“Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness,” which had its New York premiere on Friday evening at Zankel Hall, jams a lot into its 75 minutes.
The piece includes, in shifting combinations, the Crossing, a superb contemporary-music choir; a flutist who wanders the stage; a quartet of percussionists; two actors; dancers from a pair of troupes; projections of drawings and photographs; poetry in English and Spanish; and, throughout, the suggestion of themes of profound societal import, like war, migration and environmental destruction.
What pulls together all these elements — or is supposed to — is one composer, Gabriela Ortiz. Ortiz, in residence at Carnegie Hall this season, makes music of bright, energetic colors, and “Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness” offers a selection of her pieces, loosely linked in a five-movement multimedia meditation and directed by Stephen Jiménez.
Solemn dialogues for the two actors — not naturalistic scenes, exactly, but elegiac nods toward pained emotions — form interludes between the musical sections. Ortiz’s shining 2022 choral work “Tierra,” with an artfully enigmatic text by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, provides music for the first and final movements.
The second movement, “The Language of the Rain,” uses a part of Ortiz’s gently propulsive percussion piece “Liquid Borders” as the score for a dance sequence; another bit of “Liquid Borders” forms the soundtrack of another dance in the fourth movement, “The Language of the Earth.” At the center of the performance is “Dreaming the End of War,” which uses her sensually dense choral work “Rio Bravo,” with a text by Monica Sánchez Escuer that refers to women standing on the banks of “the river they want to cross and call Grande.”
You sense that the aim of all this was a kind of thoughtful dreaminess, a deep reflection on our moment, but “Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness” ends up feeling heavy-handed and thin, its components never quite cohering. The Minimalism-influenced burble of “Liquid Borders” would feel more stirringly agile if the music wasn’t paired with Harrison Guy’s choreography, its dully literal rising and falling movements performed with calm commitment by dancers from the Ailey School and Flight Path Dance Project.
The flutist Alejandro Escuer, his contributions dotted throughout the work, plays in a breathily stark style that evokes Latin American wooden folk instruments; it’s a striking effect, but one lessened by him doing much the same thing, again and again. The projected imagery — drawings by James Drake, including one of tumbling bodies that gives the full work its title, and photographs by Adam Holender — is also sometimes evocative, but doesn’t benefit from its quantity, losing power and surprise as the performance wears on.
There is one successful aspect of “Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness.” When the Crossing is singing under the baton of its visionary director, Donald Nally, the rest of this vague, earnest presentation seems to melt away and you’re left with this group’s amazing, immaculate sound, both ethereally light and almost tangibly present in the air.
The ensemble makes texts entirely lucid without any overemphasis, and its members capture the serenity and dramatic turns of Ortiz’s “Tierra” with a remarkable dynamic range. The layers of “Rio Bravo” manage to be rich and translucent at once. I’m not sure if it’s the sound of forgiveness, but it’s certainly the sound of beauty.
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