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M.E. and Brett Campbell

The audience strolled in a little hesitantly. After all, instead of settling into plush concert hall seats, they were sitting in plastic folding chairs in the basement of a multi-story hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. A single violist stood at a music stand in front of three 10-foot video screens. He began to play an insistent repeating pattern. Then a life size image of the violist, Brian Quincey, appeared on one of the screens next to him, playing a countermelody while the real Quincey continued playing the initial pattern. A new, identically dressed Quincey appeared on each screen in turn, playing a different melody and forming a virtual viola quartet.

Thus began the year’s final concert for Portland’s Third Angle New Music Ensemble—for a third of the audience anyway. For its season-ending examination of the parallels between architecture and music, the group split its audience in thirds and sent each in turn to one of three nearby downtown venues. For a performance in the lobby of the neoclassical US National Bank building, members of the group played neoclassical 20th century works by Igor Stravinsky and Francis Poulenc, as the audience arrayed themselves in front of teller’s windows and desks. In the modern Fox Tower, a different subgroup of the ensemble played John Adams’s rollicking Road Movies (in tribute to the spot’s former tenant, a movie theater) and a jaunty 2003 work by Portland’s own Kevin Walczyk called BlueVox, accompanied by the award-winning Jefferson Dancers, outfitted in orange and yellow costumes.

The group envisioned the third space, the Hilton Hotel basement, as a “raw space” that could be enhanced with video and computer music technology to create a futuristic “virtual” space. Following Quincey’s split personality performance there, the group enlisted the help of video artist Brad Johnson and projectionist Danny Rosenberg to transform the grey basement into an underwater wonder-world. As Quincey’s viola played a meandering tune, the triptych of video screens displayed an image of the basement walls. Then, as composer Brede Rorstad’s pulsating, computer-generated accompaniment bubbled up under the viola line, the view shifted—around the corner, through a vault door, down a flooded corridor, finally emerging into what appeared to be a vast, sunken cathedral, its virtual architecture modeled on the Hilton basement. As the “camera” view drifted through arches and around corners, sparkling geometric figures bobbed up and drifted away, making the enchanted viewers feel as though they were scuba diving through a hidden world beneath Portland’s streets—much like Alice’s journey through the looking glass or the wardrobe that led to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. The fantastic virtual voyage ended with a return through the vault door to the actual images of the basement walls.

A panel discussion (featuring Third Angle violinist and artistic director Ron Blessinger, composer Walczyk, and Los Angeles architect Steven Erlich) that tried to explore connections between music and architecture was a bit anti-climactic after this magical journey—but that was quickly replaced by excitement over the announcement of Third Angle’s upcoming 20th season. The group has recorded three CDs (of music by Aaron Copland, Portland composer David Schiff, and a live performance in a local glass factory), played dozens of works by Northwest composers as well as the West Coast premiere of John Cage and Kenneth Patchen’s long-lost radio drama The City Wears a Slouch Hat, hosted composers such as Steve Reich and Lou Harrison, increasingly attracted grants and support from businesses and music lovers, and has given Northwest audiences a reliable source of contemporary, accessible, avant-garde music. Next year’s schedule includes the return of acclaimed Chinese composers Zhou Long and Chen Yi, exploring the new music of China, a jazz-contemporary classical concert, and a 20th anniversary retrospective concert/celebration featuring the ensemble’s greatest hits. But this year’s inventive tripartite concert suggests that the ensemble’s most exciting days lie ahead of it.

Amy D. Rubin

Gerard Schwarz has championed American symphonic music of a specific style. He has brought attention to the voices of Hanson, Diamond, Hovhaness, Piston, Creston, and Lazarof through high quality performances and recordings on the Naxos label. In addition, the Seattle Symphony has premiered over fifty new works since 1986. This year he brought us the Made In America Festival: Part 1 (1925-1960). Next year, Part 2 will focus on American works from the second half of the 20th century to the present time.

In May, the orchestra presented five concerts featuring the music of Riegger, Piston, Sessions, Hanson, Mennin, Fine, Thompson, Diamond, and Schuman, as well as the more familiar American icons, Bernstein and Copland. Schwartz marked these individuals as the “masters of the American symphonic repertoire.” Honorary composer-in-residence David Diamond, who was to celebrate his 90th birthday this year, attended certain events just weeks before his death in his hometown of Rochester, New York.

