter Hermia over Lysander, the man she loves, and Demetrius, the man Egeus wants her to marry. He writes a fanfare-like passage that has an intriguing flavor of rock, then a Shostakovich-like motoric pattern separated by a snare drum, and then, sadly, a few seconds of retro-'50s cool jazz, complete with vibes and trap set. It's described in the notes as a comic foreshadowing of the craziness to come, but it just sounds like a cop-out.

Much better are pieces like Oberon Humbled, a reflective piece of winding, soft melody interrupted in the middle by an echo of a heavy two-beat dance, but this comes across as logical, not as a piece of inserted incongruity designed to comfort the fears of worried pop fans who might otherwise think their boy Elvis has gone over to the tuxedoed dark side.

The point of all this analysis is simply this: Elvis Costello is probably quite capable of coming up with a much better orchestral work than Il Sogno. He's got a good ear for color, and he's able to write decent themes that sound orchestral rather than like pop tunes wearing fancy clothes. On the downside, he's too shortwinded a melodist to construct a powerful piece of symphonic argument at this point, and much of his ballet score suffers from a lack of energy that leaves listeners waiting for the next tune to turn up.

But Costello is closer to the future of classical composition than many of his peers. If he's able to take his gifts and find his classical voice with them, and yet remain recognizably our Declan, then he will be one of the very few composers other than Gershwin or Leonard Bernstein to comfortably, convincingly, sit on both sides of the aisle.

A tasteful, fulfilling 'Messiah'

It's a piece for the Easter season, but George Frideric Handel's Messiah has been associated with Christmas for some time now, and even if the English-speaking world is not as infatuated with oratorios at it once was, Messiah, or a substantial part of it, always manages to be heard in numerous places across the country at this time of year.

For 27 years, the Masterworks Chorus of the Palm Beaches has been doing a partly participatory version of the work hereabouts, and last Sunday at the Royal Poinciana Chapel on Palm Beach, the group joined with an orchestra and four soloists for an intelligently conceived and musically fulfilling performance of the so-called Christmas portion of the piece.

Aside from some weaknesses in the chorus and the odd solo misjudgment, this was a tasteful, thoroughly professional Messiah. Tempos (except for the glacial opening bars of the Overture) were well-judged throughout, most of them mercifully avoiding the revisionist scholarship that has in recent years been sending so many of the numbers in the oratorio on a speeding trip.

Here, director Jack W. Jones chose sensible pacing for his singers and players, and the upshot was that you could understand what people were singing, and the chorus didn't sound like it was drowning under the weight of all those melismas. And the 19-piece orchestra played with a high level of excellence; it was gratifying, for example, to hear the fast, repeated notes in the "refiner's fire" section of But who may abide played so quickly, so accurately, and best of all, so softly by the upper strings.

Mention should also be made of the fine continuo performance by harpischordist and organist Paul Rudd, bassist Jason Lindsay and bassoonist Michael Ellert. Handel's music has a strength and self-confident quality that comes across even better, as it did in this performance, when the continuo players engage the music as fully as the whole orchestra.

There also was much to like about the solo work, particularly that of bassist James Bass, who has a strong voice with a tightly focused center. It's an accurate instrument that navigated the slippery chromaticisms of The people that walked in darkness with aplomb and power.

The other male soloist, tenor Martin Shalita, offered a lovely, young, creamy sound, somewhat on the light side, but well-trained and commanding nonetheless. Mezzo-soprano Misty Bermudez demonstrated a sweet, pleasant voice, none too big but clear and attractive to listen to.

Soprano Jana Young had more sheer power to lend to the proceedings, but some of her higher notes, such as the A at the end of the recitative leading to Glory to God in the highest, were spread-out and a little harsh.

For the most part, the soloists chose embellishments tastefully and well. Perhaps most notably, their arias came off as a normal part of the proceedings and not as archaic set pieces amid the big choral tunes everyone knows. That says something about musical training today, which is much better about the Baroque than it used to be 20 or so years ago, when Messiah soloists seemed to be struck with self-conscious stiffness whenever it came time to roll out those ribbons of sixteenth notes over a single vowel.

All in all, a very enjoyable performance of this staple of the season, played to an appreciative crowd that knows the old tradition of standing during the Hallelujah! chorus, and could probably tell you why it's done.

In addition: Next year I just might take my score and join the sing-along chorus, which sat in pews to the side of the orchestra and Masterworks members. I'd be more inclined to add my lame baritone to the mix if the chorus does His yoke is easy, which closes Part I of the oratorio and which was omitted Sunday.

