CANTATA PROFANA’S INDEFINABLE ‘DREAMS AND VISIONS’

 When is a quartet a quintet? One answer to this stump-your-friends trivia question is Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 (1908), whose four players are joined by a singer in the final two movements, intense settings of poems by Stefan George.

The work was given a fevered performance by members of the young ensemble Cantata Profana on Thursday at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia on the Upper West Side. Formed in 2013 by students at the Yale University School of Music and its Institute of Sacred Music, this group has a taste for the dramatic, gradually increasing the intensity of the golden stage lighting during a particularly ferocious passage in the Schoenberg quartet’s second movement.

While its theatrical bent is a constant, Cantata Profana’s approach to the repertory is admirably varied and indefinable. It’s devoted not to new or modern or early music — such specialists proliferate — but to most anything, so long as the mixture is put together thoughtfully and put across persuasively.

So the Schoenberg work shared Thursday’s program, “Dreams and Visions,” with another piece for string quartet from the same period, Webern’s single-movement “Langsamer Satz” (1905). Also included were Berio’s “Sequenza III” for solo voice (1965) and, for voice and ensemble, two selections from Kaija Saariaho’s “The Tempest Songbook” (2004) and Manuel de Falla’s “Psyché” (1924).

Performed here by the incisive baritone John Taylor Ward, the antic, changeable “Sequenza III” demands clicks, burbles and muffled grunts from its singer, as well as more traditional lyricism. Its final note, a faint halo of sound, led without pause into the sunset-rich harmonies of the Webern, played with a running thread of hysteria that made it seem a contemporary of Berio’s.

Mr. Ward was just as detailed in Ms. Saariaho’s two contemplative monologues: “Caliban’s Dream,” with its piquant touches of mandolin, and the ominous “Prospero’s Vision.” These two reveries framed de Falla’s languid “Psyché,” sung with precise diction and focused tone by the soprano Kristina Bachrach.

Ms. Bachrach was passionate yet lucid in her contributions to the Schoenberg, rising to visionary fervor. While they had sounded furious and even raw earlier in the quartet, the four string players here took on an ethereal delicacy, slowly unfolding the dusky F-sharp chord with which this seething work comes to a quiet, sober close.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/18/arts/music/review-cantata-profanas-indefinable-dreams-and-visions.html?ref=music&_r=0