How does one select the works that speak the most about America’s past and present, and represent American orchestral music as a unique and equal presence in a milieu which originated and evolved across the Atlantic? Making the choice is not an enviable task and Schwartz omitted many important composers: Barber, Ellington, Gershwin, Foss, Schuller, and the rugged Ruggles, just to name a few. Creating a festival and planning a wedding reception have something in common. The actual event may be joyous but the names left off the list may become a serious subject for scrutiny and can potentially overshadow the celebration.

A number of us met the gracious and engaging David Diamond at an intimate cocktail reception hosted by the Symphony. I asked his reaction to a former teacher of mine, Robert Palmer, composer of a promising string quartet in the 1950s. Diamond suggested that Palmer’s career did not blossom because he lacked his own voice. Composers take note!

Diamond was accompanied by his life-long friend and former neighbor Sam Elliott, who met Diamond in Rochester. Sam’s mother had issued a warning to her boys that the composer needed quiet for his musings, so they had better “keep the lid” on the noise level. Nine-year-old Sam paid Diamond a visit to placate him, the two became instant friends, and Sam, though not a musician, has attended most of Diamond’s events for forty-some years. He is even protectively watchful over Diamond’s ASCAP earnings.

During the May 17th event, Diamond’s words echoed in my mind. Did the works being played have something individual and personal to say that was distinctly American? Virgil Thomson’s Second Symphony seems a sentimental waltz-driven journey of whimsy, filled with “American sounding” open 4ths, and his unadorned triadic harmonic language. Mennin’s nautical Moby Dick is colorfully orchestrated but for me suffers from Diamond’s issue of “lack of voice.” Bernstein’s biblical Symphony No. 1 “Jeremiah,” shows clues to where he will go a decade later with melodic phrases about to burst into “Maria.” Whereas his works for opera and theater are consistently well shaped, this early work fizzles out, leaving the soprano standing on stage a bit helplessly as the music fades and the audience wonders if indeed, the piece is over. I looked around and saw a sea of respectful but detached listeners. The audience perked up with actual “Bravos!” to the Ives/Schuman Variations on “America.” Jocular, buoyant, romping through the land of the familiar, it evoked patriotic engagement and clearly a strong identification on the part of the average listener. Good or bad, this was American, and played with flair and dazzle by this excellent American orchestra under the baton of Maestro Schwarz.

As a partner in the festival, Huw Edwards conducted his final concert with the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra, which was founded in 1942 and is the largest youth symphony organization in the United States. Wow! What a great string sound, the brass section rocks, and the woodwinds meet any challenge! His fine work speaks for itself and he will be sorely missed. Benaroya Hall was packed and the orchestra was joined by a major presence in our musical scene, clarinetist Laura DeLuca. This collaboration produced a wonderful performance of the Copland Clarinet Concerto—captivating, bold, teasing, lyrically expressive, and stylistically on the mark. DeLuca was at home mixing a warm classical sound with jazzy note bending. The other highlight of the program was resident composer John Mackey’s Antiphonal Dances, which connected nicely to the Copland rhythmically and harmonically, and clearly delighted both players and audience.

The festival’s final concert included Copland’s bold and terse Symphonic Ode, Schuman’s Symphony No.3, with gorgeous playing by the brass, and the percussion-driven Symphony No.2 by Chavez which, like Copland, delights in transmuting short rhythmic riffs. No, there isn’t time to speculate on who influenced whom. Last was Hanson’s almost over the top Symphony No.2, “Romantic.” The players smiled broadly through tremolos and sweeping melodies reminiscent of 1940s movie scores. Schwarz’s performances were clean and commanding.

Like I said before, not everyone can be invited to the wedding and those who are left out, for whatever reason, usually stir controversy. So what sorts of things should a festival like this take into consideration? Feel free to chime in and answer any of the following:

What should be the goals of a festival like this one? To revisit important works? Showcase the new and innovative? Show the linear connections between composers of one sensibility or, by juxtaposition, show the range of language and style that goes under the heading “American Music?” Should works performed have the capacity to recruit new American audiences? Should they help to brand and identify our profile abroad? What about American women? They were invisible in the first part of the century and the second half brought the orchestral works of Tower, Zwillich, León and others to public attention. Should we give them extra space to make up for lost time? Should local composers be featured? Seattle looks out to the Pacific Rim, and some composers create out of this experience. The 2005 festival bypassed the works of Cowell, Harrison, and Cage who composed American music inspired by cross-cultural connections. Is there time to include them next year? Probably not. Next year’s festival has a lot of ground to cover. Reich, Adams, Glass, Corigliano, and the afore mentioned women are senior statesman in the composition world. How will we find the time and space to not only look back but also provide ourselves and the larger world a taste of what is new and American right now? Who will be listening and what will we want them to hear?

