Written by Rex Hearn | 25 January 2010

Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello was the basis for the libretto Arrigo Boito wrote for Giuseppe Verdi, who at the time Boito approached him about the opera was 71 years old and considered himself retired.

But three years later, in February 1887, Otello had its triumphant premiere at La Scala, and this work plus Verdi's final opera, Falstaff, are considered the pinnacle of the Italian opera tradition.

Saturday night's second-cast performance at the Palm Beach Opera confirmed this: It was a truly grand production.

From his first-act entrance, tenor Allan Glassman established his character and credentials as Otello with a booming Esultate! L'orgoglio musulmano (Rejoice! The Mussulman's pride is buried in the sea). His voice, brilliant in victory and stentorian in tone, which Glassman maintained all evening, projected beautifully.

He has the vocal quality of an early Callas in its dramatic overtone, timbre and delivery. His artistry in the way he shapes each phrase was most impressive, and he let his voice carry on the breath, bel canto style, without pushing. He has a heroic tenor, which this part cries out for.

The cunning, two-faced ensign, Iago, sung by baritone Daniel Sutin, made the most of this meaty role, conniving, persuading, and plotting Otello’s downfall. Sutin’s voice is a first-class instrument; it has a rich, iron-edged quality that made one never doubt he would succeed. Perhaps only a little more obsequiousness in his acting would have been in order.

Sutin led a fantastic brindisi in Act I with fine choral backup, and sang the Credo masterfully in Act II. This Credo, Boito’s only divergence from Victor Hugo’s translation of Shakespeare’s plot, which was his source, is needed to establish Iago as the Mephistopheles, the bad guy, of the opera. In doing so, Boito met with Verdi’s approval : "Most beautiful, and wholly Shakespearean," opined the maestro of Boito’s new, well-chosen words.

As Desdemona, the Canadian soprano Michele Capalbo rose to great heights. Her beautiful voice and subtle acting created an artistic gem that shone brilliantly from start to finish. In the Act I love duet, Gia nella notte densa (The night is dark and silent), she was indeed Otello’s lover and equal. Their love felt real.

But as Iago’s sly plots against her man progress, Capalbo showed her anxiety and concern as Otello falls away from her, mistakenly believing she is in love with Cassio. In the bedroom scene of Act IV, the great Willow Song was most tenderly and beautifully sung, as was the Ave Maria that came next. Capalbo has an elegant way of finishing off her vocal line by drawing her voice back momentarily on high notes, holding audiences in thrall for what is a lovely softening effect. This was a touching and memorable performance.

Cassio, a young captain of the guard, sung by tenor Norman Shankle, is the unsuspecting victim of Iago’s cunning. He sang his role wonderfully well. His bright tenor and arrogant swagger had one rooting for his promotion, which we knew would come from his cool demeanor : he’s made governor of Cyprus in place of the discredited murderer, Otello.

Mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts was a fine Emilia, and bass Grigory Soloviov sang the role of the Venetian ambassador, Ludovico, very well.

Director Bernard Uzan came up with a good idea for the climactic murder: There wasn't a pillow in sight when Otello kills Desdemona, strangling her from behind as she stands on the stairs. Uzan also moves crowds like no other; he had the Palm Beach Opera chorus becoming Venetians, Cypriots and Greek men-at-arms in no time.

And the chorus was superb. This is a group made up of young and exciting voices that beats the Metropolitan Opera's wobble-prone group by a mile. All praise, then, to chorus master Gregory Ritchey for his thorough training.

The scenery was provided by the Cincinnati Opera. Donald E. Thomas supervised the lighting, and the follow spots were accurate and on target.

And the orchestra in the pit sounded and played brilliantly under the baton of Bruno Aprea. They did justice to Verdi’s seamless continuity and sumptuous orchestral writing with keen playing, which is what we have come to expect from this excellent symphonic ensemble of 70 or more musicians.

This is one of those operas where music and lyrics combine to make a masterpiece. Poetry and song are balanced in lyrical forms. With this production, the Palm Beach Opera's new general director, Daniel Biaggi, is putting his stamp of quality on the company as it moves toward its half-century, just two short years from now in 2012.

The sky’s the limit.

Rex Hearn founded the Berkshire Opera Company in Massachusetts in 1985. He has been reviewing opera in southern Florida since 1995.

