Parlando and conductor Ian Niederhoffer concluded their season Wednesday night with the second part of their series, “The Cabaret Project.” Spanning this season and last, the series has Parlando playing chamber orchestra arrangements of cabaret music, and cabaret-adjacent works in the classical repertoire.
This is a deeply fascinating question to explore, as Niederhofer hinted at in his introductions before each work, and presented in an enticing program: Emil Bauer’s arrangement of Ernst Krenek’s Fantasie Jonny spielt auf; Hanns Eisler’s Kleine Sinfonie; an orchestration of Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit; and Aaron Davis’ song cycle on poems by Margaret Atwood, Zombie Blizzard. Davis played piano on “Strange Fruit,” and soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee joined Parlando on the Merkin Hall stage as vocal soloist in the last two works.