Poetry in songs reflecting sun and moon

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project—as represented by the 11 players who appeared at Miller Theater under the group’s founder and conductor, Gil Rose—is extremely able and musical. Performing Bernard Rands’s three astronomical Canti of the late 1980s and early ‘90s last Thurday, Mr. Rose and his team filled the music with rich, decisive ensemble colors and magnificent solos in scores whose dominant expressive position is one of rapture, these musicians were rapturous.... Beyond that—and especially with such superb instrumentalists at work and play—each piece is essentially an ensemble composition, a single movement along which the songs are stations. Canti lunatici, for instance, begins with short musical images being sampled and exchanged in a smooth, harmonious atmosphere. The arrival, then, of punchy Spanish rhythms seems prompted as much by a need for musical contrast as by the fact that the soprano has turned into Lorca...