Mr. Feder's charismatic hold on the congregation was palpable as he bobbed and swayed to the beat of a percussive tambourine and plucked strings, accompanied by stomping feet and clapping hands.
At the opening night performance of her 25th season at the Oak Room, Ms. Marcovicci was at her airiest and most lighthearted singing a program of songs about travel, titled "No Strings," accompanied by her longtime pianist Shelly Markham and the bassist Jered Egan.
There's a passage later in the first movement where the strings accompany the winds with quick rising and falling intervals, the upper ones slurred and the lower ones staccato: this spun like a gyroscope.
Strings accompany the hummable tune: I caught myself absentmindedly singing along on the first listen.
In the first recitative the strings accompany the voice, most keenly in motifs in the arioso middle section, in Gardiner's words "to evoke the spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters".
Over the codas, where Huntley notes "the merest veneer of the strings" accompanying Harrison's vocal, this orchestral part incorporates aspects of the string arrangement on John Lennon's recent hit song "#9 Dream", which in turn had been inspired by John Barham's score for "Try Some, Buy Some", co-produced by Harrison and Phil Spector in 1971.
It includes balls of string, suitcases, stepladders, a fez, antique egg beaters, M&Co.-designed wristwatches, part of a collection of real onion rings, used paint rags resembling small Abstract Expressionist paintings, old books and a red box secured by string accompanied by a typewritten label that reads, "The box from India that may not be opened".
Even a 33cl bottle of Evian gets treated like royalty here: ask for some water by the pool and the little chap arrives in its own clear plastic bag of ice with a draw string, accompanied by a can of Evian face spray – just in case the water alone is insufficient to cool you down (price: €5).
Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below.
Reich's "Different Trains," the composer's autobiographical string quartet accompanied by recorded voices of train conductors from his boyhood of shuttling between the East Coast and the West at the same time other Jewish boys on trains in Europe were headed to a horrifically dissimilar fate.
But there was plenty of noise: a cacophony of drumming, thumping, chiming, metallic thuds and atonal string notes, accompanied by the hisses of the pneumatic rams that operate many of the robots' body parts, creating the show's complex sonic texture.
