05/04/2026
"Yet another fabulous concert last night [April 18]: WHO WE ARE, WHO WE NEED TO BE, the musicians of the New Gallery Concert Series playing works of Derek David, Julie Arlene Spencer, John Corigliano, and Bruno C. Faria. There was an art tie-in, with paintings by Brooke Merrill echoed by Bruno Faria’s triptych for piano and tape — during which we were given brush pens and told to illustrate our own responses. Last photo in this post is mine, which for some reason should be read from right to left...
The stand-outs on the program for me were the two marimba pieces by Julie Arlene Spencer (which I wish I could have heard again!) and the marvelously inventive song-cycle “The Joy of the Yiddish Word,” with texts by Surrealist and Modernist Yiddish composers. Derek David’s text settings were deeply responsive, in both the vocal line and in the varied piano textures, to the sense and nonsense of the poems — ranging from Borscht-hall slapstick and some Mozartian japes to a fragile longing in the final song for a kind of linguistic repatriation: “The Yiddish word, loyal, silent, is waiting for you. And you sigh in a burning dream: I’m coming, I’m coming.” Both the soprano, Rose Hegele, and the pianist, Elias Dagher, projected a whole series of varied characters in the course of the cycle, ending on that hushed, almost sacred-feeling summons.
Sarah Bob has run this series now for 25 years, and for 25 years it has been introducing audiences to new music and new art. As a young man half a lifetime ago, I attended their shows in Boston and these were some of the first places I heard avant garde contemporary works live. At the time, I didn’t know Sarah, but I already loved what she was doing.
The audience last night was ecstatic and we all milled around afterwards jabbering to each other about favorite pieces, how wonderfully all the musicians had done with some really virtuosic scores, etc. There was a general sense of jubilation that is not what you expect when you go to a new music concert — and part of it is the way Sarah and her musicians welcome the audience into their music-making.
In general, one of the great things about working down here in Boston this month is seeing how there’s a kind of desperate adoration going on right now between audiences and classical musicians, a thirst for music and community. I feel lucky to witness it." M.t. Anderson
!["Yet another fabulous concert last night [April 18]: WHO WE ARE, WHO WE NEED TO BE, the musicians of the New Gallery Con...](https://img3.glartent.com/615/418/1688825736154180.jpg)
