'El Cimarrón' was a runaway success by Linda Phillips

Forget consonance. Forget comfort. Forget melody, harmony, rhythm, and tonality as we have known it. Once those strictures have been put aside, get ready for an astonishing experience, where music escapes all formal tradition and becomes the sounds and murmurs of a forest, the rasp of farm machinery, the beating of a chain and the aural equivalent of raw, remembered emotion.

The Greenwich Music Festival and its talented cadre of designers, choreographers and technicians presented El Cimarrón (The Runaway Slave), which was as much a theatrical and visual experience as a musical one. The first actual staging of a 1970 concert work by the radical Communist composer Hans Werner Henze, it continued the festival's tradition of breaking down the boundaries of classical music, creating a crossover blend of the musical traditions of many countries and cultures as it explore the music of Cuba in this performance of the group's seventh season.

Originally composed as "Recital for Four Musicians," a singer and three instrumentalists, El Cimarrón has been re-envisioned by the gifted directors of the festival, Robert Ainsley and Ted Huffman, as a sort of mini-opera, with one voice, baritone Eugene Perry, the runaway slave, in a long, solo recitativo. The personal history he recounts in music was played out in dance, as four exceptional dancers represented figures in the narrative he sang and spoke.

Ainsley, the festival's musical director, introduced the evening by thanking the board, hosts and hostesses and Austin Scarlett for his costume design. As musical director and conductor, Ainsley sees this work as centered on political, moral and personal freedom: the freedom of the people of Cuba, the freedom of El Cimarrón and the freedom from fidelity to masters. He told the audience members they would hear were Asian and Caribbean influences in the instrumentation, with bamboo sticks and sighing winds, and African in the conga drums, the gongas, the marimba. This was an understatement. The flutist, the virtuosic Claire Chase, played four varieties of her instrument, including an harmonium. Guitarist Daniel Lippe and energetic percussionist Nathan Davis, members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, attained an entirely new level of performance, and physical agility.

To open the performance, the black, industrial set went totally dark, as did the auditorium. When the lights came up, Perry began his story as Esteban Montejo, the real-life slave upon whose life the work is based.

The dancers, in highly stylized movements created by choreographer Zack Winokur, were quite wonderful as the characters in the protagonist's memory: the cruel master, the women and himself as a youth and a young man, as it chronicled the story of his escape, sojourn in the woods, move to Havana, participation in the slave revolt of 1895 and eventual return to a much-changed, slave-free plantation.

There was an anti-priest section, an evocation/condemnation of engineers section, and a revolutionary section. As spirits from the singer's dreams and stories, the dancers, Manelich Minniefee, Andrew Murdock, Jose Tena, and Yara Travieso, donned costumes of birds and ghosts and were quite terrifying and immensely moving.

Ainsley, working from a score that had neither bars nor time signature, elicited a powerful, complex performance from the musicians, and from Perry, whose story was often in sprechgesang and employed a high falsetto.

The audience was unexpectedly hurtled back to the very origins of music, when rocks struck served as percussion, the voice as instrument, the leaves, wind and water as accompaniment. That the Greenwich Music Festival was able to portray the entire history of musical sound within this short presentation was brilliant. That the production itself conveyed dream states, memory, phantasms, and actual events was akin to harnessing the music of the spheres, and bringing it to earth. Sheer genius.

The 2011 Festival will feature La Voix Humaine of Francis Poulenc, and is scheduled for June 5-10, 2011.

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Linda Phillips, a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for her music review column in the Greenwich Citizen and her book To the Highest Bidder, is an amateur pianist and was a member of the performing duo Amor Artis. She writes on musical topics for Newport Life Magazine and won a Best Criticism/Review award in 2009 from the Connecticut Press Club.