I invite NewMusicBox readers to send me their responses (my email is [email protected]), which I will read and forward to the symphony.

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

Video games are only one of the new media being explored by composers, but this year has seen the advent of a new twist: the first-ever live symphonic concert tour of music from a video game series. Dear Friends, an evening-length concert featuring Japanese composer Nabuo Uematsu‘s music from the Square Enix Final Fantasy games, has been played across North America after the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as part of a May 2004 videogame conference, performed a stunningly successful one-time event which sold out in three days. That got promoters hyped about creating a tour.

One of the concerts, conducted by Arnie Roth, hit Atlanta on June 24 and 25 as a summer special performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. It included a total of five video screens (three large projection screens overhead and two home theater screens on the stage wings) showing digital animation sequences mixed with live cam shots inside the orchestra.

Except for some empty seats on the first night (rumored to have been a mishap with a block of seating originally assigned to Ticketmaster), both concerts were full of both dyed-in-the-wool Final Fantasy fans and the merely curious. In any case, this was a disproportionately young audience for a typical ASO concert. They knew the music by name (Roth announced selections from stage) and responded as if at a rock concert. One audience member by the name of Phil Yu is so much a fan he had been to all of the U.S. performances so far except one in Hartford, Connecticut. Another couple was overheard afterwards to say, “This was so totally worth the 147 mile drive.” Roth took a voice poll during the concert, indicating a large number had come from outside Georgia just to hear it.

More Friends, a second concert of additional music from Final Fantasy, has already been developed and test-driven in Los Angeles, in anticipation of a tour in 2006.

Opera that Runs with Scissors

Very few of Atlanta’s composers are exploring the genre of traditional dramatic grand opera, primarily due of the scarcity and expense of resources for developing and mounting a production.

However, the Harrower Summer Opera Workshop gave composer Curtis Bryant the opportunity on June 26 to try out the solitary competed scene from his opera in progress, The Anarchists. The libretto, by New York author and forensic psychiatrist Allen Reichman, is based on Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent. Reichman had selected Bryant out of a list of seven potential composers provided to him by New York City Opera, and proposed the project.

Based in London, England, Scene 1 of Act III involves a confrontation between two characters: Adolf Verloc (Kyle Guglielmo), a stationary shop owner and part-time secret agent in the service of a foreign government, and his wife Winnie (Katie Baughman). The point of contention is the accidental death of Winnie’s developmentally impaired brother Stevie (presumably in Act II), killed in her husband’s failed mission to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The urgent, initially neoclassical music underscores both declamatory and lyrical vocal dialogue, and approaching the end, in Winnie’s upstage solo soliloquy about Stevie, swells in emotional passion to conclude the scene with a Tosca-esque stabbing of Adolf—but with scissors.

The Anarchists is to be Bryant’s second full-length opera. His first, Zabette, libretto by Mary R. Bullard, was premiered in April 1999 by the Georgia State University School of Music.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project has gone a long way toward making Boston feel like an important place to be. It’s inspiring to witness, not only an orchestra devoted entirely to contemporary music, but also this fresh paradigm of what an orchestra can be (reflected in the “Project” part of its name). BMOP aims to be an evolving and expanding entity, to have the flexibility of a chamber ensemble, and (like a few other groups) to expand its audience base beyond the typical concertgoers. It has added to its orchestral concert season informal, chamber “Club Concerts” at Boston’s Club Café on Columbus Ave., as well as collaborations with other organizations such as Opera Boston and the Boston CyberArts Festival.