Otello will be performed at 2 p.m. today at the Kravis Center with tenor Allan Glassman as Otello, soprano Michele Capalbo as Dedesmona, and baritone Daniel Sutin as Iago. Tickets: $23-$175. Call 1-800-572-8471 or visit www.pbopera.org.

Written by Greg Stepanich | 23 January 2010

For its first staged production of the season, the Palm Beach Opera on Friday presented a decent, if unremarkable, production of what is often considered Giuseppe Verdi's finest opera.

Otello, which for the composer marked a bold advance toward a seamless fusion of music and drama, requires a kind of singing and acting that it only got intermittently on the Dreyfoos Hall stage at the Kravis Center. Nevertheless, it was a good night at the theater overall, and a refreshing, brainy way to get the staged season under way.

The American tenor Carl Tanner was the Moor who loved not wisely but too well, and at his best Friday night, he sang with an appealing lyric sound. It's a pretty voice, very Italianate, and doubtless delightful to listen to in lighter repertoire. Here, though, a more heroic, heavier voice is needed; one missed the weight that would make the words la gloria, il paradiso ring out in the Act I love duet, for example.

Tanner's acting was also hit-or-miss. Much of the time he seemed to be uncomfortable moving around on stage, rather than dominating it, as the tough guy who just whipped the Turks would be expected to do. But as his voice warmed up, his acting got more natural, and he became more persuasive as a man driven into a jealous rage, gasping out, rather than singing, the first measures of Dio! mi potevi in Act III.

As Desdemona, the Slovenian soprano Sabina Cvilak offered a strong, rather dark voice with a wide vibrato in the upper reaches. She sang noticeably flat in her first couple entrances, but by the third act, her voice had risen to the occasion, filling out and blossoming as the drama turned to center on her.

The true test of any Desdemona is the fourth act, with some of the most beautiful pages in any opera, and here Cvilak won the only solo applause of the night. She was quite effective in the Willow Song and Ave Maria, singing the repeated Salce, salce, salce nearly inaudibly but most compellingly, and she was able to move from there to her farewell outburst to Emilia with convincing power.

As a couple, Cvilak and Tanner had no chemistry whatever, which isn't fatal to the success of the opera, but it would have helped sell the lackluster singing of the Act I love duet and the swift emotional changes of the Dio ti giocondi set piece in Act III, not to mention the very end of the opera.

The most consistent singing, and best acting, came from the American baritone Tom Fox as Iago. He sang well throughout the opera, seizing the listener's attention from the very start with a bronze-like sound of real quality and presence. The top three or four notes of his range were missing, but Fox covered for them, snapping off the high yelp of the Act I drinking song, for instance, rather than belting it out. That drinking song had a nice touch as well, as orchestra and Fox did a fade on the falling phrase of the refrain, evidence of a sophisticated, canny musicianship.

Fox's acting was that of a confident, thoroughly professional performer, at home in the spotlight, and he imbued his character not just with the requisite menace but a kind of manly force that made it easier to see why his transparent stratagems worked so well.

The young American tenor Norman Shankle was an adequate Cassio, with a somewhat lightweight voice that showed its very attractive coloring to best effect in the handkerchief exchange with Iago in Act III. He, too, is a singer who would be good to hear again in lyric romantic roles. Mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts, a member of the Palm Beach Opera's Young Artist program, sang respectably as Emilia, with a voice of good size and roundness.

Perhaps best of all in this Otello was the orchestra, which save for one flubbed horn cue at the end of Act I, played beautifully in a score that calls for the ensemble to supply most of the psychological underpinnings as well as the accompaniment. Bruno Aprea conducted them with his usual excellence, engagement and passion, unleashing all their strength in the big choral scenes and bringing surpassing tenderness and delicacy to the Willow Song. Only a slightly slower tempo in that Act IV scene might have helped make it more poignant.

This is a handsome Otello, with evocative sets from Allen Charles Klein and traditional late medieval-early Renaissance costumes in a multiplicity of colors. Veteran French director Bernard Uzan makes good use of his stage, keeping the action from bunching up or getting static.

The chorus was not particularly good at the outset, shaky and off cue in their outbursts during the storm, and the male voices were weak. The women, however, sang nicely in the Act II song for Desdemona, and the massed ensemble singing in Act III was properly forceful.

