One of the more recent masters of fusion, Chick Corea, was represented by four of his Children’s Songs, as arranged by Gluck. Many styles are employed from Celtic to Copland to Weill, with a strong dose of cross rhythms that would challenge the cohesion of any ensemble. This one cohered. Sylvia Buccelli on piano was clear and accurate, and Gluck, in an extended drum solo, displayed the independence of his four limbs.

The most substantial composition on the program was Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano (to which Gluck added percussion) by Bill Douglas. Douglas is a Canadian bassoonist who was intrigued by both classical music and jazz in his teens and composed avant-garde and atonal music in college. Soon other influences appeared (African and Indian), and he began to write tonal, modal, and lyrical pieces.

The composer structured the first and third movements in standard jazz form: unison theme enunciated by the reeds (in-tune octaves by oboe and bassoon sound great!), followed by variations (nice contrapuntal duets), and return to theme.

Percussionist Gluck sat out the first movement (“Bebop Cantabile”), and we missed his faultless groove. The role might have been assumed by the pianist, but in spite of her excellent technique, she forgot that, without the percussionist, she must be bass and drums as well as piano. More Herbie Hancock, please! In spite of a short, welcome, expressive piano interlude, the middle movement, “Lament,” with its Middle Eastern minor mode, was over-long. “Rondo con brio” (the third movement) was a pulse-pushing assemblage of rhythmic play, variety, and superb playing from Cornelia McGiver on

bassoon (big sound, super-high range) and Nicole Golay on oboe (gritty and sweet tones and beautiful line).

Kelly Ellenwood, mistress of both vocal and acting technique, wrote the lyrics for Coney Island Suite, patterned, she said, after Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island of the Mind.” Gluck, in his composer mode, depicted the carnival atmosphere with many instrumental colors: dark, nostalgic, threatening, eerie. He often used astringent harmonies, but he also knows how to write a real melody. His rhythms are always “fascinating.” (It was fun when he occasionally twisted the carousel waltz into 5/4.) Unfortunately, Ellenwood kept referring to her music on a stand, which was distracting, not to mention surprising, given that these were her own lyrics!

Three Dorothy Parker poems (two of which featured her acerbic New Yorker wit) have been set by John Musto, a prolific American composer whose music embraces contemporary concert styles as well as ragtime and blues. Respect for and delight in lyrics is not much in fashion these days, so Ellenwood did a good thing when she read the Parker poems to us before singing the Musto songs. It’s hard to know what to call this singer. “Soprano” doesn’t begin to describe her voice, which goes all over the place with technical simplicity and freedom from pop and opera garbage. She can summon a D-above-high-C or reach down for a lusty Broadway “chest” when the song demands. She can negotiate huge leaps in heavily chromatic music with unfailing accuracy, as in “Résumé,” Parker’s sardonic riff on various forms of suicide.

But the most compelling crossover story of the evening belongs to Kurt Weill, three of whose songs were adventurously arranged by David Gluck. In '20s Berlin, every kind of political faction, every artistic style could be found in the urban stew. Weill spent his youth blossoming in the melodrama of the Weimar Republic. Composers soaked up the life of the people and found their own voices through jazz, noises of industry, and social chaos. The composer found a guru in Ferrucio Busoni, a Tuscan musician who was, according to Alex Ross, “a cosmopolitan among nationalists, a pragmatist among doctrinaire aesthetes.” Busoni’s own music gathered in all possibilities, and he taught Weill an effective lesson: Do not be afraid of banality. Weill’s Threepenny Opera was hugely popular, and it successfully broke down the divide between classical and popular music with its own brand of crossover.

Weill fled the Nazis in 1933, passing through London and Paris, arriving in America in 1935—by delicious coincidence in the same month as the premiere of America’s foremost “great fusion” work, Porgy and Bess. Forsaking the agitprop of his old partner Brecht, he threw himself into the Broadway mainstream with Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) and Lady in the Dark (1941).

One Touch of Venus (1943) was a smash, as much for Ogden Nash’s clever lyrics as for Weill’s music. “Speak Low,” a gentle beguine, is the only song that became popular, but “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” is a first-rate song and a high moment for Ellenwood. In a swingy minor blues (reminiscent of “The Saga of Jenny”), Venus asks the question: “Tell me, is love a popular suggestion, or merely an obsolete art?” Ellenwood is hilarious as she rears back and wails her high D on the word is.

What is your latest foible?

Is gin rummy more exquisite?

Is skiing more enjoyable?

For heaven’s sake what IS—it?

Unfortunately the lyrics were not always clear. At times, the instruments overwhelmed them.

She also sang “Youkali,” a minor tango, and “The River Is So Blue,” which included amusing quotes from “Moon River.”

Vigorous applause earned us an encore: Lobster Telephone (“My quirkiest piece,” said Gluck, “modeled after a Salvador Dali painting”). This arranger is fond of suddenly stopping the music, sometimes resulting in excessive fragmentation, but here the device really works. After much cacophonic counterpoint, the whole ensemble ends on a humorous, crashing F-major chord!

Kurt Weill has the last word: “I have never acknowledged the difference between ‘serious’ music and ‘light’ music. There is only good music and bad music.”

Madera Vox knows the difference.