BOSTON — The artistic qualities of singers make the human voice the most enigmatic instrument: Each experience must be a new one. An artist like soprano Julia Bullock can turn just three songs into a profound event.
Bullock was the centerpiece of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s program Nov. 6 in Jordan Hall. Artistic director Gil Rose led his ensemble of intrepid new-music makers in vocal works by Samuel Barber and Matthew Aucoin, along with Charles Wuorinen’s ballet score Delight of the Muses and a world premiere from Anthony Paul De Ritis.
When the repertoire and range suit the voice, most great singers offer special moments of effortless brilliance. Three settings by Aucoin, including two texts by German poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), traced the edges of Bullock’s artistry, showing the facile tone in her huge range and the gentle, mesmerizing vibrato.
Celan wrote with the Holocaust as an ever-present reality; his fractured language reads incomplete, or inconclusive, without its backstory. The first aria, “Es war Erde in ihnen, und sie gruben” (There was earth in them, and they dug), an ominous bolero of blackness, bristled with darkness. Direct language epitomized the poem’s forlorn context: “Sie gruben und gruben” (They dug and dug).
A second aria, “It’s all different from what you think,” sung in English, changed musical energy, but not the context. A liquid string ostinato urged Bullock along. It’s a different tale of psychological wandering; the orchestra swelled suddenly and subsided throughout, anxiously. The two arias were selected from a larger dramatic cycle, The No One’s Rose, premiered in 2021 by the American Modern Opera Company, the forward-thinking troupe that includes both Aucoin and Bullock.
A third setting came as a soloist’s encore: “One by One,” an evocative song by American composer Connie Converse arranged by Aucoin that revealed Bullock’s ability to sing low alto just as easily as she sings high soprano. Aucoin arranged it with a big-band feel.
Bullock also appeared as soloist in Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. The composer creates liminal spaces for the singer, who narrates novelist James Agee’s wandering reminiscence of a Tennessee summer evening. The prose libretto reads without irony; the singer is another instrument in the ensemble, the lyrics a part of the presentation, but just. The sense of Agee’s reminiscence comes from the singer’s sound and gestures. Bullock eased into the shifting moods, from childlike to mature, hopscotching memories that seem to come from random periods of life. She is a subtle performer, not given to Romantic gesture. Her purity of tone color begets close-your-eyes attention.
With its alliterative title, De Ritis’ Jiggedy Jingle Jaunty Jaunty invokes the Siren’s episode from James Joyce’s Ulysses and the meditations of the novel’s main character, Leonard Bloom. For Bloom, the sounds obsessively recall his wife’s affair (starting with a creaky bed); De Ritis creates a world in which sounds of the city and the commotion of passersby fill Bloom’s head.
The one-movement piece hardly takes a breath. Clinking glasses and swirling conversations — some taped, some murmuring instrumentalists — create an instant atmosphere of city life. De Ritis uses inscrutable recordings, outbursts from two onstage vocalists, mutterings throughout by the instrumentalists, and bright, brassy outbursts to mimic the confusion. It made for a colorful concert opener.
The premiere successfully created a frame with the concert closer, Wuorinen’s Delight of the Muses. The composer wrote the score on a commission for the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death; Peter Martins subsequently created a dance for New York City Ballet, staged first in 1992.
The score is eminently danceable. Wuorinen can write exasperatingly egg-headed music, some based on fractals and other scientific fancies. But this richly orchestrated work, full of movement and energy, sparkles with musical references that spill over with humor (specifically, Wuorinen had two early piano sonatas, K. 281 and 283, in mind; quotes from Don Giovanni seep in). The ensemble pauses at one point to jam on some courtly (or jester-) inspired rhythms. Wuorinen can be fun.