I didn't get a chance to finish writing the additional comments about the Christmas canon I'd planned to post. That, too, will have to wait until next year.

In the meantime, happy holidays to one and all, and best wishes for a wonderful new year.

Thoughts on the Christmas canon

Is there any corpus of music more malleable than the Christmas canon?

In almost any store, in a multitude of public places, in churches and concert halls, you can hear this motley assemblage of song played by everything from handbells to harps, sung by earnest soloists and enormous choirs, and still most of these tunes manage to retain their integrity, even against the most determined arranger's efforts to bury one or another of them under tons of treacle.

That is to say, Silent Night is still Silent Night, even when miserably or ostentatiously rendered.

The Christmas canon is like classical music in the sense that many of the melodies and words we sing at this time of year come from a long-vanished musical milieu. They were once congruent with popular taste, but haven't been for centuries. It's partly the power of tradition that dictates they remain with us still, and partly the strength of the music itself.

The canon is also like classical music in that it is still open to new pieces, a very few of which may join the permanent club and return each year at this time to evoke the season anew. That's particularly true of the 20th century, which saw a sheaf of good American popular songs with Christmas themes become favorites.

Overall, the music we know best at Christmas comes from a remarkable number of sources, and I've always wanted to take a closer look at it, probably to figure out just why these songs, and not others, are part of the celebration.

I started to do that last week, but even with the little work I've attempted I can see it's a giant task (and it seems to me there are a couple books on this subject already). So by way of scratching this particular itch, I'll offer up some brief, unscientific observations about this fascinating body of music.

To begin with, the origins of Christmas music can be divided into several broad categories: church, folk, concert, commercial, to speak very generally. The earliest Christmas music goes back to the beginning of the Roman Church, though the melodies themselves no doubt originated from folk sources that could be hundreds of years older than that.

One of the oldest is O come, O come Emmanuel, which is an Advent song that began as, and still is, a Gregorian chant, and has roots no later than the 8th century. If you've ever heard this particular piece sung as a chant, without the 19th-century harmonizations that were added to it — well, you can still hear the harmonies in the mind's ear, but if you try you can divorce the melody from those progressions and just hear the chant float along the way it was meant to, in measure with the words, rather than with an artificially added time signature.

This is music that seems ideal for stone and granite. Not only does it sound good against them, it seems elemental like they do, and I always at some point find myself thinking about the voices that first sang these notes all those centuries ago, and how vastly different that world was.

How much more uncrowded their aural lives were than ours, which are crammed with music all the livelong day and night. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga once memorably made the point that in the Middle Ages, darkness was really darkness, and quiet was truly quiet, in a way that we can't understand anymore. Just so, there must have been a sacredness, a special weight, about the singing of Veni, veni Emmanuel when it was done by a group of churchmen raising their voices in an unheated rural European monastery in the days of Charlemagne.

We may not be able to feel that significance, and yet we can appreciate the austere beauty of this hymn, even gussied up with Romantic-era cadences in the key of E minor.

Also in the ancient Christmas category: In dulci jubilo; Resonet in laudibus; Es ist ein Rose entsprungen; Susanni; The boar's head carol; God rest you merry, gentlemen; There is no rose of such virtue; What child is this.

All of these have more or less of that old, modal sound in which we recognize that earlier world. Another good example is the Coventry Carol, or Lullay, thou little tiny child, the words of which come from an English mystery play of the 15th century, though the tune we know might be a century younger than that. It seems ideally suited for untrained voices, as it moves within a very narrow range.

This, too, is one of those spookier Christmas tunes, speaking in its archaic language, both words and music, of a disappeared time. What were the people like to whom these things sounded normal and not odd? How did it fit into the universe they knew?

Forgive me for being an American steeped in the popular art forms of movies and television, but it's hard for me to hear these older songs without giving them some sort of cinematic treatment. When I hear The boar's head carol, for example, I see those scholars acclaiming the feast, though I don't have a good sense of what it was like to be a student in those days. The Coventry Carol makes me think of a performance of the Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, in which mothers sing this lullaby to their children so that King Herod's men, bent on slaughter, will not hear them.

Maybe that's how many of us relate to these pieces outside the lure of the melodies. In any case, the music acts as an emissary of their times, a stranger in a coat long out of fashion, but with something to say that we still hear, and continue to hear, every Christmas.

I'll have another commentary on Christmas music — the newer stuff this time — sometime this week, before the holiday.

