Aaron Engebreth and Aliana de la Guardia as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in Elena Ruehr’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. Shem Shthankiya photograph
By Keith Powers
Chamber Music Events, Feb. 9 through 15
Composer/pianist Ketty Nez’s music is the sole focus in a chamber ensemble concert Feb. 9 in the CFA concert hall at BU. Seven Times Salt leads a dance party—English Country Dance, with caller and instructions, Feb. 10 at Harvard-Epworth Church. The Chamber Orchestra of Boston presents a wide-ranging program Feb. 10 at First Church in the Back Bay. Laura Kaminsky’s chamber opera As One gets two stagings at BoCo, Feb. 10 and 12.
Bach Collegium Japan returns with founder/director Masaaki Suzuki, and they should not be missed. Music of Bach and Telemann, with baritone Roderick Williams. Feb. 10 at St. Paul’s Church in Cambridge, a presentation of the Boston Early Music Festival. Lynn Chang’s Hemenway Strings at BoCo play Vivaldi, Still, Montgomery and Bunch Feb. 10 in Seully Hall. Klangforum Wien—an international ensemble of up to 24—comes to Sanders Theatre, Feb. 10, performing large-scale works each by Poppe and Czernowin. Wu Man (pipa) joins cellist Mike Block’s Global Journeys series Feb. 10 in Rockport Music’s Shalin Liu Performance Center.
Julie Scolnik’s Mistral Music welcomes mezzo Kara Dugan on Feb. 11 (No. Andover) and Feb. 12 (Brookline). Vocal settings from Mendelssohn, Shostakovich, Weill and Korngold are spiced by instrumental works as well. This program looks like one of those perfectly complementary musical groupings.
Blue Heron sings a Josquin mass, and early works based on Dido’s last words, Feb. 11 at First Church in Cambridge. Boston Baroque’s X-tet—mostly BB’s principals—plays Lusitano, Haydn (Op. 20, 2) and Brahms (first string sextet) at Lyman Estate in Waltham Feb. 11. “Bach” and “funk” are not usually linked, but let’s see what flutist Emi Ferguson (H&H principal, AMOC) and her Baroque improv band, Ruckus, do with the notion. Looks like fun Feb. 11 in the WGBH Calderwood studios, part of the Celebrity Series.
Parker String Quartet, celebrating its 20th anniversary, plays two Beethoven quartets (95, 131) and the Ligeti 2nd quartet (five deeply linked movements) Feb. 12 on the Harvard campus in Paine Hall. The busy Horszowski Trio moves to the Gardner Museum Feb. 12, with trios by Farrenc, Chen Yi, and a premiere by Stewart Goodyear. The Needham Concert Society presents harpist Ida Zdorovetchi Feb. 12 at Carter Memorial United Methodist Church, a 20th c./Euro program: Ravel, Hindemith, Bax, Françaix, Debussy, Grandjany.
Pianist Randall Hodgkinson plays Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Chopin’s Op. 58 sonata on Wednesday, Feb. 15 in the BrickBox Theatre in the Jean McDonough Arts Center, part of the Worcester Chamber Music Series.
NOTED
From an upcoming Opera News review of Guerilla Opera’s presentation of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, staged last weekend at MIT’s Building W97 black box theatre.
Aliana de la Guardia and Aaron Engebreth sang the title roles in Elena Ruehr’s setting of Sydney Padua’s graphic novel. Starry contributors: librettist Royce Vavrek, director Giselle Ty, three versatile dancers, the intrepid Guerilla chamber players.
I can excerpt myself, right?
from Opera News, forthcoming
IRL, Lovelace and Babbage intersected in nineteenth century England. Babbage spent his life trying and failing to complete his Difference Engine, a calculating machine that prefigures modern computers.
Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Byron, was Babbage’s partner in experimentation. Her vast annotations to Babbage’s description of the Difference Engine have made her commonly accepted as the original software programmer.
Padua’s novel starts with the couple’s incomplete technologies and runs away. In her extravagant extrapolations, Babbage’s Difference Engine gets completed, and Lovelace’s ideas take the inventors through adventures and dimensions.
The opera does the same. Lovelace and Babbage meet the Queen, fight crime, visit the third dimension, and genially ponder a human future meshing with computer intelligence. Along the way jokes get played, cat memes get invented, and cartoonish jump-cuts lead Babbage and Lovelace though chaos, crime and many day-glo costume changes.
Musical highlights abounded: de la Guardia, who sang richly and expressively, pleading “Give me poetical science” over tasty quartet accompaniment. A percussion solo (Mike Williams played engagingly all evening) behind a quartet of voices—“The Amazing Geek”—that turned into an onstage boogie. Erin Williams singing the Queen’s cat aria—the imagined birth of a British Hello Kitty.
The dancers moved fluidly from funk to en pointe, creating a continuous arc of creative motion. Movement was choreographed seamlessly into the opera—not just for the trio of dancers. Ruehr’s score sounded organically danceable, simple on the surface and layered richly in the interaction between singers, dancers and instrumentalists.