E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bloody great ‘Bach Cantatas’; a new Tod Machover hyperconcerto; Samson et Dalila BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Don’t breathe. Something profound is happening. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, wearing a hospital gown, has pulled out her IVs. A dancer (Michael Schumacher) — or is he an angel? — is circling a bare lightbulb around her. She embraces the light, but it escapes. She reaches for it, but it eludes her. She is singing, almost to herself, Bach’s "Schlummert ein" ("Sleep on"), a gently rocking lullaby — a lullaby to her world-weary eyes. The Orchestra of Emmanuel Music under Craig Smith is playing so softly, you can even hear, beyond Hunt Lieberson’s heartbreaking voice, the sounds of traffic outside the Cutler Majestic Theatre.

This performance a week ago Thursday reunited three artists whose work over the past three decades has been crucial to the musical life of Boston for one fulfilling and emotionally draining evening of music theater. As a preview of a tour that will take them to Vienna, Amsterdam, London, and New York, conductor Craig Smith led mezzo-soprano Hunt Lieberson and his Emmanuel Music players in the two Bach cantatas for solo voice that Peter Sellars had staged for them — now under the title "Bach Cantatas." Cantata No. 199, Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut ("My heart is swimming in blood," or, in Sellars’s translation, "drowning"), was first performed here on First Night 1995-’96, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of Emmanuel Music. In the spring of 2001, for Emmanuel Music’s 30th anniversary, Sellars staged Ich habe genug ("I have enough"), No. 83, which depicts the sufferer’s joyful release from earthly bonds.

Two years ago, Nonesuch Records issued what became a hit recording of these two cantatas, with Smith leading Hunt Lieberson and essentially the same orchestral personnel, especially Peggy Pearson in the insinuating, piercing oboe d’amore obbligati and Betty Hauck in the one feverish viola solo — the instruments whose timbres most reflect those of Hunt Lieberson, who started her career in Boston as a violist in the Emmanuel orchestra. Now subtly restaged by Sellars, "Bach Cantatas" seemed more powerful than ever, especially in the singer’s more fluid interchange with the lightbulb. Even before the music started, I was struck with the dramatic contrast between the jewel-like auditorium and the stark, exposed, bare stage on which, off to the side, the orchestra was already tuning up. Because the sightlines in the Majestic have changed with the reopening of its second balcony, there was now a large platform in the center of the stage where the "action" took place: Hunt Lieberson, barefoot, wearing a pale blue gown fit for a Madonna, or a Japanese princess, and using its long rust-colored sashes to suggest a noose, a blindfold, falling tears, a rocking cradle, a formal tea ceremony (when she sat on the floor and flattened out the panels in front of her), then finally, swinging them wildly into the air, the sinner’s ecstatic liberation. In No. 199, the new platform provided a frame for Sellars’s conscious artifice; in No. 83, though, I missed the absence of boundaries between the sufferer, her elegant gown now a hospital johnny, and the rest of us — the idea that we were all on the same ground level.

Bach intended his cantatas not for theaters but for church services. Some might be troubled by their presentation on stage, especially in Sellars’s challenging choreographic style. And yet how often do the cantatas come across as merely beautiful bits of theology? The staging underlines Bach’s inherent drama, the violent conflicts within each human soul, between the soul and God. And there’s no director more aware of, and responsive to, musical content than Sellars. His seriousness of purpose matches Smith’s and Hunt Lieberson’s. And Bach’s.

I SUPPOSE it’s not such a big stretch to put together Boston’s most technologically advanced composer with a regiment of Boston’s most powerful CEOs. For its 24th annual Presidents at Pops fundraising concert, the Boston Pops commissioned a new work from MIT Media Lab’s Tod Machover, Jeux Deux, for HyperPiano and orchestra, and Keith Lockhart led the premiere for a fancy crowd that included Governor Romney and Mayor Menino. A "HyperPiano," as Machover animatedly explained to Lockhart and the rest of us, is a piano (a Yamaha grand) outfitted with a computer program (written by Mike Fabio) and controlled from an off-stage set-up that responds to what is being played on the piano, transforming the quality of sound and adding dazzling blitzes of notes, as pianist Michael Chertock demonstrated by triggering a whirlwind of "Look ma, no hands" glissandi. On top of this, Machover had Marc Downie create an "interactive" visual response that projected on a screen over the stage an unfolding continuum of abstract patterns: black lines (prompted by the piano keys), white lines (reflecting the software), and mobile X-ray-like images of the pianist’s hands.

