With the snow falling in sheets and driven by a blizzard force wind outside, it was an incredible experience to transport oneself from inside BU’s Hillel house to the Negev desert. Yet that is just what happened the evening of Jan. 26 as hardy music lovers attended Max Stern’s “Inspiration in the Desert.”
Szu Ning Tai skillfully challenged the strings on her harp to play ancient melodies from the Psalms exactly the way King David would have heard them.
In the same traditional vein, Thomas Wilber (accompanied by David Owens) used the flute in a beautiful rhapsodic interpretation of the sights and sounds of the desert in “Piyutasia.”
Moving to more contemporary sounds and rhythms, “Quartet from The East” used improvisational techniques in part as the four musicians felt the music as one unit … Dissonances both resolved and sustained in an emotional wave ebbing and flowing through the three movements. The extraordinary team of Victor Cayes [sic] on piano, Klaudia Szalachta [sic] on violin, Dannie Cho on clarinet and Hyundai Ji Kwon on cello provided the talent needed to deliver this magical piece to the audience.
Finally, “Rainbow.” A work for seven saxophones took us through the rain, wind and rising waters of the Genesis flood and ended with the peaceful sound of the dove and finally the rainbow whose seven colors were symbolized by the seven saxophones.
This concert took us to places musically new and dreamlike, and we loved it.
-Judy and Bobby Kaff
