(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)

Enlarge Deutsche Grammophon

Orpheus makes his way through the underworld, in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production of one of the first operas, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, from 1607.

Deutsche Grammophon

Orpheus makes his way through the underworld, in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production of one of the first operas, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, from 1607.

We've tackled terms, vocal ranges and some tricks of the opera trade in this series so far. But now it's time for a little history. We'll track some of opera's evolution over the past 400 years, beginning with its creation.

Those opera adversaries who slam the music for its elitist and Eurocentric associations are actually pretty close to getting the birth of opera right. Intellectuals, scholars and amateur musicians from Florence, Italy dreamt up the idea of opera in the last decade of the 16th century.

Unlike some art forms that took generations to morph into the next big thing, opera was invented in one place, at one time by a specific group (or two) of people. The Camerata, which included Galileo Galilei's father, held meetings at the salon of a Florentine count. The group argued over and experimented with new combinations of drama, song and music based on their study of the ancient Greeks.

Enlarge Chris Owyoung/courtesy of the artists

New York Polyphony.

Chris Owyoung/courtesy of the artists

New York Polyphony.

It's been about three decades since pre-Baroque music began to be revived in a big way. A whole constellation of big-name vocal superstars has evolved, with Anonymous 4, The Tallis Scholars and the late Montserrat Figueras among the firmament. But now a new generation of early music experts has come of age — and their numbers include the vocal quartet New York Polyphony, traveling with the tag line "Early music. Modern sensibility."

Marrying new technology to music is a particular passion for this group (countertenor Geoffrey Williams, baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert, bass Craig Phillips and, on this recording, tenor Geoffrey Silver, who has since left and been replaced with Steven Caldicott Wilson, pictured above). They've positioned themselves as a kind of a cappella Kronos Quartet eager to push the boundaries of the expected, from their performance of a Missa Charles Darwin by Gregory Brown at TedX Woods Hole to an animated video they created for music by the largely forgotten 15th-century composer Lionel Power.

There are dozens (and frankly probably hundreds) of excellent recordings in the catalogue that revolve around two staple subjects: romantic love and religious devotion. But for their latest album, New York Polyphony turned to matters that feel far more pressing in our own turbulent and too often violent era: death, loss and the sobering prospect of having to face one's own mortality.

To this end, the group assembled music mostly from Franco-Flemish composers from the first half of the 16th century. That sounds rather dry, until one takes into account what a hideously violent and uncertain era it was — one bedeviled by warfare, religious persecution, famine and plague. As the text of the affecting work attributed to Josquin Desprez included here, Abasalon Fili Mi, an exquisitely somber musical portrait of Biblical fathers mourning their dead sons, has it: "I shall live no longer/but descend weeping into hell."

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Equally affecting are Antoine Brumel's Mass for the dead (Missa Pro Defunctis), one of the earliest polyphonic settings of the memorial mass, two Gregorian plainsongs, the little-known Flemish composer Thomas Crecquillon's setting of lamentations from the biblical Book of Jeremiah and a haunting motet full of strange harmonies by the Dutch composer Jacobus Clemens non Papa — all sung with pinpoint accuracy, flexibility and an amber-shaded richness and depth. Not unlike their British counterparts in the larger vocal ensemble Stile Antico, New York Polyphony brings a very human (and very welcome) warmth to their singing.

True to New York Polyphony's inquisitive spirit, the album closes with a contemporary piece by Jackson Hill (b. 1941), an Alabama native and longtime Bucknell University professor who looked back seven centuries for inspiration. Taking fragments from a 14th-century piece by one of France's great poets and composers, Guillaume de Machaut, Hill created a work that rises and sighs in hypnotic undulations of sound — providing an affecting close to this gorgeous and reflective program.

Enlarge Thomas Niedermueller/Getty Images

Soprano Anna Netrebko in a 2011 file photo.

Thomas Niedermueller/Getty Images

Soprano Anna Netrebko in a 2011 file photo.

