folkishness

This sounds very much like a breakthrough, too, with a well-defined patchwork folkishness.

He even designs a set (a slatted wood barn interior, albeit with two chandeliers) that evokes folkishness.

The three pieces here - two virtuosic, lyrical concertos and a vocal work - combine a gritty sophistication with a street-level energy and currents of exotic folkishness.

Mr. Hakola's music scampers about mischievously, mixing together shapely lyricism, atonality, quirky folkishness and an almost hedonistic approach to timbre and rhythm.

The scores hinted at the breadth of his compositional language, which has evolved from an unusual blend of folkishness and dissonance to a style that is unabashedly melodic and accessible, if still interestingly spiky.

"Contrasts" always strikes me as the most vibrant and kaleidoscopic of Bartok's chamber works; its scoring (clarinet, violin and piano) is unusually well suited to the composer's idiosyncratic mixture of complexity and folkishness.

After intermission "The Lost Lover," a highly charged setting of a section of "Song of Songs" by Deborah Drattell was followed by the innocent folkishness of Kodaly's "Dances from Galanta."

He was abetted in these demonstrations by some magnificent playing from the orchestra: the windswept panoramas and icy shimmer of the string writing, the lively folkishness of the wind and brass writing and the distant thunder in the percussion could not have been conveyed more palpably.

His current subscription concerts at Avery Fisher Hall offer a particularly lovely assortment of unhackneyed works, united by a thread of folkishness: Dvorak's "Devil and Kate" Overture and Violin Concerto, and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 2, the "Little Russian."

Just one example of how Mr. Pountney blended past and present sensibilities: there was ample folk costume and dance, yet the wedding, just preceding the discovery of Jenufa's drowned baby, was bathed in sickly green light, as if all this cheerful period folkishness was under water.