What this performance lacked most was a sense of furious forward motion, a feeling of events spinning out of control. Part of that has to do with casting the wrong kind of tenor voice for Otello, and part of it Friday night probably had to do with opening-night unfamiliarity. But it has to have that kind of drive to make the denouement work -- in Shakespeare as well as Verdi.

Otello will be performed at 7: 30 p.m. today at the Kravis Center with tenor Allan Glassman as Otello, soprano Michele Capalbo as Dedesmona, and baritone Daniel Sutin as Iago. Friday night's cast returns for a second performance at 2 p.m. Sunday, and tonight's cast returns at 2 p.m. Monday. Tickets: $23-$175. Call 1-800-572-8471 or visit www.pbopera.org.

Written by Greg Stepanich | 19 January 2010

Even though his art has gone in a very different direction, Kenneth Frazelle will even now defend the severe modernist composers who used to dominate the world of classical music, including his own teacher at the Juilliard School, Roger Sessions.

“He did not want you to write the way he did, he wanted you to write what you wanted,” said Frazelle, who added that Sessions often wouldn’t say anything for half an hour as he studied a student’s score in a weekly lesson. “He would never suggest a solution, but he would point out things that lacked integrity or continuity. He tried to get you to write what you heard.”

Studying with Sessions was “one of the great experiences of my life,” he said, though ultimately Frazelle would find a more accessible language than that of the generation that trained him.

“I wanted to write for a bigger audience than 10 or 12 guys in black turtlenecks,” he said.

This week, Frazelle comes to the Lynn University Conservatory of Music for its Fourth Annual New Music Festival as its composer-in-residence. On Thursday, the Boca Raton school will host the world premiere of a piece Frazelle composed just for the festival: Gee’s Bend Scenes, for trumpet, piano and marimba. The four-movement chamber work was inspired by the work of the quilters of Gee’s Bend in rural southwest Alabama.

Now 54, Frazelle is an adjunct instructor at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, where he attended high school, and where one of his pupils, years later, was pianist Lisa Leonard, who founded and now runs the Lynn New Music Festival.

“It pays to be nice to your students,” said Frazelle, who has kept in touch with Leonard over the years. “She was a real fireball.”

Frazelle hails from a North Carolina tobacco-farming family, and much of his music reflects regional and nature themes: Blue Ridge Airs, Appalachian Songbook, The Swans at Pungo Lake, Shivaree. He also has written numerous absolute works, including individual sonatas for cello, harpsichord and oboe, string and piano trios, a chamber orchestra concerto, a quintet for flute, guitar and string trio, and solo piano pieces.

One of his best-known works is Still/Here, a ballet score for choreographer Bill T. Jones, and his oeuvre also includes much vocal music, such as solo settings of Shakespeare sonnets and poems by the North Carolina-born poet A.R. Ammons (Worldly Hopes, Sunday at McDonald’s).

Figuratively going home to find his aesthetic came about gradually, and Frazelle said he doesn’t remember quite when it happened for him.

“I do remember just connecting to a kind of music that felt timeless in a way to me, that felt archetypal and very universal,” he said. “It was a wide sound world that had a certain kind of modal music that I was very interested in.”

One of his evocative scores is called Vanishing Birds, a four-song cycle from 2007 for soprano and piano that laments the extinction of the Carolina parakeet, the precarious status of the piping plover and red-cockaded woodpecker, and draws disdain on the destruction of a pine forest.

All of this ties him to some venerable strains in American artistic thought.

“I’m not a religious person in any conventional way,” he said. “I admire Walt Whitman, the Transcendentalists, A.R. Ammons, people that see spiritual things in what’s around us and in human relationships.”

Frazelle, who was born in Jacksonville, N.C., said his father, and accountant and teacher who died when the future composer was 6, “had an innate musical ability. He sang very well,” he said. By the time Frazelle was taking piano lessons in the second or third grade, “it was pretty clear what my calling was.”

Frazelle credits his mother with supporting not just his musical pursuits, but the artistic ambitions of his sister, who studied dance, and his brother, how became a painter. “She always believed in us, and got us incredible training,” he said. “I’m profoundly grateful.”

