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Callithumpians deliver two ingenious depictions of insanity"Come on, get up there, I'm trying to start the show!" muttered Stephen Drury to baritone Brian Church from a side entrance to Jordan Hall. Church, dressed like the kind of homeless person you'd guiltily maneuver to avoid, stumbled onto the stage, scattering the bags of newspapers he carried. Drury stormed by him, assumed his conductor's post, and swiftly brought his arm down, unleashing the torrent of sound that opens Peter Maxwell Davies's "Eight Songs for a Mad King." It was all an act, of course. Friday evening's whole show was. The Callithumpian Consort -- the intrepid contemporary music group that Drury directs -- was presenting two revolutionary theatrical works by the Scottish composer: the "Eight Songs," written in 1969, and "Miss Donnithorne's Maggot," composed five years later. Both have texts written by Randolph Stow, and both are ingenious dramatic depictions of insanity. And Drury, his chamber ensemble, and two singers met the pieces head on with inventive and musically expert renditions. It was an astonishing performance. The king is George III, whose eccentricities included trying to train birds to sing in time with a mechanical organ. In Davies's piece the instruments in the chamber ensemble represent the birds, but they're also extensions of the king's frayed psyche. In Friday's staging, the instrumentalists followed Church around the stage, hounding and tormenting him, the musical and physical give-and-take reflecting the king's lunatic interior monologue. The music is a brilliantly constructed rag-tag pastiche of avant-garde, baroque, and English dance-hall styles, including a blackly hilarious send-up of "Comfort ye" from Handel's "Messiah." As for the baritone, his part calls for little conventional singing but a lot of shouting, whining, whispering, falsetto, and other forms of vocalization. Church's delivery, full of pathos, sounded less ugly than Davies may have originally intended. But he was such a marvelous actor that the shock of the text came through unabated. He climbed through Jordan Hall's seats in one scene, and, in another, he ruined the violinist's instrument, which she then slammed to the ground and destroyed. The subject of "Miss Donnithorne's Maggot" is a woman who, in her youth, was jilted on her wedding day and never left her house again. Legend has it, she left everything exactly as it was planned for the wedding -- cake included -- until she died. In this work, there's less overt action, and the text, full of sexual imagery, does a lot of the heavy lifting. There's also much more conventional singing, and soprano Jennifer Ashe gave a performance that was pure bravura. It's odd that such a piece should sound so beautiful, but Ashe, prowling the stage in a white nightgown, riveted the audience's attention with a radiant and opulent voice. Some of the staging felt forced, as when the female instrumentalists changed into costumes meant to reflect Miss Donnithorne's thwarted sexuality. But some well-deployed lighting and props gave an eerily effective sense of the spinster's ghostly house. In both pieces, the instrumentalists played complicated stretches of music from memory while parading around the stage in their own dramatic parts. Church and Ashe received the loudest applause, but Drury and his players -- violinist Gabriela Diaz, cellist Benjamin Schwartz, flutist Natalie Pao, clarinetist Michael Norsworthy, pianist Yukiko Takagi, and percussionist Timothy Feeney -- brought their roles off with gusto, and were equally deserving. The Callithumpian Consort © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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