Mr. Menken, who wrote the lustrous period-pop score for "Little Shop of Horrors" (with the lyricist Howard Ashman), is a skillful interpreter of the Philadelphia sound.
A mile and a half east of Place du Grand Sablon, in the back of an antiques shop near the European Parliament, you can score lustrous Murano glass bead necklaces by the brother-and-sister team Coppola e Toppo and the odd Pierre Cardin piece, plus a stash of exquisite 1950s Marcel Boucher.
The Sibelius, a dramatic 1906 tone poem based on a story from the "Kalevala," Finland's national epic, is scored in lustrous, if sometimes ominous hues and demands a thoroughly fluid approach to tempo.
This will give you lustrous appeal assuming your grades and scores match your achievement.
The collaboration by Mr. Golijov and Mr. Santaolalla, "Darkness 9/11" (2002), is a more conventionally mournful score, etched in slow-moving, lustrous chords, and it set the stage for a concluding sequence of works in the same spirit.
Unusual fare for a birthday concert, perhaps, but the score has ample attractions, including lustrous, hypnotic string writing, a recurring (and disquieting) distant timpani rumbling and a graceful piano part — often a single, singing line — played with understated eloquence by Maki Namekawa.
The sixth, Mr. Li, born in 1988 and based in Beijing, attended this premiere of his "Skyline on the Moon," a deftly scored work that veered from lustrous Impressionist washes to folksy Ivesian polytonal clashes.
In the final, brooding notes of Stravinsky's score, Mr. Boal -- surrounded by Yvonne Borree, Jenifer Ringer and Miranda Weese as muses -- stood lustrous in the backdrop of a glowing sun.
What's more, without being beholden to their scores, both dances are sensitive to the mood, texture and shape of the ravishing music, given lustrous form by the Orion String Quartet.
