Virgil Thomson's "Mostly About Love" (performed here by Nancy Armstrong, accompanied by Longy dean Wayman Chin) surrounds poet Kenneth Koch's absurdities with triadic cheer, parlor-song melodies wandering into dotty, effusive tangents. Marc Blitzstein gravitated toward popular song: his e.e. cummings setting "Open Your Heart" (sung by Elizabeth Anker, with Moll) marries Broadway turns of phrase to the finely-crafted "grand line" Boulanger extolled. Three songs by one-time Longy faculty member Theodore Chanler (given a nostalgic cast by Jayne West and Chin) went in both directions - the Shakespearean "O, Mistress Mine" and the haunting "Memory" enrich Thomson's diatonic simplicity; the comic "Dr. Livermore" detours down Tin Pan Alley.
The concert's main focus was the nigh-centenarian Elliott Carter. His 1945 Emily Dickinson madrigal "Musicians Wrestle Everywhere" (operatically rendered by Ryczek, Anker, Rachael Chagat, Brendan Daly, and Robert Honeysucker) has a dash of jazz, but syncopations are subsumed into the intricate activity. Similarly, in Carter's ingenious 1939 "Canonic Suite," the sound of a saxophone quartet (Kenneth Radnofsky and students Dennis Shafer, Tsuyoshi Honjo, and Gordon Gest, in elegant form) evoked Paris rather than Harlem. Carter's 1940 "Pastorale" is more explicitly jazzy, a hortus-in-urbe Coplandesque landscape spiked with dry, offhand dance rhythms; Robert Sheena's velvety English horn played off Chin's bell-like piano.
But Carter's "Warble for Lilac-Time," a 1943 Whitman setting performed by Ryczek and Moll, strains at the limits of oracular populism. Carter would strike out in a new direction in his monumental 1945/46 Piano Sonata; Randall Hodgkinson's majestic, Herculean performance emphasized the music's stream-of-consciousness quality, Carter feeling his way into the postwar American psyche. The program's chronological outlier, Carter's 1985 "esprit rude/esprit doux," flutist Vanessa Mulvey and clarinetist Michelle Shoemaker deploying loquacious, coruscating lines with energy and grit, completed the new vision: an America of aggregate individualism, of multiplicity and motion.