On May 28, to a packed Jordan Hall, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project presented their “Takemitsu Tribute” concert, concluding their eighth season—a season which also featured concerts devoted to minimalism, pieces for solo voice and orchestra, Bernard Rands’s Canti Trilogy, and the annual “Boston Connection” concert, as well as three of the “Club Concerts.” On the first half of the program were Kaze-No-Oka, for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra—a BMOP commission and premiere by Japanese-American composer Ken Ueno (who has been making waves in Boston in recent years), and Water Concerto (1998), for percussion and orchestra, by Chinese composer Tan Dun. On the second half were Toru Takemitsu’s very popular and romantic 1957 Requiem, November Steps (the piece for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra which won him fame in 1967), and Three Film Scores, a 1994 suite consisting of “Music of Training and Rest” from José Torres (1959), “Funeral Music” from Black Rain (1989), and “Waltz” from The Face of Another (1966). The shakuhachi and biwa in Kaze-No-Oka and November Steps were played by special guests Kifu Mitsuhashi and Yukio Tanaka, from Japan.

The Takemitsu pieces chosen may have been a something of a “greatest hits” selection, and one which—aside from November Steps—seemed to showcase his European rather than his Japanese influences, but then how often do we get to hear any of Takemitsu’s works performed live? The “accessibility” of this selection may have been considered necessary in order to balance things out for the audience after the first half of the concert, which featured heavy, introspective music in Ueno’s piece, and loads of startling novelty in Tan’s. In any case, the music of these two composers reflected more overtly the influence of Takemitsu’s East/West innovations, his attention to sound, and his use of striking juxtapositions.

In Kaze-No-Oka Ueno drew upon the Japanese aesthetic principle of “shawari”—important to Takemitsu, and now to Ueno himself. To put this many-sided concept into a nutshell, “shawari” can translate as “beautiful noise,” “to touch,” or “obstacle,” and for the artist can mean the use of a deliberate “inconvenience,” desired for its creative potential. A relevant example can be heard in the metallic sounds, above the pitches themselves, which emanate from the biwa. Ueno applied this principle to his orchestral writing by combining the instruments in close, sometimes buzzing, microtonal sonorities, and using other instrumental noises—even white noise from the mouths of the players—creating very sensual “artifacts of sound,” as he calls them, with a structural rather than ornamental function. The biwa and shakuhachi duo itself was set against the Western orchestra in a dramatic manner. Unlike November Steps, in which the writing for the two instruments is temporally interspersed with the orchestral writing, in Kaze-No-Oka they appeared only after the orchestral section of the piece had fully concluded, in a cadenza which seemed to last as long as the first part of the piece. This was Ueno’s response to BMOP’s request that the shakuhachi and biwa part be usable as an independent composition, for another concert event. Many composers might shy away from separating these elements so completely, for fear of incongruity. But the tension at the moment of the duo’s entry, the sustained intensity and relatedness of the music despite the sudden drop in density, the surprising length of the cadenza—these things resulted in a piece with its own strong sense of balance and “meaning.”

Juxtaposition in the Water Concerto occurred in a different dimension. “Pure sounds”—a great menagerie of sounds arising from large, closely-miked basins of water with the theatrical use of wooden bowls, plastic cups, tubes, sticks, metal, bare hands—were pitted not only against the special sonorities and general pitch-orientedness of the Western orchestra, but against well-known Western harmonic devices as well. The orchestra at moments imitated the sounds from the percussion, and at other moments provided a familiar “functional harmonic” backdrop. But perhaps more compelling than these sorts of juxtapositions was the percussion writing itself—the setting of the element of water against so many materials—and the evocative sound and rhythm world Tan created. Soloist Robert Schultz, who performed his tremendous, choreographed part as if he’d known it all his life, brought this world to us vividly and with infectious pleasure.

Lindsey Eck

Henna Chou’s strangest collaboration began when she answered an ad on Craigslist for a composer willing to write for toy instruments. Soon she was sucked into the Vortex—Austin’s experimental theater group, though the directors of Holes Before Bedtime resist that term. “We approach it in a very straightforward fashion,” says co-director Matt Hislope. “We approach it as if it were something out of the canon.” The musical, by Dan Basila (whose specialty is plays about babies), is a farce concerning a male pregnancy in the form of testicular cancer. Despite the infantile yet family-unfriendly subject matter, the rigors of a tight repertory production in a small but high-profile urban theater demanded scoring with tightly coordinated rhythm and timing that belied the appearance of daft spontaneity.

Holes Before Bedtime

Holes Before Bedtime began as libretto for an opera, and was staged as such in New York and San Francisco. In Austin, it’s a musical with the lines spoken or chanted as well as sung. Issues of timing, together with the demand that instruments double as the source of sound effects, pose different and perhaps greater challenges as compared with scoring the text as an opera.

