New Music For A New Year

One verse into ​“Malagueña,” singer Taylor Ward was summoning ghosts from a bygone culture, whispering at first, and then full-throttled and throaty. With a humming, echoing signal from Doug Perry’s vibraphone, those phantoms rose creaking to their feet. At last, strumming a melody on his guitar, Arash Noori made the spirits lurch forward, still humming Federico García Lorca’s ​“Poema del cante jondo.”

The performance was part of a Cantata Profana set Thursday night that involved George Crumb’s The Ghosts of Alhambra at Christ Presbyterian Church in East Rock. The concert, attended by a small but rapt audience, marked the third installment of the Second Movement Concert Series, which seeks to present local student groups alongside professional performers who have made New Haven their home base.

“When I got here, I was impressed with … so many schools with arts programs and with music programs. That was just something I wanted to embrace in the way we think of performing arts,” said series co-founder David Perry at the event.

There’s a reason that David Perry and co-founder Isabella ​“Isa” Mensz singled out Cantata Profana for the first concert of 2015. True to their musical vision, honoring – – and prodigiously growing – – the city’s sense of arts and music may be what the group does best. Introduced by a guitar quartet from New Haven and West Haven, the three CP members played a lineup that married, with equal improbability and beauty, pieces like Ghosts of Alhambra with excerpts from Stephin Merritt’s 69 Love Songs, the early modern chansons of Michel Lambert, and a selection of spare, room-filling hymns from William Walker’s The Southern Harmony.

Opening the audience’s drowsy, Thursday-evening eyes to the depth of which percussion is capable, Doug Perry drew out the birdsong of Christopher Deane’s Mourning Dove Sonnet on his vibraphone, sticks and bows held gingerly in his hands like talons as an impossibly low, throaty cry flew from the instrument’s chrome belly.

Meanwhile, Ward took Chavela Vargas tightly by the hand and danced madly around the room with her, tearing up the well-worn red carpeting and spinning in the low church light as each climbing note escaped from his wide, grinning lips.

Noori, eyes partly closed and chin fitted to the curves of his instrument, traded his guitar for a third time and rewrote Lorca’s will, lending new meaning to the lines ​“when I die / bury me with my guitar / beneath the sand.”

Paired with the group’s on-stage explorations of genre and timbre – – instruments used included percussive rocks and sticks; three different kinds of cymbals; two different guitars; one theorbo, a twangy, synth-like rubber cord from which Perry pulled pure magic; and Ward’s swooping voice – – the lineup made for an exquisite, delicious explosion of melody that kept the audience on the tips of its musical toes.

Ghosts of Alhambra, for instance, is the kind of piece during which you must dare yourself to breathe. Any movement too great, and you may miss a hissing final note. ​“The Night You Can’t Remember,” meanwhile, operates in hilarity and reminiscence, surprisingly not too unlike ​“Vos mespris chaque jour” in theme. A final marriage of Alan Lomax and Diana Ross rounded out the evening, promising more soulful, deeply moving, and near-danceable mash ups (of which Ward is the unofficial king) to come later this season. 

“A lot of the inspiration that I took in terms of how to get this started … came from Cantata Profana and watching how they got going,” David Perry said.

He added of the group’s work that he didn’t know what the program was beforehand. ​“I know it is going to be surprising and fantastic,” he said.

That’s all the confirmation he ever needed.

The next concert in the Second Movement Series is February 13, 2014 (venue TBD). To find out more about the series, visit its calendar or follow it on Facebook