Astral in Wonderland

Knussen is a Scottish prodigy who wrote Hums and Songs of Winnie-the-Pooh when he was 18 and revised it four years later. He describes it as "a sequence of faded snapshots and reflections, by an unwilling grown-up, on things remembered from the book, and on what those things meant to him as a child." There is nothing cozy or Disney-ish about his treatment of Pooh’s eager climb and long fall in pursuit of honey. In the final song “How sweet to be a cloud floating in the Blue,” the pulsing metallic winds and the slightly shrieking soprano create an effect that sounds more touching to a modern ear than a sweeter approach would have.

The Astral program was dubbed Astral in Wonderland and featured music associated with children’s literature. It was an interesting idea for a concert, and it produced one of Astral’s most attractive afternoons.

It was also a showcase for the carefully selected young musicians Astral supports with career guidance and performance opportunities. Knussen’s exploration of Pooh Corner was followed by a suite for violin and piano taken from a ballet about swan legends by a Russian-born Australian composer, Elena Kats-Chernin. Pianist Andrea Lam and violinist Kristin Lee traversed a landscape that resembled some of the best-known ballet suites, complete with witches, fairies, and princes. But all that emotion and color stemmed from two instruments.

The oldest piece on the program, Schumann’s Märchenbilder, spotlighted violist Born Lau, supported by Lam at the keyboard. Märchenbilder is a tone poem about fairy tales, but Schumann didn’t link the music to particular scenes and stories. Lau's dark, tender viola song evoked the warmth and excitement of a child exploring the fearsome world of trolls and witches while safely ensconced on the living room rug.

Soprano Kathryn Guthrie contributed three pieces that proved she can handle a broad range of styles. In the second half, she moved from Knussen’s modernism to the simple, affecting melody of David Del Tredici’s setting of Lewis Carroll’s dreamy poem about the real Alice. Then she ended the concert with three songs from Leonard Bernstein’s Peter Pan, which required a midcentury musical-comedy style.

Andrea Lam preceded Guthrie’s Alice song with a long piano solo Del Tredici calls Virtuoso Alice. The piano piece is built on the same melody as the song, but it’s the kind of solo 17th-century composers called a fantasy — a freely constructed work that uses the melody as a base while it wanders anywhere the composer wants to go. It requires a pianist who can overcome the technical demands indicated in the title and coat them with the kind of sensitivity and appropriate shading Lam brought to her work.

J. R. R. Tolkien defended fantasy by arguing that there are two types of growth. We can throw away the old as we add the new, or we can grow like trees and add the new to the old. Many of the best artists grow the second way, carrying their childhoods with them into adulthood. Astral’s foray into wonderland presented a memorable look at the dialogue between the eternal child and Knussen’s “unwilling grown-up.”