A Single Incisive Voice Speaks for ‘Decameron’

Richard Felciano’s ambitious and moving new work, “An American Decameron,” sounds like a contemporary art-song cycle and acts like one too. But it reads like something else: glimpses of the American panorama from street level. That’s its calling card and the crux of a question regarding its musical language.

For the project, given its premiere by Southwest Chamber Music at the Norton Simon Museum on Saturday and performed again at Zipper Hall on Tuesday, Felciano has set fragments of text from Studs Terkel’s interviews with a wide range of people.

Timing only adds weight to this American-grained piece, commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation and headed for a performance, by Southwest Chamber, at the Library of Congress. (It was scheduled for this weekend but has been postponed because of anthrax worries.)

It’s not necessarily a very accessible listen. Rather than present these voices in an original context (as in the interview recordings spliced into Steve Reich’s “Different Trains”) or in a vernacular style, Felciano has opted for a musical vocabulary for soprano--here, Phyllis Bryn-Julson--drawing on European American art music. When hints of bluesiness or swing enter, on “Looking Up,” or when we catch a few Satie chords in the whimsical “Eric Satie for a Cologne Thing,” it sounds out of character with the piece’s basic post-serial language.

Over the course of its 10-song, roughly one-hour spread, “An American Decameron” checks in on Terkel’s America in all its variety and tension. There are gentle reflections on mortality, a Quaker’s ecological reasoning (“Outhouse Economics”) and the perspectives of a fashion model and a homeless woman.

Southwest Chamber Music, opening its 15th season, gave an impressive performance of a score that demands much of an ensemble and that takes advantage of the diverse colors available in the sextet. Striking moments include the bracing climax of “The Streets of Harlem” and the lovely nebulous whirl that ends “Euclid.”

Front and center, though, was Bryn-Julson, the sure-voiced protagonist, incisively guiding us on this unusual and affecting tour of art music and the common American voice.