Out and about: The Delray Beach Chorale offered an interesting program last Sunday, with a medley of Spanish-language Christmas songs compiled by American composer Conrad Susa. The carols mostly were accompanied by guitar and flute, which reminds us that there is plenty of music to be had even in the most modest forces.

The singing here was competent if not particularly distinguished, but director Kent Morgan deserves credit for programming this work, along with the opener, the Messe de Minuit pour Noel by the French Baroque master Marc-Antoine Charpentier. The music is often quite lovely, but suffers from a touch of sameness that's hard to get past; audiences of the late 17th century perhaps did not crave as much variety.

The Delray chorale is a local band with an impressive record of adventurousness. I heard them a couple seasons back giving a vigorous account of the Vaughan Williams Christmas cantata, Hodie, which I much enjoyed. It's good to see this group come up again this year with another challenging and rewarding program for the season.

Christmas music, rituals and memory

Back in 1982, the writer Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory, Wartime) went to the Indianapolis 500, and something he said about his trip to the races has stuck with me over the years. In an essay titled "Indy," Fussell gives a rundown of the elaborate starting ceremonies for the contest, including invocations, anthems and the playing of Taps:

By this time I find that I am crying, for me always an empirical indication, experienced at scores of weddings and commencements, that I am taking part in a ritual.

And so it is with Christmastime. No doubt all of us who observe the holiday, even as I do in a non-religious way, have tiny ceremonies, some of them tear-inducing, that we follow at this time of the rolling year. For us, there is Cookie Day, an event for the strong-willed only in which our kitchen disgorges pounds of tasty treats for coworkers and family members. There are always a couple car trips to neighborhoods to see what our fellow South Floridians have come up with in the way of festive light displays, and we always seem to get in a special lunch or dinner in the midst of a late shopping spree.

But it's the music of the holiday that means more and more to me each year. Christmas music is a category unto itself not only for the almost unlimited categories of artists over the past century who've recorded music for Christmas, but also for the music itself, which comes from an astonishing number of sources.

Christmas isn't yet Christmas for me until I play the first holiday CD, which for the past five years or so has been Creator of the Stars, a collection of seasonal music from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance recorded in 1997 by Pomerium, a 15-voice a cappella choir based in New York. This wonderful disc has beautiful performances of sacred works by Lassus, Byrd, Josquin, Dufay, and Ockeghem, among others, though it's in the early tracks that we can hear the canon of Christmas growing out of church sources.

The disc begins with a plainchant version of In dulci jubilo, an ancient song we're familiar with as Good Christian Men, Rejoice. Then then tune is presented again in three versions from the early 17th century by Michael Praetorius, in two, three, then four voices. This is followed by three versions of Resonet in laudibus, another very old song we still sing as Christ Was Born on Christmas Day. Pomerium starts with a chant version taken from a circa-1470 source in the Austrian National Library, succeeded by a four-voice treatment of the tune by Christian Erbach, who lived from 1571 to 1635.

And that Erbach version, in which the voices unfold and unwrap themselves in lovely blossoms over the simple tune, is where the Christmas tradition starts for me. It's gorgeous music as is, but it's also instructive: Here is the art of the composer, the independent intelligence crafting the raw folk material into something completely new. In a broad sense, it's exactly the same process today's hip-hop writers follow, taking samples of existing music and building something else entirely out of them.

Another disc we enjoy around this time is a Festplatte recorded in 1999 by the German male pop-choral group Die Prinzen. There are several dippy moments on this disc, particularly in the original tunes, and I don't speak enough German to get all the jokes I'm sure are in there. Still, we love this disc for several things. Sharon loves the dark beauty of Maria durch ein' Dornwald ging, and I find myself returning to two tracks at the very end of the record.

The first is O Little Town of Bethlehem, a 19th-century American carol, sung here as written, in English, for the first verse. For the second verse, the tune switches to Ralph Vaughan Williams' setting of the song; disliking the American tune (by Lewis Redner) but liking the words by Phillips Brooks, he fitted an old English folksong to the lyrics instead.

For the third verse, the singers switch to German, keeping the Vaughan Williams tune, but singing instead O Bethlehem, du kleine Stadt, wie stille liegst du hier. There's something joyful and cheeky about this that I really like, a feeling enhanced by the coda, which returns (still in German) for the last four bars to the original American tune.

It's the next cut that has me in tears, a performance of an old Italian folksong, Tu scende dalle stelle (You descend from the stars, O king of heaven). This song reminds me of my immigrant Southern Italian grandparents, now long dead and still acutely missed. I never heard them sing it, nor do I know if they even knew it, but to hear it is to think of them, and the time when they still lived, and the semi-rituals we observed when visiting them at this time of year.

