The pianist Emanuel Ax played with his customary poise and effervescence, shaping unaccompanied lines with a flexibility that offered a dramatic contrast to the surging drive elsewhere.
Like the version of Mr. Bermel's piece that So Percussion offered on the festival's opening night, this quartet edition began slowly and quietly, with unaccompanied lines slowly giving way to counterpoint, and occasional touches of humor lightening the introspective mood.
"Douce Dame Jolie" is first performed in Machaut's version, as a single unaccompanied line, and then in Mr. O'Regan's playful reconfiguration, with the melody sped up, slowed down, harmonized and otherwise toyed with.
Early on, as the Storyteller relates Kumudha's first transformation ritual, there is a gripping passage of recitative: vibrant, conversational, unaccompanied vocal lines are broken up by scurrying bursts from the orchestra.
The music critic John Warrack comments on the "extraordinary expressive subtlety" with which Holst deploys the sparse forces: "... [T]he two unaccompanied vocal lines opening the work skilfully convey the relationship between Death, steadily advancing through the forest, and Savitri, her frightened answers fluttering round him, unable to escape his harmonic pull".
Unaccompanied melody contains its own accompaniment.
Starting on a single, sustained tone low in the instrument's range, the unaccompanied flute line gradually takes shape as an alluring, gently chromatic fantasy.
On Twitter, where words often slip free of their contexts, the unaccompanied punch line sparked a firestorm of outrage, which quickly escalated into a campaign demanding the show's cancellation.
E-mail address GO SIGN UP Share Tweet On Twitter, where words often slip free of their contexts, the unaccompanied punch line sparked a firestorm of outrage, which quickly escalated into a campaign demanding the show's cancellation.
Even Bartok's Sixth Quartet, the most overtly complex work here, begins with a tart, melancholy, unaccompanied viola line and later touches on the rhythms of Hungarian folk music.
And Ms. Jeanrenaud's own "Vermont Rules" began with unaccompanied, vaguely Slavic lines, then turned arpeggios into loops as the tunes climbed toward drama.