• The contentious Russian presidential election is fast approaching on March 4th, and both Anna Netrebko and Valery Gergiev appear on a list of 499 celebrities endorsing Vladimir Putin (link in German). Though Netrebko has rejected Russian tabloid claims that she is Putin's former lover, she said in a Newsweek interview published last fall that she wishes she'd had the chance: "I'd have loved to have been ... he's a very attractive man. Such a strong, male energy."
• Tenor Charles Anthony died this week at age 82; he sang an astonishing 2,928 times at the Metropolitan Opera over 57 seasons. Born Calogero Antonio Caruso in New Orleans, he was told in 1952 by Met head Rudolf Bing to choose a stage name: "Caruso, it goes without saying, was taken."
• A beautiful account from the Los Angeles Times' Mark Swed of Mahlermania in Caracas as Gustavo Dudamel arrives with the LA Philharmonic: "The very diverse audience included students and parents, rich and poor, children as young as 5. Attire could be anything: jeans and T-shirts, suits and mini-skirts. Kids carried musical instruments. Teenagers danced and necked on the plaza. Vendors sold delicious local chocolate wrapped with portraits of Gustav Mahler ... All tickets to the Mahler concerts were about $8 and sold out in less than two hours, with some people arriving in the middle of the night to wait in the ticket line."
• Also datelined Caracas: the New York Times' Dan Wakin, who went for a first-hand visit to one of the barrios in which El Sistema operates. "All instruction and instruments are free. No child is turned away, teaching is done in groups, and many of the instructors have passed through El Sistema themselves (and are thus committed to the movement). Public performance is ingrained from the beginning. The núcleo (teaching location) is within walking distance of the students' homes." (Be sure to look at the accompanying slideshow.)
• Score one for some early spring cleaning! In clearing out a storage room, staff of a town council in Leicestershire, England, stumbled upon a manuscript by Edward Elgar. It's a short piece called Carillon Chimes that was commissioned for the 1923 opening of the town's bell tower.
• How well are those HD cinema broadcasts of operas, orchestral concerts, and ballets doing? "The HD broadcasts are the most successful single element of [Met chief Peter] Gelb's tenure, and have proved truly visionary. They have raised the profile of opera, created excitement where there was none, and rather than bankrupting the company, as many predicted, they have made money. In 2010-11 they netted an impressive $11 million ... and opera does offer an audience of aficionados willing to go to movie theaters to see performances at times the theaters might otherwise be nearly empty."
• Just in case you think that American kids are the only ones losing access to the arts, consider these new stats from Britain: According to 2,000 parents of 5-to-12 year-olds, "four in 10 children have never seen the inside of an art gallery, while 17 percent haven't visited a museum with their parents ... a quarter of children haven't been to the theater, while six in 10 have never heard or been to a classical music concert."
• A few months ago, Kentucky Opera staged a Marriage of Figaro with three keyboards rather than a pit band amidst the ongoing labor issues with the Louisville Orchestra. The opera company stirred up new controversy by hiring non-union players for its upcoming performance of The Merry Widow – and now conductor Joe Mechavich has resigned rather than cross the picket line. On Thursday, the musicians rejected the board's offer to settle their nearly year-long contract dispute.
• Since Mechavich now happens to be free this weekend, he's headed to San Diego to conduct the West Coast premiere of Jake Heggie's Moby-Dick. The conductor is stepping in for San Diego Opera's Karen Keltner, who's fallen ill. And hear some Heggie for President's Day here.
• Now that the U.S. has finally passed legislation standardizing treatment of musical instruments on airplanes, British musicians are calling for the same. Says the Musicians' Union: "Musicians regularly have problems taking their instruments on planes due to inconsistent policies from airlines and extortionate fees."
• This does my heart grievous wrong on so many levels: Crossover fiddler David Garrett has signed on to play Paganini in a biopic called The Devil's Violinist. (Was Oscar-winning Pag lookalike Adrien Brody unavailable?)

Enlarge Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera

Got an idea for a classical cartoon, or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

Enlarge Morozova Tatiana/iStockphoto.com

Opera and rap seem to hit a nerve with many music lovers.

Morozova Tatiana/iStockphoto.com

Opera and rap seem to hit a nerve with many music lovers.

So what's wrong with rap and opera? Not much, really. Except that last week when we asked readers to name their musical blind spots (genres or bands they ignored, either by choice or neglect) a distinct refrain emerged within the responses. Two examples:

"Oh, and by the way, rap is not music. It is mostly a bunch of meaningless drivel by people with no real talent and who certainly should not get paid."