These were homely things, no doubt: Hanging around in the kitchen, helping Grandma make meatballs or ravioli, grabbing noodles out of the hot water to taste-test them. We'd roughhouse with our cousins and act like idiots during the big holiday dinner. Not so much ritual, I know; more like the sameness of all holiday gatherings.

But the gathering itself was the ritual, and Tu scende dalle stelle now seems part of the soundtrack when I look back to those Christmases on the far south side of Chicago.

I guess I'm getting older and more sentimental, attaching so much meaning to these simple songs. Or it could show again the power of ritual, and music, to illuminate our lives and give them texture, color and meaning.

To be continued: Not everything in our Christmas record collection is classical or obscure. Over the next few days, I'll post some thoughts on other aspects of Christmas music.

Building a Library of Gloom

Like Borges, I want to invent libraries, though in my case it's really just the one library, my own.

I've organized it along relatively ordinary lines: All the American literature is in the tall bookcase in the dining room, all my composer biographies and letters collections are here in my study. Out in the living room, the three main bookcases have classics, ancient and contemporary history, politics, belle lettres, and on the bottom shelves fiction and nonfiction from other countries, the English-speaking ones to start, followed by Europe, Asia and Africa.

Art and philosophy are in another case, science in another in the main bedroom, and there are reference works as well as a couple antiquarian things, like a mass-market 1881 edition of the collected works of Washington Irving (is anybody going to do a new bio of him? We probably need one).

But instead of making like a faux Melvil Dewey, why not organize the library some other way? Like, for example, states of mind.

I could have a Library of Positive Energy for when I need a mental pick-me-up, or a Library of Passivity when I don't (these books would be the ones in limp covers, I suppose). A Library of Yearning (this could be Eros or Agape) and a Library of Regret.

And then there'd be the Library of Gloom. It'd be a constant, self-indulgent draw, but it could have the opposite effect of snapping you out of the black dog.

One author who'd have to take an honored place in that library would be Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese who began writing a work he called The Book of Disquiet before World War I and hadn't finished it by the time he died in 1935. Browsing one day in the bookstore a couple years back I picked up a Penguin edition, translated by Richard Zenith (a lovely name for the translator of an apex-of-melancholy sort of writer).
The book is a long series of bloggish entries, ostensibly by an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon named Bernardo Soares, that are a deeply sad but intriguing meditation on one person's absence of a life, as well as a darkly philosophic critique of 20th-century society. Pessoa sets the tone right at the beginning:

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up.

Or this:

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me — this was denied me …
Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I always have been, alone as I always will be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams and their hopeless hopes.

Whew. Love that touch of grandiosity at the end, too: Depressed people of the world, let me be your spokesman!

Another candidate for the library would be Tears and Saints, written in 1937 by the Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran. Looking back at it now, a few years after having read it (in the translation by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston), parts of it are gloomy, but it's actually more tough-minded, and funnier than that. This book, too, is a series of short aphoristic entries drawn from reflections on the lives of the saints. Here's one I liked:

The greatest piece of good luck Jesus had was that he died young. Had he lived to be 60, he would have given us his memoirs instead of the cross. Even today, we would still be blowing the dust off God's unlucky son.

And this:

There are flowers of melancholy and of sadness, but only boredom has roots. The secret is to know how to be bored in an essential way. Most people, however, never even scratch the surface of boredom. To live real boredom, one must have style.

And thereby un-bore yourself, I guess.

I'd also have to leave a place for Schopenhauer in the library, keeping in mind his warning against reading too much and not taking time to think for yourself. One of his notes on politics (translated by R.J. Hollingdale) seems more relevant these days:

The monarchical form of government is the form most natural to man. How could it happen that, universally and at all times, many millions, even hundreds of millions, of us men have subjected ourselves to and willingly obeyed one man, occasionally even a woman or, provisionally, a child, if there were not in man a monarchical instinct which drives him to it as to the condition most appropriate to him?

I think this is right on target. People seem to really need a figure like that, someone chosen for other reasons than deliberative democracy; a fact of life rather than the product of a consensus. That's rather depressing.

Maybe it's not such a good idea, reorganizing the books that way, especially because so few books are all one thing, so rarely are they all one tone and in one key. Back to the drawing board: How about color-coding? Any interest in a Library of Orange? And what would it contain?

A soprano on the verge

It's perhaps too risky to make a good prediction based on the evidence of just three songs, but audiences Sunday at the Second Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale might have been in the presence of a soprano that soon will be breaking into the big time.

