Imagine the lush tonal colors of Gil Evans combined with the fierce rhythms of Charles Mingus and the dissonant precision of Thelonious Monk, and you get some idea of this music's odd pleasures.
The mother to whom she's speaking, meanwhile, responds with social platitudes quite at odds with the teacher's fierce poetic rhythms.
The plebeians wear long blue robes and knitted skullcaps suggestive of Muslim garb (the costumes are by Angela Wendt) and at one point perform a celebratory dance, tapping out fierce African rhythms with sticks.
Richard Alston's new work is ostensibly a story about music, about the journey that took Domenico Scarlatti from his Neapolitan home to the courts of Portugal and Spain and exposed his still modest baroque talent to the free, fierce and vivid rhythms of Gypsy music.
The scherzo, with Mr. Kalish fierce in attack and rhythm, and the Avalon responding in kind, brought out the subdued violence to a frightening degree.
Juanes gets a musician's workout in songs like "Me Enamora" ("It Makes Me Fall in Love") which shifts between twin-guitar Southern rock and Colombian cumbia, "Tres" ("Three"), which bounces ahead on a rural accordion, and "Bailala" ("Dance to It"), which places a fierce six-beat Colombian rhythm behind Juanes's bluesy lead.
Moderately and elastically paced, the performance did not intensify the music's jagged rhythms or its fierce harmonies.
"Taki Ti Taki," based on Afro-Venezuelan rhythms, escalated to fierce, rapid-fire drumming, with Ms. Baca's voice pushing toward raw incantation.
It's about the rigors of panning for gold, delivered as an incantation called out over a jabbing horn section and a fierce, tumbling six-beat Afro-Colombian rhythm, currulao.
