http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/arts/music/james-baker-leads-the-talea-ensemble-at-roulette.html 2014-09-29 00:58:18 James Baker Leads the Talea Ensemble at Roulette The Talea Ensemble performed “Written for Talea,” a concert of new works composed for the group, at Roulette. === During a concert of new works composed for the Christopher Trapani’s “Waterlines: Five Songs About Storms and Floods” proved to be the most promising piece on the lineup, called “Written for Talea” and conducted by James Baker. The ensemble didn’t seem quite at ease with the complex piece (written in 2005 and revised in 2012), but the soprano Mr. Trapani took inspiration from blues recordings made after the 1927 Mississippi River flood, meshing influences from the American South with the spectral music he heard while working in Paris. He adapted the texts for the five songs from hymns, Romantic lieder and blues songs, woven through with dulcimer, banjo, strings, winds, percussion and electronics. Swooping vocals dominated “Wild Water Blues”; in “Falling Rain Blues” electronics, including sounds of rain, enhanced an evocative tapestry. There were a few alluring moments in Ghostly fragments permeated Aaron Helgeson’s “Poems of Sheer Nothingness” required substantial patience from the listener; mine, admittedly, ran out before the end of that long cycle. According to the program notes, the songs — troubadour texts sung in Occitan, a language similar to Catalan and still spoken in parts of southern Europe — ask a question: “If music could speak to language, what would it say?” There was little to fault with the singing of the soprano