After high school at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Frazelle pursued further studies at the Juilliard School, where he worked with Sessions and followed a modernist path into the 1980s. It was in 1985 that the noted mezzo-soprano and contemporary music specialist Jan DeGaetani, who was premiering a new work of his, told Frazelle she was concerned about the difficulty of the piece.

“She told me there were maybe three or four people who will be able to do this; that’s how difficult what I was writing was,” he said. “Now when someone of that stature confronts you, it’s definitely worth thinking about.”

“There was some very good timing there,” he said, because DeGaetani’s misgivings came at the same time that “my ear was opening up.”

Frazelle has been much honored in his career, receiving a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Barlow Prize, and commissions from groups such as the Phoenix Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Nashville Chamber Orchestra.

Inspiration comes not just from outside sources such as birds and quilters, but straightforward musical ideas as well.

“Often something visual will trigger a motif, a three- or four-note cell. Sometimes I’ll just hear a rhythmic fragment,” he said. “I do a lot of watercolors in the summer, and sometimes that will lead to some musical idea when I’m not thinking about it. I’m a big believer in sketchbooks and jotting things down.”

His composing process remains largely intuitive, he said. “I don’t make a lot of graphs or charts. It’s through-composed rather than being formally organized in advance.”

And although he did buy the Sibelius software notation program for his computer – “I think I learned how to do ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ in C major” – he prefers to write things out by hand.

In May, Frazelle will see the premiere of a new song cycle – Songs in a Rearview Mirror – at the Kennedy Center for the tenor Anthony Dean Griffey. Like the Gee’s Bend trio, it looks to Alabama for its inspiration, in particular Hale County, and the celebrated work of Walker Evans and James Agee, the photographer and writer who visited the area in 1936. Frazelle wrote the texts himself, also drawing on the work of photographer William Christenberry.

In the meantime, there’s the teaching, and Frazelle said he often looks to Sessions’ example when working with his students today.

“I think about it a lot. So much of good teaching is knowing when to keep your mouth shut,” he said. “Sometimes you just have to lay back and let people work themselves out of a certain problem.”

Excerpts from a number of the composer’s pieces can be found by going to www.kennethfrazelle.com/compositions.html

The New Music Festival

The Lynn New Music Festival, which opened Sunday with a faculty concert, continues tonight with a concert of music by young composers, including the winning work from the 2010 Florida State Music Teachers Association high school composer’s contest.

On Wednesday night, Frazelle will lead the discussion at the Contemporary Music Forum, an event that combines commentary with performances of contemporary music. And on Thursday night, Frazelle’s new Gee’s Bend Scenes will take pride of place on a concert devoted to his music. Other works will include his String Trio, Piano Trio, Lullabies and Birdsongs for solo piano, Elegy for Strings (string quintet), A Green View (for cello and piano), From the Air (chamber orchestra) and Fiddler’s Galaxy (violin and piano).

All events begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Amarnick-Goldstein Concert Hall on the Lynn campus, and all are free of charge.

Written by Greg Stepanich | 19 January 2010

There has been no shortage during the past century of American composers who have been willing to write violin concertos.

But there has been a dearth of conductors and orchestras who have been willing to turn those concertos into repertory pieces (or at least try). A tip of the hat, then, to Alexander Platt and the Boca Raton Symphonia, who did their bit Sunday afternoon for the Violin Concerto of Ned Rorem, a highly original, colorful piece that could certainly stand to be heard more often.

Rorem’s concerto, written in 1984, is more of a six-movement suite than it is a concerto in the traditional sense with which most audiences likely are familiar, but nevertheless it adheres broadly to a standard fast-slow-fast structure. The soloist at the Roberts Theatre on the campus of St. Andrew’s School in Boca Raton was the violinist Livia Sohn, a young player to whom Platt gave the title of the Rorem concerto’s premier interpreter.

Sohn is indeed a fine violinist, a performer with a strong, rich sound who presented the straightforward lyricism of the third movement (derived from a song Rorem wrote in 1953) with unaffected purity, and the loopy spin-cycle bravura of the fifth movement with impressive technique and nonchalance. With the brusqueness of its opening statement, the savage hammering of the timpani in the second movement, and its passages of stark calm in the fourth movement, it adds up to a concerto of widely varied moods, and Sohn was at ease in presenting all of them.