For all this hi-tech, the music itself was based on the most graspable, traditional principles of organization: a pounding, all-systems-go boogie-woogie fast section, with intense strings and full-throttle brass (gyroscopic swirling on the screen); a lyrical slow interlude with delicate woodwinds (blue dominating the color field); and a playful, tuneful final dance (the on-screen lines spiraling like magnetic filaments), with a classic slowdown before the revved-up coda.

One of Machover’s major works of the 1990s is his Hyperstring Trilogy — pieces for violin, viola, and cello that take string sounds to new heights — and depths. It’s a kind of Divine Comedy. Jeux Deux, as the title suggests, doesn’t have that kind of ambition. It’s more confidently conventional than exploratory, more entertaining than demanding. But it did introduce some cutting-edge approaches to music to an audience that was more at home with the Cape Breton country fiddling of glamorous and endearing Natalie MacMaster (whose harshly amplified violin actually sounded more like one of Machover’s hyperinstruments than like a country fiddle). The concert raised $1,265,300 for the BSO and its outreach program.

JEFFREY RINK’S CHORUS PRO MUSICA, under the sponsorship of Concert Opera Boston, with Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Victoria Livengood and New York City Opera tenor Michael Hayes, an excellent orchestra and supporting cast, and an inspired 128-year-old score by Camille Saint-Saëns, turned a respectable opera audience at Jordan Hall into a cheering crowd. Samson et Dalila is not performed very often, but it’s even juicier than Cecil B. DeMille’s Technicolor extravaganza on the same Biblical subject. Saint-Saëns’s Philistine temptress is not as torn with passion for her hirsute ex-beau as Hedy Lamarr was for Victor Mature; she’s just out for revenge. But she gets to sing some of the most voluptuous music ever written for a mezzo — three arias you can’t get out of your head — plus a powerful trio and a sensational duet. If there had been any scenery, these performers would have chewed it to bits well before the last act.

Livengood’s Dalila was the sine qua non. She has the vocal chops, from ringing high notes to a baritonal growl. Her campy performance — part Theda Bara (the rolling come-hither eyes), part Joan Crawford (the suddenly disappearing smile), part Bea Arthur (the ironic snarl of disbelief at Samson’s stupidity) — undercut the seductiveness of her seduction arias: "Printemps qui commence" ("Spring is beginning") and "Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix" ("My heart opens at thy voice"). The incomparable phrasing and warmth you hear on Maria Callas’s recordings make any resistance impossible. Livengood was more commanding than insinuating, a powerhouse who exuded sex and malevolence — hilarious and frightening and riveting.

Hayes, short-haired to begin with, was a stolid but touching Samson with a heroic if not exactly beautiful tenor voice — the voice of a warrior — that got under one’s armor. He more than held his own in the ensembles with Livengood. Baritone Philip Candilis, a physician/ethicist in his spare time and a student of Todd Duncan (the original Porgy) and Boston’s beloved Robert Honeysucker, was superb as the Philistine priest. Bass John Ames (the Old Hebrew), who sings with the San Francisco Opera, has a dark, reverberating tone and all the low notes you can shake a stick at (if, as Groucho Marx used to say, you like that sort of thing) but a barely approximate sense of pitch. More on target were Boston’s David M. Cushing (the Satrap of Gaza), baritone David Kravitz, and tenors Charles Blandy and Brendan Daly — luxury casting in cameo roles.

Rink created a fast-moving and shapely performance. The familiar Bacchanale, the archetype of musical hootchy-cootch, was spine-tingling, a field day for the triangle, the timpani (the legendary Fred Buda), the bellowing horns, and the belly-dancing oboe (Andrea Bonsignore). Julia Scolnik’s flute provided the erotic foreplay for Dalila’s arias. The chorus has some of the best music in the opera (it shouldn’t be surprising that this piece was conceived as an oratorio), and the group was spectacular in the dawn music welcoming Samson back into the fold, the elegant chorus of Philistine women, and everywhere else. Next year, CpM will present an even rarer work that might be even more fun: Verdi’s Attila.