Blair String Quartet

8 p.m. Feb. 26 at Blair Recital Hall

Call 322-7651 for information

Così fan tutte

Presented by Nashville Opera 8 p.m. Feb. 26-27 in TPAC’s Polk Theater

Call 255-2787 for information

It’s not often that Nashville gets two first-rate classical music events happening in the space of one weekend. But that’ll be the case this Friday, when Nashville Opera opens Mozart’s Così fan tutte at TPAC and the Blair String Quartet plays its last concert of the season at Blair Recital Hall. Luckily, the Opera will perform Così on Saturday evening as well, so loyal classical patrons don’t even have to choose between the two.

The BSQ concert is especially noteworthy because it marks the quartet’s final performance at Blair with its current membership, together now for 12 years. Grace Mihi Bahng, the cellist, is leaving for Florida at the end of May. Lots of cellists from all over are eager to sit in her chair, and a successor will likely be named in late May or early June. This program will allow her to go out with a bravura finale.

This BSQ has always prided itself on playing the whole range of quartet repertory, from the classical period to the 20th century. This weekend’s program spans that range. It will include Mozart’s “Hoffmeister” Quartet (1786), composed just after the six “Haydn” quartets, and showing the same lucid craft and contrapuntal finesse. It will include also the rich colors of Dvorak’s next-to-last quartet, composed in 1895. Either of these alone would make the evening worthwhile. But the BSQ will play also a composition by Morton Subotnick, premiered just last year in Los Angeles.

Subotnick (b. 1933) has been called by Newsweek “the first sonic virtuoso.” He has a special interest in exploring the relationships between conventional acoustic sounds and electronic or synthesized sounds. In doing so, he has written some compellingly beautiful music. In 1988, for example, he published a concerto for alto saxophone and computer called In Two Worlds. It’s not Mozart or Dvorak, but it is powerful and beautiful.

The composition to be offered this Friday is called Echoes From the Silent Call of Girona, scored for string quartet and CD-ROM. It’s the composer’s response to visiting a district in Spain where Jews had once prospered before being tortured and exterminated during the Inquisition.

The district was known as the Call, and its present emptiness may remind us that the 20th-century Holocaust is not an isolated phenomenon, and that not all genocide victims are Jews. What European Anglos did to Native American peoples is in the same tonality, and so is what Serbs and Albanians and Hutus and Tutsis are doing to one another right now. Subotnick’s music resonates in that dark abyss.

This will be a first for the BSQ: The foursome has played a lot of cutting-edge contemporary music, but never before with an electronic component. Many people are understandably frightened by the mere idea of “avant garde” electronic music. But the BSQ in its last Blair appearance demonstrated, in playing Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, that serial composition, anathema to many, can produce hauntingly beautiful music. They’re likely to do a similar thing with Subotnick’s Echoes.

The musical score, and the composer’s own comments, suggest that this music is the marriage of an “inner musical narrative” and a “sound environment.” The former is provided by the acoustical sounds of the string quartet; the latter comes from the CD-ROM, which contains the computer-altered sounds of cello and human speech. In this case, the electronic noises aren’t really distinct from the strings; rather, the two blend into a pulsing, seamless resonance. Even if you don’t like Subotnick’s piece, it will stretch—and maybe renew—your idea of what music can be.

So too, in a less uncommon way, will Nashville Opera’s production of Così fan tutte. The opera has a history as strange as Mozart’s own. First performed in Vienna in 1790, the year before Mozart died, it ran for only five performances before its imperial patron’s death closed it down. Immediately, the work became entangled in quarrels about “immorality,” resulting in the bowdlerization of the original libretto. Not until 1896 was the opera presented again in more or less its original form.

On the surface, the story is a bit of comic foolery with a happy ending—and that’s how it has been mostly performed. But beneath the surface, the story has serious implications. The title translates literally as “They [females] are all like that.” But in this case, the English all-purpose “they” is closer to the truth: “They’re all like that”—men as well as women.

The opera opens lightly enough. Two young men are engaged to marry two sisters. An older, more cynical friend of the husbands-to-be bets the men that their fiancées will be unfaithful the moment their backs are turned. He dares them to pretend to go off to war, and then come back in disguise and pitch woo, each at the other’s beloved. The young men take the dare—with no evident sense that their own behavior is a serious breach of trust.

The game begins like a practical joke, but in John Hoomes’ insightful staging, it takes an unexpected turn. Even if you’ve seen the opera before, you haven’t seen it done like this.

With its two-act structure, Così is more elegantly symmetrical than perhaps any other opera. It comes just two years after Don Giovanni and is pervaded by the same kind of urbane irony. Though it features brilliant coloratura solos with daring acrobatic vocal leaps, it also uses more ensemble singing than maybe any other opera. As always in Mozart, the vocal texture is crystal clear, the melodies exquisite, the harmonies metamorphic with delightful surprises. The music bodies forth throbbing, intoxicated, youthful passion—and at the same time ironically undercuts its self-delusions.

Watching and hearing music director Karen Lynne Deal’s relaxed, confident, incisive work in rehearsal was a delight—the more so because she had a focused and talented cast to work with. Così is Nashville Opera’s Young Artist production for this season, starring four young singers selected through national auditions—and Dennis Delgado (tenor), Marcus DeLoach (baritone), Lori Hultgren (mezzo), and Rachel Mondanaro (soprano) could hardly be better cast. All are gifted with agile, athletic voices. Their solo work is fine indeed, and their ensemble singing maybe more so.

The two managers of the deceit-game are accomplished singers/actors as well. Pamela Hinchman (soprano) is Despina, servant to the ladies, and John Davies (bass) sings the role of Don Alfonso, the cheat-master.

This Così, though sung in a good English translation, is performed in period dress on a stylized period set. And nobody’s writing music like Mozart’s anymore. So these performers don’t look or sound like you and me—but as we watch and listen, we know we’re looking in a mirror, confronting the baseness that resides within each of us. That’ll also be the case, I think, when audiences hear Morton Subotnick’s Echoes From the Silent Call of Girona. Girona may be a remote, ancient Spanish city, but the tragedy that befell its citizens centuries ago continues to play out across the globe today.

What do you think about this story? Express yourself in the Nashville Scene Music Board— http://www.nashvillescene.com/musicboard.