Leon Kirchner’s “Orchestra Piece (Music for Orchestra II)’’ echoes the late-Romantic atonality of his teachers Roger Sessions and Arnold Schoenberg, sometimes sounding like the Hollywood soundtrack Schoenberg never wrote; but with escalating stylistic twists and turns, Kirchner’s concentrated grandeur — given a dazzling performance — attained its own glorious excess.
Two works featuring baritone Sanford Sylvan anchored the program. Steven Stucky’s “American Muse’’ began with a fine setting of John Berryman’s “American Lights,’’ the orchestra neurotically circling a swinging rhythm as Sylvan deadpanned sardonic couplets; an E.E. Cummings paean to Buffalo Bill was equally inventive, Sylvan fluently stammering like an overexcited child before contemplating the hero’s mortality in eerie falsetto.
But A.R. Ammons’s “Delaware Water Gap,’’ the undulating landscape musicalized as an Impressionist sea, and Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing’’ were lovely but less compelling, the craftsmanship admirable, but the line never transcending a generic stream-of-consciousness lyricism. Stucky’s sounds are never less than ravishing, but “American Muse’’ was best in its irreverence. Rose and the orchestra were again keen, riding the color wheel with élan. And Sylvan was a welcome guest, his limpid and elegant tone and nonpareil diction (few singers project English with Sylvan’s clarity) smartly focusing the interpretive drama.
The closer was Martin Boykan’s “Symphony for Baritone and Orchestra,’’ an engrossing, evolving thicket of vaulting lines; even at its sparsest, there’s always some bit of angular counterpoint shadowing events. The finale sets Keats’s sonnet “To Sleep,’’ the profusion bringing out the poem’s restlessness: a plea, not a celebration. After the evening’s series of set pieces, Boykan’s slower unfolding took a little getting used to, but the work earns its expanse, and its goal: the gentle disquiet of a long night.
Matthew Guerrieri can be reached at matthewguerrieri@gmail.com
