Mr. Kovler’s “Unsung Serenade,” in which a gloom akin to Ravel’s pregnant murk in “La Valse” gave birth to brighter sonorities, had an emotive potency that suggested, of all things, a potentially estimable operatic composer in the making.

A setting of a Jerome Rothenberg poem that surreally evokes the experience of Eastern European immigrants in America…the music was notable for its pacing and the bold colors of the orchestration.

Selected from the BMOP/NEC composition competition, “A Jew Among the Indians (Cokboy)” was a setting of Jerome Rothenberg’s poem and movingly captured the anxiety and placelessness of the immigrant transported to a new world and finding himself among other disenfranchised peoples. The orchestra provides a wandering backdrop to the poem’s narration, performed Saturday night by the piece’s composer Matti Kovler. Tonal displacement predominates through much of the work, interrupted only by a G major chord corresponding to a vision of the sunrise and again when the music fades into a Hassidic delivery of Psalm 139 (“Where can I go from your Spirit?”). Overall, an intensely moving piece about immigrant experiences in America.

Matti Kovler’s “Here Comes Messiah!” — a monodrama, in some onomatopoetic detail, about giving birth — was sung, spoken, whispered and breathed, heavily, by Tehila Goldstein, an agile soprano. It, too, had a folk touch: its ending is a graceful setting of “Peliah,” a Hasidic song based on a Psalm text.

(…) Most memorable for me was Matti Kovler’s three-part song cycle Here Comes Messiah! In remarks before the performance, Kovler said he completely changed his conception of the work after hearing the remarkable soprano Tehila Goldstein, who is at least as much an actor as she is a singer. Sure enough, Goldstein whistled, keened and grunted through the poetic and religious texts, while Kovler looked on from the piano. His music bore a close resemblance to Bernstein’s, filled with all the same joy and wonder: “Where can I escape from Your spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend up to heaven You are there, if I descend into the netherworld, You are there. Such knowledge is too wondrous; I cannot attain it.” (Psalms 139) How these performers (who were led by Alarm Will Sound’s Alan Pierson) pulled off such warm, technically sound performances of brand new works with less than a week’s rehearsal time is a mystery, if not a miracle. Almost as much as the songs themselves.

…It is not surprising that I felt a particularly strong connection to Matti’s piece: I was there namely as part of his retinue. I am also familiar with his compositional idiom, and Here Comes Messiah! was clearly marked with the Kovler stamp. Matti’s instruments are not merely textural tools, but characters themselves. As the piece began, the breaths and physical movements of his solo singer, Tehila Goldstein (see picture with Matti), were echoed and magnified by the ensemble. From this point, there was no question that we were not watching a poem with orchestral accompaniment, but instead the group effort of a large cast of players – in which extraordinary poet-translator, Janice Silverman Rebibo unambiguously belongs. It was particularly in the second part of the piece that this group dynamic gained a strong hold over the audience’s attention. In the climax before the third and final part, the performers’ grip on the room was visceral, tangible, in a series of fortissimo pulses (labor pangs) from the instrumentalists, and exclamations from Tehila Goldstein. Here the expressivity she had already demonstrated earlier intensified exponentially, in her face, her stance, the timbre of her voice. Matti was at the piano, and he brilliantly made use of it in this passage, as both a harmonic and percussive instrument, driving the sound of the others around him. Although his part in Here Comes Messiah! is less central than in his Cokboy (performed earlier this year in Boston), and the work revolves around a woman’s experience in child birth, it is, nonetheless, entirely an extension of Matti himself. He is wholly present in his music, and not simply because of his compositional language or aesthetic. The audience does not need to be introduced to the composer, or his thought process, to become privy to his internal world – he wills us to come in.