Aug. 25, San Miguel Chapel

This summer’s chamber music series at San Miguel Chapel spotlighting members of the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra (and friends and family) reached its final installment on Aug. 25 with a program featuring orchestra flutist Patricia Wolf Zuber and her husband, Greg Zuber, principal percussionist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. They were joined by three further Santa Fe Opera instrumentalists (flutist Bart Feller and percussionists Scott Ney and Joe Ferraro) in a program designed around the topic “Music of the Earth.”

The earliest work on the concert was Vivaldi’s flute concerto titled (The Goldfinch), in which the flute presumably imitates the song of some species of that bird. The Zubers presented it with the accompanying part arranged for marimba, which cannot really negotiate all the lines at the speed a string orchestra could. The movements were accordingly on the relaxed side, especially given the up-tempos normally applied to Baroque music today. Wolf Zuber did, however, allude to Baroque sound by replacing the normal metal top-joint of her flute with a wooden one, which lent a richness strikingly reminiscent of an 18th-century instrument.

All the musicians (with Wolf Zuber and Feller playing piccolos) participated in two movements from John Luther Adams’ (1983). Adams notated the songs of birds he encountered while living in Georgia and then used those dictated bits as source material, leaving the instrumentalists considerable freedom about how their parts might overlap. “These melodies and rhythms,” he explained, “… are not so much constructed artifacts as they are spontaneous affirmations [in which] counterpoint arises as an informal, spontaneous cross-play between parts.” The birds represented in these spirited, spatially performed readings — percussionists in the front of the chapel, piccolo players at the back of the aisle — were the Baltimore oriole (in “Apple Blossom Round”) and the eastern meadowlark and red-winged blackbird (in “Meadowdance,” where multiple maracas and a suspended cymbal suggested a distant stream before growing into a downpour of rain).

Toru Takemitsu’s was made possible through another arrangement. Originally written for alto flute and guitar (and later transformed by the composer into versions for alto flute and harp and for alto flute and string orchestra), it worked convincingly in this setting for alto flute and marimba, the instruments bonding comfortably in their warm tones. Takemitsu wrote the piece in 1981 on commission from Greenpeace for the Save the Whales campaign, and Wolf Zuber demonstrated in advance how uncannily her instrument could mimic whale sounds, especially when played with flutter-tongue. The work’s three movements sustained a calming atmosphere occasionally enlivened by brief eruptions of greater energy.

The recital took a qualitative leap to conclude with An Idyll for the Misbegotten, composed in 1986 by George Crumb. Back in 1971, Crumb had employed whale sounds in his classic (Voice of the Whale) — a piece Takemitsu surely knew — one