“We wanted it to be somewhat sparse,” says co-director Josh Meyer, “because we did a workshop production of this in November, and we had no instrumentation; it was all just singing a capella. And it made the characters seem even more insane…we wanted to hold onto that.” What Meyer calls sparseness translated into a minimalist soundtrack for the live performance from Chou, a label she accepts.

Meyer supplied the vocal lines for the places where chant turns to song; thus he shares writing credits with Chou. What looked like child’s play in performance was actually the result of weeks of rehearsal. Chou only notated a few bars of the score and then the piece grew collaboratively, further honed by listening back to recordings. The result, boasts Meyer, is a show that differs considerably from night to night, yet last Friday’s performance met Chou’s goal of “wanting it to seem deliberate.”

Henna Chou

Chou was required to serve as one-woman band in full view of the audience. With aplomb and a deadpan expression that contrasted with the high silliness onstage, she switched with little in-between time from regular keyboard to the toy xylophone and celesta-thingy (one at each hand) to cello to banjo to percussion and back. Her composure at such a task reflects long classical training via private lessons—12 years on piano, cello from the age of eight, and guitar from twelve, continuing through her undergraduate years at Iowa State. In the last three years she’s played little classical repertoire, focusing on original collaborations with Texas musicians including shows in San Francisco with Houstonian Annie Lin.

The text, even when chanted rather than sung, had the insistent rhythm of Mother Goose rhymes. The effect was oddly reminiscent of Jacobean blank verse—an iambic meter that Chou capitalized on with her continuo passages on the cello—constantly emphasizing the iambic accents on the downbeat and playing against them on the upbeat. The cello served many functions, from a droning, monotonous “rhythm tool,” as she puts it, to a shrieking, squealing sound-effects generator.

Meyer added a narrator or choragus to the original script. When Anthony Megie showed up for the audition, he was wearing tap shoes. Naturally he got the part and a chance to tap, a rhythm which Chou was delighted to use as percussion.

Chou’s next project is to finish up some original songs, but she hopes to write for theater again in the near future. As her first theatrical work, Holes Before Bedtime surely served as a tough baptism by fire, which makes her calm execution all the more admirable.

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

It seems as though every music organization needs its edge. For every festival produced, a sub-festival is necessitated as a forum for outsider music that is not included as part of the main program but still poses the potential for wider acceptance at some point in the future. These are the smaller and more timidly funded series with titles that tend to imply uncertainty, instability, and possibly even mild psychoses. The Other Minds new music organization of San Francisco is no exception—it now has a dangerous stepchild of a music series called Brink. With a title like this, one is forced to question what kind of brink is being faced. A new frontier? Or are we at the brink of a nervous breakdown?

Analyses of the motivations behind the marketing of art is a slippery slope. So let’s stick to the music. In the case of the second event in the newly christened Brink series, it was an evening of intense contrast between self-knowing irony and beautifully earnest clarity, the former represented by Blevin Blectum, the latter by Christopher Willits. From the early heady days of the irreverent duo Blectum from Blechdom, Blevin and her partner in crime Kevin were making electronic music that dared the listener to take it seriously. Digital signal processing virtuosity was the tool to explore cartoon-electro-cut-up themes creating a fragrant and flagrant potpourri of sound that was full of catchy hooks while still being completely unpredictable. Their music was sneeringly ironic and quite often blatantly hilarious. It’s interesting to note that when listening to either the solo music of Blevin or Kevin, Blectum or Blechdom, they still seem to retain exactly the identity they brought to their duo. One gets the sense that if they were to start the duo all over again today, it would be exactly as it was, each contributing a perfect 50 percent to the final music.

Blectum’s performance was comprised of a pastiche of sounds, each giving no indication of what was to come. She excels at taunting the listener, teasing us with earworms which suddenly disappear never to be heard again. It’s a game that the listener is sure to lose, a postmodern romp through unhinged sounds that retain a vague familiarity, the sources never quite revealed nor completely hidden. In a way her music is maddening, but in the best sense. One is left with the feeling of having taken a great adventure through the terrain of a foreign world which has its own consistency and logic obvious to those in the know. But in a style that draws comparison to a Borges novel, the logic will never be completely revealed to we mere tourists. I hope she keeps it that way.

