The Mendelssohn/2001 concert, in which conducting duties were shared by their respective artistic directors, Alan Harler and James Freeman, began and ended with choral works by composers known for their severity but which were, in these cases, harmonically extravagant and emotionally forthright.
Henryk Gorecki's Totus Tuus had the deliberate manner of a Bach chorale but with ecstatic outbursts - the sort that this choir does extraordinarily well. As for Arvo Pärt, I've always enjoyed his music but I've never loved a piece on first hearing as I did the 2010 Adam's Lament, a seethingly passionate, harmonically explosive work with texts by Saint Silouan.
While many works portray man striving toward the spiritually unimaginable, this text is the opposite: The Old Testament figure of Adam has known the sublime and must concede to the cruelty of earthly life, including fratricide in his own family. How could the music not have the sharpest edges and strongest characterization of this composer's entire output?
Though Orchestra 2001 was in the Pärt performance, its showcase was John Adams' Shaker Loops and Pierre Boulez's Messagesquisse. The former was written in 1978 and sits at the foundation of Adams' rich output, far more minimalist than anything he's written recently but with his trademark harmonic succulence (his word, not mine) that gives the music's motivic repetition a soft-focus shimmer. All the works on the program had nests of tremolos, uncharacteristically in Boulez, whose spare atonal piece with soloist Lori Barnet nonetheless sat well with the rest, even though you'd never dare have these composers at the same dinner party.
