A Mostly Enchanted Evening

IRVINE — “All’s well that ends well” may not be a universal proverb, but musicians of all tongues and methods know it’s important to end on a definitive, or at least an appropriate, note.

Even a grossly unfit ending couldn’t ruin the enchanting program Friday night at the Irvine Barclay Theatre: a world music summit in which the female choir known as Bulgarian Voices Angelite alternated and meshed with Huun-Huur-Tu, the folk quartet from the Siberian republic of Tuva.

For 100 minutes it went like this: the 18 Bulgarians, who first won raves in the West in the late 1980s under the name Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, were the sound of rushing air and of spiritual light filtering into an earthly realm. The Tuvans, with their gruff, oscillating bass tones and keening high-range laments, embodied the terra firma under the Bulgarians’ firmament. Members of a third entity, the Moscow Art Trio, were generally fine team players who brought in strains of Russian folk song and supported the headliners with rhythmic jazz piano currents and inventive, sometimes klezmer-like sallies on melodica, French horn, clarinet and wood flute.

Trio leader Mikhail Alperin, who had the vision of teaming Tuvans and Bulgarians, composed much of the music on their solemn, prayer-like joint album, “Fly, Fly My Sadness,” and is the musical director for the alliance’s first American tour.

The evening flowed like a ride through lovely, undulating scenery as the three partners--all garbed colorfully in traditional dress--appeared separately, took turns performing different movements of a given piece, or meshed their talents in combinations ranging from one or two players and singers to a full cohort of 25. There were no pauses for explanations or translations, which was all for the good, since the show’s sounds and sights were articulate enough. Still, more informative program notes elaborating on the music would have been a help.

The spirituality of the joint CD came through, but so did plenty of enlivening strokes of humor, both musical and via body language or vocal effects mimicking animals or conversational chatter. The pacing and structure honored each group’s distinctiveness, yet supported Alperin’s goal of creating a common grounding for all folk cultures.

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The Bulgarians at one point whooshed like the personification of the living, perpetually moving atmosphere we all breathe; Huun-Huur-Tu, world music favorites in the West since 1993, galloped through what amounted to cowboy songs born of Tuva’s herding culture--and what’s more universal in the post-Hollywood era than a cowboy song? All hands offered an antic, entertaining interpretation of a day in a barnyard, complete with the crowing and squawking of fowl and the bleating of beasts.

Especially moving was a piece in which the Bulgarians united the cathedral and the mosque, with a quavering muezzin-like solo call set against hymnal choral waves that illustrated why they’ve chosen as their new name the Bulgarian word for “angel.” The piercing intonations and sliding intervals of Islamic music, the legacy of the Turks’ 500-year rule over Bulgaria, are important to Angelite’s distinctiveness.

In Bosnia, ties between the Muslim and Christian worlds have been horribly sundered. The Bulgarians showed that preserving them can yield harmony and point to shared spiritual yearnings.

Huun-Huur-Tu saved the most amazing strokes in its arsenal for what should have been the final encore, a driving number that came off like a Siberian answer to a John Lee Hooker blues boogie. It featured the astounding “throat-singing” technique known as sygyt, in which a single voice box simultaneously emits both a low-down, gurgling, Howlin’ Wolf growl and a whistling, otherworldly buzz like that of a Moog synthesizer.

Alperin deserves gratitude for putting these riches together so well. And a big jeer for foolishly hogging the finale for his own group. The Moscow Art Trio’s long, scattershot combination of New Age music, instrumental novelties and vocal and physical slapstick wasn’t so terrible, just woefully anticlimactic. The last singer heard was the capable but unremarkable Sergey Starostin, hardly the equal of the Tuvans and Bulgarians. The blunder turned “all’s well” to “oh, well.”