Zephyr Explores Past Standard Fare

Zephyr Sunday, Feb. 25, St. John’s Cathedral

Unsuspecting concertgoers might think that a program called “A Spiritual Odyssey” would take them to the music of Palestrina or Bach.

Instead, the performers of Zephyr led a large audience at St. John’s Cathedral through 20th-century religious works that touched on medieval chant, theatrical dance and even Middle Eastern vocal traditions.

Organist Charles Bradley opened the program with an effective performance of Arvo Part’s “Trivium” (“Crossroads” is just one of its several meanings). The work, though written in 1976, begins and ends with the quiet sounds of late medieval music with melodies moving in hypnotically relentless rhythm above a single sustained bass note.

Between these serene sections, the bass turns into a jarring dissonant blur before the comforting return of meditative quiet.

Soprano Darnelle Preston’s singing showed both tonal beauty and careful control in Uzbekistani composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky’s haunting “Lacrymosa.” His music uses an arresting combination of West and East.

The words are from the Catholic Requiem. But the difficult vocal part, like Middle Eastern chanting, glided from pitch to pitch, coming briefly to rest on notes that are slightly flat or sharp to ears accustomed only to Western music.

The singer is pitted against a string quartet background of increasingly assertive repetitious rhythms with slowly shifting harmonies.

The quartet part was played with stern assurance by violinists Kelly Farris and Jane Blegen, violist Kendall Feeney and cellist Darrett Adkins.

Adkins and Feeney, in her more accustomed role as pianist, performed “Two Meditations” that composer Leonard Bernstein arranged from his “Mass.” Bernstein, never one to resist a theatrical gesture, calls for the performers to play some complex music as though it were as simple as a pop tune; he requires the cello to take on an almost speechlike quality, and he has the pianist do some fancy hand drumming on the front of the piano (the cellist’s foot briefly takes on the same role).

Adkins and Feeney brought off their multiple roles with elan.

Gardner Read’s “De Profundis” (based on the Gregorian chant for the lament “Out of the depths I cry to you, oh Lord”) movingly combined the organ with the sounds of Margaret Wilds’ horn. Wilds’ playing was superb, whether soft and distant or nobly loud.

No program of modern sacred music would be complete without this century’s great visionary, Olivier Messiaen. His “Dieu parmi nous” (“God among us”) combines the sounds of the fairground calliope, twittering bird songs and the technical virtuosity of the toccatas of Messiaen’s French forebears, Widor and Dupre. Bradley takes obvious pleasure in Messiaen’s kaleidoscopic moods and made the audience feel that pleasure, too.

Even more moving than the technical dazzle of “Dieu parmi nous” was Messiaen’s serene solo motet “O sacrum convivium” (“O sacred banquet”) as radiantly sung by Preston and quietly accompanied by Bradley.

The afternoon’s dying light through the cathedral’s stained glass made this meditative close all the more beautiful.

, DataTimes