Willits, on the other hand, wants us to understand. For the record, I don’t think music is a universal language, but if there is anything out there with the potential to function in such a way, I would say Willits comes closest, working in a kind of musical-emotional Esperanto. Where Blectum excelled in information overload Willits drew on sparsity. Where Blectum maked us uncomfortable in just not quite getting the joke, Willits soothed us into a communal sense of melancholic comfort. His music is characterized by fascinating polyrhythms built from digital pops combined with tonal electric guitar material to create intricate and warm architectures of sound. At this concert he seemed to be pushing those boundaries a bit, taking chances with improvisation that paid off in creating a music that seemed terribly abstract while still being touchingly intimate.

Both Willits and Blectum share a conviction that electronic music is a personal form of expression and need not be distant nor machine-like. Neither appears interested in perpetuating the tired glorified myth of man/machine but instead showing how computer music has evolved into being less computer and more music. Programming them both in one evening was a stroke of curatorial genius, as it gave two very clear points on a spectrum of current potential in the medium, both personal and idiosyncratic but still diametrically opposed to one another. One giving us a wink and a nod, the other a warm embrace.

• Brink is held the last Wednesday of every month at the Hemlock Tavern, San Francisco. Tonight’s performance features Celeste Hutchins and Nami Sagara. 
  ***Roddy Schrock is a sound artist who digitally mines everyday sound for the profound and canvasses the glitzy, rough edges of pop for its articulate immediacy. He has lived and worked in Tokyo, The Hague, New York, and San Francisco, with performances in the Czech Republic, Holland, Japan, and North America. He is also an educator, currently teaching at De Anza College (California) and will be giving a summer workshop on Supercollider software at STEIM (Netherlands).

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

As spring stretched out towards summer here in Northeast Ohio, the Cleveland Orchestra presented the world premiere of a new score that mirrored, to an extent, that same natural event.

Susan Botti’s Translucence, first performed in late May by the orchestra under music director Franz Welser-Möst, did exactly what its title suggests it should. It hinted at bright, thin sonorities and melodies without, like the local thermometer, settling on anything firm.

Cleveland weather was probably the last thing on Botti’s mind as she wrote Translucence, but perhaps it wasn’t. Botti, currently the Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra, grew up here before taking off for schooling in Boston and New York. Furthermore, Translucence was the composer’s second commission from the orchestra, a follow-up to last season’s Impetuosity.

In any case, two things definitely were on Botti’s mind as she wrote the new piece: a poem by Amy Swenson called “The Exchange” and Botti’s own setting of that text for tenor James Gilchrist and harpist Alison Nicholls, premiered in 2003.

Here is the poem:

Now, my body flat, the ground
breathes. I’ll be the grass
Populous and mixed is mind
Earth, take thought. My mind, be moss
Field, go walking. I, a disk
will look down with seeming eye
I will be time, and study to be evening
You, world, be thought
I will stand, a tree, here
Never to know another spot
Wind, be motion. Birds, be passion
Water, invite me to your bed.

According to Botti’s program commentary, the 15 continuous minutes of Translucence, scored for normal orchestra with a few extra woodwinds, comprise two sections, an exploration of the poem’s images followed by a larger recasting of her original song. Neither such divisions nor any visual allusions were readily perceptible after only one hearing, but there were plenty other features of Translucence to latch onto.

Botti, currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, is a singer as well as a composer, and her vocal leanings were apparent. Brief, quivering fragments of melodies appeared in the violins, answered elsewhere by sighing phrases for viola, oboe, or horn, or interrupted by punctuating roulades from the upper brass.

And though there were two moments in which the entire orchestra united at pointed dramatic peaks, these occasions were relatively rare. Textures were typically no thicker than a top line and its accompaniment, with the percussion section, notably the marimba, often serving actively in the proceedings.

The long and exposed melodies for alto flute, though, may have been the clearest indication that Translucence has roots in vocal music. Perhaps Botti felt this rather unusual instrument is the closest match to her own voice type, thus establishing a more personal dimension to the entire piece. After all, she did dedicate the work to her mother, whose name, incidentally, is Claire, i.e. “light.”

Welser-Möst and the orchestra nailed the piece, little surprise since the two are often at their best together when interpreting contemporary scores, specifically music in which a shimmering and hermetic atmosphere is paramount.

However, the concert also included a dull account of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Leif Ove Andsnes performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which would have been marvelous had he not spent half the time competing with a steady electronic beeping somewhere in Severance Hall. Translucence, with its intentionally ethereal impact, turned out to be the most hard-hitting entry on the program.