The Symphonia did an expert job for its part, with good solo work by timpani, flute and trumpet at key moments, and an overall sensitivity to the soloist throughout. This is a worthy, interesting concerto, and performing it is exactly the sort of thing an ambitious American chamber orchestra ought to be doing as a matter of course.

Sohn followed the Rorem with an encore, a tender account of the Louré movement from the solo Partita No. 3 in E (BWV 1006) of J.S. Bach, which showed that she also has a good grasp of Baroque style and applies it with restraint and sobriety.

Sunday’s concert opened with another rarity, the Symphony No. 1 (in D major, D. 82) of the 16-year-old Franz Schubert. This precocious symphonic essay is in some ways closer to an hommage than it is simply derivative, with the tyro composer’s influences laid out clearly for everyone to hear: Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart and even Rossini, as Platt suggested in remarks made before the performance.

The Symphonia gave this work a tight, springy sound in its faster movements, which worked admirably with the scalar main theme of the Haydnesque first movement and the virtual Beethoven quote of its secondary theme. The orchestra also played it with vigor and power, which had a way of demonstrating that despite its student origins, this is actually a big work, and would come off just as well played by a large ensemble.

The slow movement, echoing the Andante of Mozart’s Prague Symphony (with a sly chromatic-scale quote at the very end), was warm and expansive, and Platt was surely right in the third movement to play the minuet with force and speed to make a better contrast with the ländler of the trio.

In the finale, Platt and the players stressed lightness and wit, giving it enough distinction to stand out from the first, which it otherwise resembles in sheer bigness and scope. All in all, a fine reading of a sharp piece that could easily be in the Classical rotation on orchestral programs.

The concert closed with another Symphony No. 1, this one by Schumann (in B-flat, Op. 38, Spring). Here the chamber size of the Symphonia was decisive; this is a work usually heard with larger forces, but it works well with an orchestra the size of the Boca ensemble, and textures were clear and rarely sounded thick.

The Symphonia’s Schumann was a traditional one as far as tempos and general outlook are concerned, and it was a fitting tribute for the composer’s bicentenary this year. But the violins sounded somewhat ragged and tired, especially in the first movement, which got the music off to an anemic start.

Things were better in the ardent slow movement, where the sense of long line was evident as the melody was passed from section to section, and there was plenty of life and bumptious energy in the scherzo and the big-hearted finale.

For its next concert on Sunday, Feb. 14, the Boca Raton Symphonia will be joined by pianist Alessio Bax for a performance of the Piano Concerto No. 2 (in F minor, Op. 11) of Frederic Chopin, marking that composer’s 200th birthday. Also on the program are two works of Samuel Barber -- the Capricorn Concerto, Op. 21, and the Adagio for Strings -- plus the Symphony No. 31 (in D, K. 297, Paris) of Mozart. The concert begins at 2:30 p.m. in the Roberts Theatre at St. Andrew’s School, Boca Raton. Call 561-376-3848 or visit www.bocasymphonia.org for tickets ($42-$53) or more information.

Written by Greg Stepanich | 15 January 2010

In the life of every creative artist, there must one day come The Leap.

It's that moment of mental alchemy when all the bits and pieces the artist is trying to fit together suddenly come together, often while the creator is sleeping, paying bills or doing something else entirely other than concentrate on the work.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich demonstrates by singing, in a sweet, confident soprano, the opening bars of the first string quartet by Beethoven. It sounds nice, but it took a long time for Beethoven to get to those measures just right, and his fitful, awkward sketches are proof of the grief it caused him, she says.

"We have no idea how it works, and it does not typically work A to B to C to D," said Zwilich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer whose newest chamber work gets its Florida premiere Sunday at the Kravis Center. "The brain does something you don't understand."

Zwilich, 70, is a native South Floridian and one of the most honored American composers of our time. The first woman to earn a doctorate in composition at the Juilliard School, she was also the first woman composer to win a Pulitzer (for her First Symphony, in 1983). She grew up in Miami, went to Coral Gables High School, and now lives in New York and part-time in a Pompano Beach condominium with her companion of 28 years, Erik LaMont.

