Beautiful voices, choral and woodwind

What a difference beautiful voices make - with all music, but especially the new stuff.

Orchestra 2001 collaborated with the Mendelssohn Club on Saturday in a program of modern Nordic works that could have sent you out into Rittenhouse Square floating a foot or two above the ground. Mellifluous voices of a different sort - clarinetist Ricardo Morales and bassoonist Daniel Matsukawa - premiered the lovely Concertino bucolico by Philadelphia composer Jan Krzywicki on Sunday with the Philadelphia Classical Symphony. Both concerts, at Church of the Holy Trinity, left you wanting more - rather than retreating to Mozart.

The Mendelssohn/2001 concert, in which conducting duties were shared by their respective artistic directors, Alan Harler and James Freeman, began and ended with choral works by composers known for their severity but which were, in these cases, harmonically extravagant and emotionally forthright.

Henryk Gorecki's Totus Tuus had the deliberate manner of a Bach chorale but with ecstatic outbursts - the sort that this choir does extraordinarily well. As for Arvo Pärt, I've always enjoyed his music but I've never loved a piece on first hearing as I did the 2010 Adam's Lament, a seethingly passionate, harmonically explosive work with texts by Saint Silouan.

While many works portray man striving toward the spiritually unimaginable, this text is the opposite: The Old Testament figure of Adam has known the sublime and must concede to the cruelty of earthly life, including fratricide in his own family. How could the music not have the sharpest edges and strongest characterization of this composer's entire output?

Though Orchestra 2001 was in the Pärt performance, its showcase was John Adams' Shaker Loops and Pierre Boulez's Messagesquisse. The former was written in 1978 and sits at the foundation of Adams' rich output, far more minimalist than anything he's written recently but with his trademark harmonic succulence (his word, not mine) that gives the music's motivic repetition a soft-focus shimmer. All the works on the program had nests of tremolos, uncharacteristically in Boulez, whose spare atonal piece with soloist Lori Barnet nonetheless sat well with the rest, even though you'd never dare have these composers at the same dinner party.

The Philadelphia Classical Symphony had a lighter but tastier program that included saxophonist Jonathan Hulting-Cohen in Luciano Berio's Chemins IV and Roger Boutry's Divertimento - the former a probing, boundary-pushing work, the latter suave and charming.

The Krzywicki piece was so singularly itself that you can't really talk about antecedents, but two significant points of reference were Copland's Clarinet Concerto and the Delius Double Concerto - in that virtuoso displays were completely lacking in the solo writing, along with any romantic-era heroism that one often associates with concertos. The piece wasn't afraid to start in dreamlike quietude and return to that state periodically through the course of its five movements. Two of the movements were marked "Soliloquy" and had that kind of rhapsodic rhetoric.

This piece will have a future, especially if future soloists have Morales' seamless lyricism and Matsukawa's rich, trombonelike tone. The pair was also featured in Richard Strauss' delightful Duet Concertino - a welcome, lightweight piece in a performance this charismatic.

However, artistic director Karl Middleman certainly knows how to get in the way of his own concert. Having assembled a sophisticated program with a lineup of musicians drawn from the Philadelphia Orchestra, he also maintained a counterproductive lecture/concert format.

His circuitous writing killed the concert's overall pace and showed how easily music can be talked to death. His questionable theory that Strauss was inspired by "Beauty and Beast" ensured that you'd only hear the music one way. His bedtime-story delivery made you wonder if you'd walked into the wrong concert.