"Very little of opera is worth bothering with and even then only as instrumental music rather than as the sounds of tortured cats."

It was clear that opera and rap, more than any other genres, hit some kind of nerve with people. And it's a fact that seems to hold true far beyond our highly unscientific social media polling. But why?

Enlarge Lisa-Marie Mazzucco/courtesy of the artists

Cellist David Finckel (l) with his colleagues of more than 30 years.

Lisa-Marie Mazzucco/courtesy of the artists

Cellist David Finckel (l) with his colleagues of more than 30 years.

Ending a relationship that has lasted much longer than most marriages, the Emerson String Quartet has announced this morning that cellist David Finckel is leaving after 34 years. The upcoming 2012-13 season will be Finckel's last with America's most iconic string quartet.

Update, Feb. 15: I reached Finckel on the phone yesterday afternoon to discuss his decision. Click the audio link to hear our conversation.

Finckel — who joined the quartet in 1979, three years after it was founded — was in some ways the most visibly prominent member of the quartet through his heavy schedule of extra-curricular activities. he and his wife, pianist Wu Han, are co-directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a superb chamber music festival in Silicon Valley called Music@Menlo and the creative directors of their own recording label, ArtistLed, along with their own appearances as a duo and in other projects.

In a statement, Finckel says he was spurred to leave the quartet to make more time for his other artistic and educational outlets. (Always technologically oriented, he's recently created a 100-part series of online "Cello Talk" tutorials for student players.)

Enlarge Doriane Raiman/NPR

Simone Dinnerstein, at NPR's Studio 4A, plays The Cohen Variations, a new piece based on Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne."

Doriane Raiman/NPR

Simone Dinnerstein, at NPR's Studio 4A, plays The Cohen Variations, a new piece based on Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne."

Last spring I invited pianist Simone Dinnerstein to drop by our studio to spin and talk about some of her favorite tunes in a guest DJ session. We quickly found that we shared an all-time favorite song — Leonard Cohen's iconic "Suzanne," an enigmatic love song with a hothouse full of indelible images. We both first heard it via Judy Collins' 1966 album In My Life (see below).

Dinnerstein returned to the studio recently, this time to play a set of variations on "Suzanne" written for her by New York composer Daniel Felsenfeld. The piece, called The Cohen Variations, is for solo piano, leaving Cohen's evocative poetry behind.

"I'm not a very word-oriented person," Dinnerstein says. "The words are not the thing about that song that gets me." She likes what she calls the drone-like quality of the Collins rendition, and the circularity of the simple four-chord structure. Still, it's gutsy to strip a Cohen song, especially this one, of its lyrics.

"I know that was something Danny was thinking about when he wrote the variations, how to do wordless Cohen," Dinnerstein says. "He uses these inner voices. I think it also conjures up a feeling of words to have inner voices. It's like the subtext of a song. It's really deep what he's done, and it's quite minimal but really subtle."

You can hear Collins' original version and her take on a Beatles classic below. Click on the audio link at the top of the page to hear Dinnerstein discuss Cohen's song and her studio performance of The Cohen Variations.

Enlarge Luz E. Acevedo

Composer Ernesto Cordero's concertos glow with the warmth of his native Puerto Rico.

Luz E. Acevedo

Composer Ernesto Cordero's concertos glow with the warmth of his native Puerto Rico.

An all-star cast, including guitarist Pepe Romero and the legendary I Solisti di Zagreb, heads up these performances of three concertos by Ernesto Cordero. Born in New York in 1946, Cordero was raised in Puerto Rico where he teaches guitar and composition at the University of Puerto Rico. Each of these works is an appealing musical paella with Caribbean seasoning.

The three-movement Concierto Festivo for guitar and strings, composed in 2003, is dedicated to Romero, whose commanding performance proves that at age 67 he's still one of today's finest guitarists. The twitchy, tango-riffed opening movement has a theme recalling Rodrigo's celebrated guitar concertos.

The following adagio begins mysteriously with shimmering strings that usher in a moving canción for the soloist. But the mood shifts in the finale where quivering strings introduce a stately theme. It's energetically embroidered by the guitar and subjected to clever variations in an animated dialogue for soloist and orchestra. It all ends with guitar fireworks.