Styx (1999)

Still, that was quite an earful: Giya Kancheli's gripping 35-minute Styx (1999), for viola, chorus and orchestra, in a reprise of the orchestra's United States premiere of the work in April. Mr. Kancheli, born in Tbilisi, Georgia, weaves a tribute to dead colleagues from the former Soviet Union into a multifarious text that begins in Georgian and ends in English.

Whatever the language, the text often seems to grasp at words, names or syllables as much for their sheer musical potential as for any literal meaning. Finally, it fixates on a meditation on time: merciless time, merciful time; time of joy, time of terror. An alternation of the English words "terror" and "joy" gives way to scraping and rasping sounds evoking an extended death rattle, and ends with a victorious shout of "Joy!"

The viola, Mr. Kahane said in an introduction, represents Charon, mediating between the lands of the living and the dead. Accordingly, the part is given mainly to lyricism and, more oddly, dance rather than technical display, and Basil Vendryes, the orchestra's principal violist, made lovely and subtle work of it here.

Kancheli's Styx is subdued, spinning out long, lyric melodies, [with] sparse texts. Styx is a major addition to the repertoire...this is required listening.