December 8, 2003
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

Drawn to What's Next, Not What Has Been

By ALLAN KOZINN

Berio and Friends

Sometimes coincidental threads seem to tie together unrelated performances. The eerie vocalizations of Ms. Green in Mr. Gal's opera, for example, called to mind Luciano Berio's "Sequenza III" (1965) for voice and Joan La Barbara's "Conversations" (1988), both performed by Ms. La Barbara on Wednesday evening at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, at Columbia University. The Berio strung together babbling, sighs, coughs, brief shards of conventional melody and tongue clicking, and showed that a composer doesn't need notes to create a concise drama.

Berio's 13 Sequenzas are an uneven lot although no doubt the performers on each of the instruments he wrote for cherish their own. Of the five played on Wednesday, the most memorable (apart from the vocal one) were No. VIII (1976) for solo violin, played with both warmth and virtuosic brilliance by Vesselin Gellev, and No. IXa (1980), for clarinet, in an exuberant but nuanced account by Michal Beit-Halachmi.

More captivating were works by some of the performers. William Schimmel's "Dean Martin Variations," for solo accordion, deconstructed "That's Amore" and a few other Italian favorites, and straddled the line between humor and ingenuity. And Miriam Kapner gave an indifferent reading of Sequenza VII (1969) for oboe, but her own "Emerging" (2000) was a sensitive exploration of the oboe's singing character and its technical armory.