Music Review: Bachanalia during Merkin Concert Hall

So it was disconcerting to hear Bachanalia open a 24th deteriorate on Wednesday night during Merkin Concert Hall with such an ineffectual opening of dual chorale preludes by Bach. Part of a problem lay in a arrangements for solo violin and strings by a composer Jakov Jakoulov, that incited a song gloppy with thick-textured scoring and beefed-up harmonies.

Ms. Beilina’s comment of a solo violin partial was injured by intonation problems. She arrived in America in a mid-1970s after studies with David Oistrakh during a Moscow Conservatory and several prizes from competitions. She played tentatively in a Bach and was likewise fluid after break in an arrangement of Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess” for violin and strings.

The categorical attractiveness of this program, provocatively patrician “Renaissance and Decadence,” was a pastiche of song by a Renaissance madrigal composer Gesualdo, who had a gusto for unusual harmonies, and a fin de siècle French composer Erik Satie, whose soft-spoken, clever pieces desirous a cultish following from a organisation of radical composers in early 1920s Paris called Les Six.

Before a opening Mr. Jakoulov, who organised a Gesualdo and Satie works, spoke about this project. we strongly inspire musicians to pronounce directly to audiences. But Mr. Jakoulov’s thick Russian accent and wayward sermon finished it tough to follow his points.

Both Gesualdo and Satie, as he said, were experimenters. But as artistic people, they could not have been some-more different. Gesualdo was an despotic nobleman who murdered his mother and her baby child when he detected her with a lover. Satie was a medium independent who played piano in cabarets as a immature male and led a strangely sly life.

Satie’s Five Gnossiennes, beautifully ethereal and quirky tiny piano pieces, were played here in Mr. Jakoulov’s unenlightened arrangements for piano and 15 strings. In some pieces Satie’s beguiling, wholesome piano chords were extended with modernist, misty harmonies. If a indicate was to filter a chords by a contemporary prism, it did not work, during slightest in these shaky, sorry performances.

In between a Satie miniatures tiny subgroups of fibre players achieved Mr. Jakoulov’s transcriptions of 4 Gesualdo madrigals. Gesualdo’s harmonies are infrequently shockingly complicated and piercingly dissonant. The madrigals contingency be sung or, in this case, played, with pinpoint precision, so listeners will comprehend that a bizarre chords are intended. But these performances had extraordinary privacy and loath pitch.

The program, that served double avocation as a holiday concert, finished with a “Hanukkah Medley” for strings and piano by Dina Pruzhansky, finish with “The Dreidel Song” finished adult in a demeanour of Prokofiev’s Neo-classical style; afterwards came Mr. Jakoulov’s “Christmas Suite,” an amalgam of fractured carols with a informed melodies encased in Ivesian wrong-note chords. Though a tiny peculiar, a holiday song brought onward a liveliest personification from Bachanalia. Go figure.

The subsequent Bachanalia unison is Jan. 18 during Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, during 95th Street; (212) 864-5400, bacchanalia.org.