Musical outreach of substance: Sphinx Virtuosi play the Palladium

 There's no need to subscribe to a blanket assertion that "music is a universal language" to concede that

With a flourish, Sphinx Virtuosi conclude a piece.

there is always more work to be done in expanding its realm. In classical music, up to now, the most conspicuous representation of non-white composers and performers  has stemmed from east Asia, particularly Japan, Korea, and China (including Taiwan). 

The Sphinx organization, founded in Detroit in 1997, has made strides toward making the aptitude and interest of black and Hispanic musicians more evident and available to the public. That was the import of Sphinx Virtuosi's appearance Saturday night at the Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel.

The 17 members of the string ensemble now on tour seemed to revel in the acoustics of the Palladium. That affinity was noted by Tommy Mesa, the principal cellist, in remarks to the rapt audience before he played Andrea Casarrubios' "Seven" to open the concert's second half. The piece is both a meditation on and a tribute to the nurses who worked at risk and toward exhaustion in the early stages of the pandemic when Covid-19 hit New York City particularly hard. 

The work Mesa commissioned seems to be typical of Sphinx's commissioning of new pieces that both advance composers whose backgrounds match the Sphinx vision and relate to the experience and culture of African-American and Latina/o musicians. In Mesa's performance, with scordatura tuning in which the lowest string was shifted from C to B, the deep extra resonance of the shift made more definitive seven plucked notes representing the daily moment of evening applause that New Yorkers gave outside hospitals to thank front-line nurses. 

The piece was rich in string-crossing patterns and other sorts of persistent scene-setting. The delicacy and expressive range of the cello got thorough display, with an emphasis on deeply reflective textures,  yet with restless anxiety never far in the background. Mesa gave a  mesmerizing performance, sitting center-stage on a platform under a bright spotlight.

The concert opened with the full ensemble playing a celebration of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," often called the black national anthem, by Xavier Foley, the youngest composer represented Saturday night. Foreshadowing of the tune's famous phrases poked out of the busy ensemble  before the violins stated the theme against a rippling accompaniment. This representation of anxiety was painted with a broad brush, as the composer wants the famous hymn to be placed against American polarization and the nation's unfinished racial business.

The work exemplified Sphinx Virtuosi's unanimity of articulation and a sonority richly projected into the hall; the center-rear position of two double bassists was especially thrilling.  From there, a few historical pastels by black composers of early 20th-century fame —one American, one British— made a pleasant impression: the second movement of a string quartet by Florence Price (1887-1953) and two of "Four Noveletten" by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912).

I found the Price work in this performance to have plenty of "cantabile" but insufficient "andante" — the walking pace that easily decelerates into an "adagio" here may have sapped some of the music's charm. Coleridge-Taylor's noveletten (a designation borrowed from Schumann) conveyed a narrative charm, especially with the long-phrased romantic melody the composer devised for his "Andante con moto." The piquant punctuation of both pieces by tambourine and triangle, played by one of the first violinists, gave the music full-bodied character.

Jessie Montgomery, like Foley a former Sphinx member, had the concert's most daring work. "Banner" moved a string quartet into concerto prominence for a rough, wide-ranging, ambivalent tribute to the U.S. national anthem. Using one word out of the song's title, "The Star-Spangled Banner," opened up the expressive range by implication, because a banner proclaims a cause and a point of view, probably a partial, even narrow one. Folk songs and other national anthems were alluded to: Mexico's got extensive exposure, starting with concertmaster Patricia Quintero Garcia's solo. 

There were aspects of a funeral march in one memorable episode: Dissonant viola clusters imitated snare drums, and double-bass thumps put the gravity of bass drums underneath the ensemble. "Banner" was not without its signs of uplift, and the work honored distantly, but unmistakably, Francis Scott Key's textual celebration of endurance and aspiration.

Latin America came in for celebration  after the solo cello piece. Brazil's Ricardo Herz was represented by two dance-focused pieces, "Inocente" and "Mourinho," in which complex rhythms played conventionally were supplemented by well-distributed hand slaps on the instruments. 

The stimulating concert concluded with the driving bravura energy of the "Finale furioso" movement of Alberto Ginastera's Concerto for Strings. The fury was passed around the ensemble under just enough control to keep the gauchos evoked from falling off their horses onto the pampas.