Her Septet for Piano Trio and String Quartet, which was premiered in April 2009 at the 92nd Street Y in New York, is the product of a dozen commissioning groups including the Kravis Center. It will get its Florida premiere at the hands of the groups for which it was written: The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio and the Miami String Quartet.
Zwilich said the piece was proposed to her by the trio's cellist, Sharon Robinson. The KLR trio had often played as part of a quartet or quintet, and sometimes a sextet, but in a seven-player outfit.

"They said they had never been able to find anything for piano trio and string quartet. And I jumped at it. I thought it would be a wonderful thing to do," she said, adding that she'd written a double concerto for Laredo and Robinson and a triple concerto for the whole trio to play. "It's become a very family-like relationship, and I love them. I really love these people."

Robinson, who along with her husband Jaime Laredo teaches at Indiana University, said the trio's relationship with Zwilich extends back decades.

"She's written so much for us over the years, and they've all been winners - winners with audiences and with critics," she said. But this Septet tops them, she said.

"Actually, it's my favorite piece of hers," Robinson said.

The Septet is divided into four movements, the outer two revolving around A and the inner two around D. The first movement, Introductions, utilizes themes from Zwilich's Piano Trio and her Second String Quartet, and introduces material that will be heard throughout the work. The second movement, Quasi una Passacaglia, requires the players to toggle between a Baroque sound (no vibrato for the strings) and an intense, highly Romantic sound that grows from imitative trade-offs to a full-voiced climax.

The third, Games, is essentially a piece of hard-driving, bluesy jazz in classical dress, with the composer all but asking for "swing" eighths rather than straight as the players trade bits of blues scale and the piano offers a brassy repeated riff. The finale, Au Revoir, recalls material from the first two movements in big tableaux that eventually lead to a final sustained A, with quiet A major chords in the piano and lower strings, as the music evaporates.

That third movement proved to be one of the biggest difficulties for Robinson.

"It's been a challenge to make it correct and give it that swing feeling. Of course, we all respect and revere the jazz tradition," but crossing over between genres sounds easier than it often is. And this is where the composer came in handy.

"She's really helped us loosen up and just be jazzier," Robinson said.

In fact, Zwilich cites two composers as having a decided influence on her style: Beethoven and Thelonious Monk. And the Septet confirms that. Its long narrative arc and continual development of motifs reflect Beethoven, and the third movement's splatters-of-paint chords and tricky rhythms honor Monk, the seminal jazz pianist.

Zwilich grew up in the South Florida of the early 1950s, in what she says was a "really fine school music system."

"My private teachers weren't necessarily the greatest. But there was support. All you needed was one private teacher, and I had a private trumpet teacher who was just a wonderful mentor for me. I had a private violin teacher who predicted I would never amount to anything, and had a private piano teacher that kind of kicked me out when I was 6," she said, laughing. "Which is to my benefit, because if I'd had a really good piano teacher when I was a child I'd have probably been a pianist.

"And I'd much rather be a composer."

But South Florida has not yet been able to develop the kind of critical mass that could make for a great cultural scene, she said.

"The scene in this area has never had deep roots. There were usually one or two big contributors, people who really beloved in something, performers who put it all on the line. But you need enormous roots to sustain things," Zwilich said.

She uses a vivid example of what would happen if it did: A normality of scene, in which musical interests would be advanced by the simple expedient of the presence of everyday people who happen to be musicians taking part in other mass activities such as sports or putting their kids through the Cub Scouts.

"And the thing that happens with that is cultural, it isn't just the people that get dressed up and go to a concert," she said. "The second clarinetist plays golf. And he plays golf with people who aren't musicians. So there's that flow of intimate contact.

"When the musician is just a normal part of the community, it fans out. It spreads out in very, very interesting ways, and that's always been a problem down here. And I don't know what the answer is," she said.

In addition to her composing -- she's written five symphonies, a dozen concerti, and, with the exception of opera, numerous works in every major form -- Zwilich has been a visiting professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee for years. The young composers with whom she works are writing things that are "all over the map," and she welcomes the technological changes that have come to the world of music.

"I think we're at the dawn of something very, very interesting," Zwilich said. "We've got to get a number of things right at this point. You look back at the history of the player piano, or the disc recording, and it was always going to be the end of music, and it never did anything but open things up.

