In between these curiously pathetic vignettes comes "Frühlings-Lied" (Spring Song), to a poem of Rainer Maria Rilke. Here the imagery is of the innocent, ecstatic rush of spring's arrival and the music is full of a kind of half-formed, halting eagerness that is irresistibly apt for the poetry. The whole is weird, wonderful, and quite unlike anything I've ever heard before. Volti's performance, bar one apparent derailment in the middle of the "Frühlings-Lied" that quickly repaired itself, was virtuosic and intensely felt.

The Estonian Arvo Pärt is the closest thing this program sported to a "household name," but the 2000 ...which was the son of ... is not exactly typical Pärt. The composer sets the genealogy of Jesus (beginning with Joseph, his supposed father) not in "sacred-minimalist" fashion but to a series of stock, homophonic, cadential phrases that only occasionally ventures into slightly more complex counterpoint. The effect is, at first, disturbingly mundane, growing fascinating as the names roll by and the incantatory power of the list takes hold. There are brief surges in the musical interest at key points in the tale of names (Abraham, Noe), but the main impression is of flatness, throwing into strange relief the way the list, calmly, ends ("... which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God").

Veljo Tormis, Pärt's compatriot, was in attendance Saturday night for the performance of his 1982 Helletused (Childhood Memory) for solo soprano and mixed chorus. The piece is built upon herdboys' calls, which echoed from one section of the choir to another, swelling into a steadily intensifying stream. Over the top of this came a soaring, impassioned soprano line sung with magnificent fervor from behind the audience by Tonia d'Amelio. It was wild and intoxicating music, and the performance, at the opening of the second half, deservedly brought down the house.

Finnish composer Pekka Kostiainen contributed two pieces to the program, the first of them commissioned by Volti. Harvoin yhtehen yhymme (Seldom do we come together), written in 2001, sets the opening of the Finnish national epic, Kalevala, with its lines that fittingly describe gathering and singing together. Siitä päivän kiini saapi (The robbery of the sun and moon), from 1999, sets another passage from Kalevala, in which the "gat-toothed dame" of the North, Louhi, steals away the sun and moon, and even the houses are bereft of light.

Both are mainly in a graceful quintuple meter derived from traditional recitation, the eight-syllable lines falling neatly into fives. In Siitä päivän kiini saapi, the men, separated from the women in two groups, carry the melodic line much of the time while the women, between them, imitate the plucking of the kantele (a five-string zither). As the text turns to the theft of the celestial lights, the music descends dramatically into a black pit, leaving the voices murmuring and growling at the extreme bottoms of their ranges — a moment that Volti brought off to chilling effect.

Olli Kortekanga's 2002 Shadows, to a late, dark poem of D.H. Lawrence, proved another kind of music altogether: dense, harmonically rich, long of line, and concentrated in expression. It was wrenching, powerful music. It demanded, and got, a performance of superb intensity and uncommonly fine intonation from Volti. After such a piece Einojuhani Rautavaara's 1973 Suite de Lorca, with its easy Spanishisms and its onomatopoeia, seemed almost too lightweight to close the program, but the dashing performance blew any doubts away.

(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.)

©2006 Michelle Dulak Thomson, all rights reserved