Dolce Suono's search for the ancient Greeks

One of Mimi Stillman's most noticeable talents is her ability to pick top-flight colleagues for her Dolce Suono chamber series. She continued her winning streak with her latest addition. Mezzo-soprano Donna Morein owns a gorgeous voice, and she proved she knows how to use it from the first phrase of a 20th-Century art song masterpiece, Ravel's Chanson Madecasses.

These Madagascar Songs create their effects with an unpretentious melody line that shows off the best qualities of the mezzo voice. They're perfect for the Dolce Suono programs, since they combine the vocal part with imaginative, unpredictable writing for one of the group's core ensembles— flute, cello and piano. The first work is a languid French love song, the second boosts the intensity level with an anti-imperialist outbreak (Aoua! Don't trust the whites!), and the third is a perfect evocation of unblemished day-to-day contentment.

The program opened with a total delight: the three instrumentalists dancing through Haydn's G Major Trio for the flute, piano and cello combination. The trio presents Haydn in his happiest, most winning mood, and the musicians played it as if they were enjoying a private jam session in an 18th-Century music room.

The exchanges between the instruments sounded like true interactions. When the flute executed a little flight and the piano answered with an echo, it sounded as if Mimi Stillman and Charles Abramovic were actually having fun responding to each other, rather than merely hitting the notes indicated in the score.

Ravel's cross-cultural scene painting

The theme of the program was supposed to be "Cross-Cultural Influences, Ancients and Moderns." The Haydn didn't quite fit that description, as far as I could tell, but I didn't hear anyone object. The Madagascar Songs obviously reflect Europe's encounter with Africa, and Stillman and Morein followed it with another example of Ravel's cross-cultural scene painting, the Enchanted Flute for mezzo and flute from his Scheherazade song cycle.

The second half of the program was devoted to a premiere that might not seem cross-cultural at first glance. Jeremy Gill's Ode: A Dramatic Cantata is based on material that lies at the very roots of Western civilization: Greek texts such as the odes of Pindar and modern poems about ancient Greece. But one aspect of Greek culture is just as alien as anything that Westerners might encounter in Africa or Persia.

The Greeks loved music, but…

In the discussion that preceded the premiere, Classics professor Ralph Rosen noted that we know almost nothing about the music the ancient Greeks played. We know that music played a major role in their culture, and we possess the texts of Greek musical works. But we have only inherited a few scraps of written music.

Each section of Gill's Ode provides music for a different Greek verse form, or a modern quotation. The piece as a whole takes a very personal look at Greek culture and Greek attitudes toward life. You can listen to it, in part, as a thought-provoking speculative essay about Greek musical culture. The Dithyramb to Dionysius, for example, sounded excessively dramatic to me, but upon reflection I realized that might be appropriate: Dionysian revels were supposed to be an exercise in excess. I might have
reacted the same way to the real thing.

Fragments pieced together

Some of the music was based on fragments of Greek compositions or bits from works by composers like Mahler and Puccini. In his preliminary remarks, Gill said he had synthesized things that exist as fragments, and fragmented things that exist as wholes.

Gill's vocal style is more declamatory than Ravel's. In one section, Donna Morein even slipped, dramatically, into straight speech.

Gill's instrumental writing, on the other hand, can be irresistibly melodious and rhythmic. One of the best sections was a flowing, moving flute solo based on a theme from Tosca. A hymn to Apollo concluded the piece with the swirling melodies and high-spirited rhythms of traditional Middle Eastern music.

Yumi Kendall, multi-talented

Yumi Kendall contributed some beautiful cello solos all through the program. The finale proved she's a talented percussionist as well, as she maintained the beat by slapping the strings and the sides of her instrument. With Stillman blowing away on the flute, Abramovic filling in the sound on the piano, and Morein capturing the sway of the melody line, the evening ended with a happy approximation of the rousing pipe and percussion Renaissance music that Piffaro plays.

Did ancient Greek music sound like that? Would Pindar and Sophocles feel right at home clapping to the rhythms of a Renaissance town band or a Middle East belly-dancing combo? We'll never know. But it's reasonable to think they might.