"I'm not one of the doomsayers, " said Zwilich, who does all her composing, even sketching, using the Sibelius music software program. "Every technological advance that people have gotten very upset about turned out so much better than they anticipated," she said. "Of course, the problem with the Internet, which I happen to love, is that you really have to know what you're looking at."

But she does see a problem in that the U.S. educational system. She points, as many classical musicians do these days, to El Sistema, the state-sponsored music education program in Venezuela that is credited with literally saving the lives of thousands of at-risk children in the South American nation. Gustavo Dudamel, the new conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is a product of that program.

"There's something so wonderful about that. I heard the orchestra in Carnegie Hall when I was there at a rehearsal. I was sitting with a couple other people, and it's a combination: You want to laugh, and jump for joy, and cry. It's just so beautiful, and why we can't do that...." she says, her voice trailing off.

That leads her to suggest that American society needs to reorder its priorities.

"This craziness of the greed, and producing nothing but moving numbers around -- I kind of hope we can take a new direction and get down to what's important in life. Giving our children not the latest pair of shoes or something, but art, learning, education, and getting young people a start in life. We've really dropped the ball in this country."

For Zwilich, the most important thing about music is its communicative power, its ability to reach humans at their most basic level. As a composer, it goes even deeper for her; she tells the story of how her music came to terms with the heart attack death in June 1979 of her first husband, Metropolitan Opera violinist Joseph Zwilich, before she did.

"The piece I was working on when he died was my Chamber Symphony. When I could finally compose again, I had to start over, because I was so different. I think one of the things that happens to you when you have that kind of an experience is that your priorities totally rearrange.

"And I think I realized how deep music was in me," she said. "I remember I had a very, very close friend, a colleague for many years, and I said to him, 'I've got to write a memorial,' and he said, 'Oh, forget about it. Just go to the double-bar. It's too early.'

"So I took that advice very seriously, but of course [the Chamber Symphony] was a lament, a memorial. And one of my best friends came with me to Boston for the premiere. She turned to me just afterward, and said: 'Amazing. I hear acceptance at the end of this piece, and I haven't heard a word of that out of you.'

"And I realized that my music, in an odd sort of way, was in a more advanced place than I was. And I guess I began to feel that it was more important to me than I had even realized."

Robinson said Zwilich's music is part of a renaissance that brought classical music out of the bad old days of mandatory atonality.

"Thank God for her, and the other writers like her," she said. "It was a strange neighborhood were all having to live in, and it was not accepted by the mainstream audience."

But Robinson said the KLR trio has been "extremely lucky" in the new works it has been able to champion. "Our audiences have come to trust us. We have been, I think, really successful at performing new music that's going to live, that has depth, that has intellectual curiosity."

One added benefit with playing Zwilich is that its author knows her way around instrumental potentialities, Robinson said.

"Ellen played a string instrument, and a brass instrument, and she understands how to write for them. She figures all that out," she said. "She's a consummate craftsperson ... She has a message and she knows how to convey it."

Direct and practical, in other words. And yet for Zwilich herself, music itself is something nearly mystical.

"We try to understand what music is, and I don't think we do," she said. "Whatever it is, it involves the entire human being. It involves the intellect, the emotions, your physical reactions, your body, your spirit -- it's something that brings the entire human being together.

"And that means that it's kind of wonderful for a composer to be able to be just exactly who he or she is."

The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio and the Miami String Quartet will perform at 8 p.m. Sunday at the Kravis Center, West Palm Beach. Also on the program in addition to the Zwilich Septet are the Piano Quintet in A of Antonin Dvorak (Op. 81), and the best-known string quintet (in E, G. 275) of Boccherini. Tickets: $20-$75. Call 832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.

Here are some pieces and suggested recordings for getting to know the music of Ellen Zwilich, as suggested by the composer herself:

Violin Concerto: Pamela Stern, violin; Saarbrucken Radio Symphony/Michael Stern; Naxos (also contains Rituals)

Symphony No. 3: Louisville Symphony/James Sedares; Koch (also contains the Oboe Concerto and the Concerto Grosso) http://

Piano Trio: Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio; Arabesque

Horn Concerto: David Jolley; Michigan State University Orchestra/Leon Gregorian; Koch; (also contains Symphony No. 4 and Bass Trombone Concerto)