Christina Lamberti, a New Jerseyan who already has a large number of major engagements to her credit (Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera), appeared with the new Renaissance Chamber Orchestra, a 13-member string ensemble led by Richard Fleischman. She sang three arias from Italian opera, and in them showed all the characteristics of an artist to be reckoned with: A huge, powerful voice; a thorough command of the dramatic situations she was singing about and the ability to convey them; and the stage presence, even in a church sanctuary not designed for operatic performance, to fully engage the attention of her audience.

Her first aria, L'altra notte in fondo al mare, comes from the neglected Mefistofele of Arrigo Boito, a great Italian literary man and infrequent composer now best known for the libretti he fashioned from Shakespeare (Otello, Falstaff) for the grand old man of his country's music, Giuseppe Verdi. Boito's music is utterly Italian, not as distinctive melodically as that of Verdi, but worthy of standing beside lesser composers such as Catalani or Cilea.

In the hands of Lamberti, however, the music took on much greater grandeur, quite a feat given that she wasn't even backed by a full orchestra. Here was a full-throated performance, riveting in sound and fury, beautifully sung and modulated. Lamberti's timbre is rather dark overall and well-suited to over-the-top dramatic roles, but she also possesses the ability to switch, as she had to in the Boito, to a more open, vulnerable sound in the middle of a passage.

With the possible exception of some vibrato that was slightly wider than necessary at the very end, I heard nothing but consistency and yards of rich tone throughout the aria; in short, a revelatory rendition of this music.

Lamberti was no less powerful in the aria Morro, ma prima in grazia, from Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, which requires the same kind of tragic force as the Boito. And she showed that she was able to turn her voice to the lusher side, with a gentle, childlike "per pieta," at the end, for the much-beloved O mia babbino caro, from Puccini's comic one-acter, Gianni Schicchi.

Again, it's hard to make blanket predictions based on three arias, sung in front of a reduced orchestra in an arena with a generous, echoing acoustic, but the evidence of Sunday's performance suggests that Christina Lamberti is a singer who deserves to be more widely heard on the world's leading opera stages, and I think before much longer that she will be.

The rest of the Renaissance Chamber Orchestra concert also was far better than I expected. Many of the orchestra members are former Florida Philharmonic players, and director Fleischman, a graduate of Juilliard and Curtis, has impressive credentials that include stints as a violist for the San Francisco and Philadelphia orchestras, as well as the opera orchestra for the Santa Fe Opera Festival. Fleischman's program included two Baroque works — a Handel concerto grosso and a Vivaldi concerto — plus Barber's Adagio for Strings, the Romanian Folk Dances of Bela Bartok, and a non-tango miniature by Argentina's Astor Piazzolla.

Most of these pieces were played at quite a high level of accomplishment, in particular the Handel opener (Op. 3, No. 4, in F), which had just the right tempi and feeling of sunny invention that characterizes this composer at his most genial. Much the same was true of the Bartok set that closed the concert, the only blemish being a somewhat underconfident sally through the quarter-tone violin solo over the drone in the middle section.

The sound was appropriately ravishing in the Barber Adagio, in particular from the violas (all players save the cellists stand throughout the concert), who brought in a distinctive voice instead of just taking their turn at the primary melody. The other moody work, Piazzolla's Melody in A minor, also showed off the distinctive character of each of the string sections to beautiful effect.

The Vivaldi concerto for four violins and cello (Op. 3, No. 10, in B minor) as less successful. It sounded somewhat underrehearsed for Fleischman's brisk opening tempo, the result being that the first movement sounded labored rather than dazzling.

Nonetheless, this was an impressive concert in every important respect. Area concertgoers might find the single-concert ticket price of $20 a little steep, but organizers say subscription prices are available, and there are five concerts left in the group's season.
If indeed audiences were hearing someone on the cusp of a much bigger career, it certainly was a price worth paying.

Marginalia: There are plenty of reviews of Lamberti on the Web, and she's apparently in the middle of building her own site. Some of the reviews are less complimentary than mine, including one that said her voice wasn't too large and called her singing dry. I didn't hear any evidence of that Sunday, and I look forward to hearing her again.....The Renaissance Chamber Orchestra is one of the divisions of the Music America Performance Academy, a nonprofit group that's barely two years old and based in Fort Lauderdale. Violist Amichai Hendel, an Israeli who came to Florida in 2002, founded the Academy that year to fill what he saw as a void in the area's musical life, spokeswoman Rue Hendel told me.