Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on March 12, 2015

By Anne Midgette Classical music critic/The Classical Beat March 11 at 11:13 AM

In the classical music field, multimedia has become a tired buzzword for something purportedly unconventional, usually involving video projections. But the PostClassical Ensemble really did offer multimedia in its long, packed, content-rich concert as part of the Kennedy Centers Iberian Suite festival Tuesday night.

Its not just that the artists offered projections of images and videos, along with the relevant texts, on the back wall as an attractive accompaniment to the performances. Its that they offered so many different kinds of performance, at a consistently high level.

The program was called Iberian Mystics: The Confluence of Faiths, and it set out to explore the effects of Christian, Jewish and Muslim influences on Spanish music and culture a program ambitious enough to constitute a whole festival in itself. But concerns that this was going to be too much like a college lecture given the slides and the presence of a narrator (Clark Young) were mostly allayed by the performances, starting with members of Cathedra, the Washington National Cathedrals resident professional chorus, singing motets by Toms Luis de Victoria.

In the course of the evening, the audience also got a trio playing folk Sephardic songs on period instruments, an Arabic music ensemble with a tabla player who almost stole the show, emotive readings of texts by everyone from Teresa of Avila to Rumi, Cervantes to Lorca, and even a flamenco dancer. It was an impressive array, and, as far as presenting a wide cross-section of work in meaningful short excerpts, it pretty much blew the festivals opening-night presentation last week out of the water. (Okay, its not a competition.)

All of the color and variety slightly overshadowed the performances by the PostClassical Ensemble itself, although the group sounded in fine form under its engaging music director, Angel Gil-Ordez, and offered satisfying chunks of straight-up classical music to show, more or less, how composers have tried to assimilate all this local color.

The second, slow movement of Manuel de Fallas Keyboard Concerto, with Pedro Carbon as soloist, didnt quite live up to its billing as, in Ravels words, the greatest chamber music of the 20th century, with its strummed, emphatic statements from keys and strings.

[The PostClassical Ensemble: An alternative to conventional classical performance.]

The Trio Sefardi (Susan Gaeta on vocals, Tina Chancey on strings and Howard Bass on lute) gave such lovely and luminous performances of folk songs that the ensuing orchestrations of Six Sephardic Songs by the 20th-century composer Joaquin Nin-Culmell were slightly anticlimactic. The soprano Mariana Mihai-Zoeter had a hard-edged, slightly strident voice that didnt engage as much as Gaetas compelling, soft-grained one (although her gown was as beautiful as those in the festival fashion display in the Kennedy Center lobby).

And the first flamenco dance, executed by Sona Olla with foot-stamping abandon backed up by the guitar and vocals of a trio of flamenco musicians, was so intense and earthy and real that adding dance to the Falla excerpts that followed seemed like gilding the lily, or watering down the experience, fine though the orchestras playing was.

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PostClassical Ensemble traces influences in packed Iberian concert

Category: Sephardic
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