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New York classical music institutions are in a period of economic challenges. This season, the Metropolitan Opera is dark more nights than in the past. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the historic Next Wave Festival is a shadow<\/a> of its former self.<\/p>\n Yet if you know where to look \u2014 at venues large and small \u2014 the city still has plenty to fill a calendar. Just on Thursday and Friday, for example, there were back-to-back premieres of ambitious song cycles by living composers.<\/p>\n On Thursday, Paul Pinto\u2019s \u201cThe Approach\u201d \u2014 a multimedia, dramatic work written for the treble-voice quartet Quince Ensemble \u2014 was unveiled at Merkin Hall. And the next night, at Zankel Hall, Ted Hearne brought his \u201cDorothea,\u201d built around poems by Dorothea Lasky, to New York for the first time.<\/p>\n To my ear, Pinto\u2019s music for Quince was the stunner of this pair. But after a slow start on Friday, Hearne\u2019s cycle also flashed some of the refinement of his earlier works. He has been adept at using chamber music, rock and electronic instrumentation, and in the oratorio \u201cThe Source,\u201d found poetry even in material from WikiLeaks. But the first half of \u201cDorothea\u201d felt strangely static for a composer-performer of such successful eclecticism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This was due, in part, to an overreliance on the composer\u2019s own singing voice, his tenor electronically altered. Past projects, like \u201cPlace\u201d and \u201cOutlanders,\u201d have seen Hearne writing for multiple singers, not to mention multiple facets of himself. But the early portion of \u201cDorothea\u201d was dominated by steady Auto-Tune style.<\/p>\n The effect could be appropriately lovelorn, or weary, as guided by Lasky\u2019s texts. But this digital sheen also eclipsed the contributions of the other artists onstage. Outside of a few choice moments, his fellow performers \u2014 like the electric guitarist Taylor Levine or the vocalist Eliza Bagg \u2014 could seem sidelined by the digital tweaking of Hearne\u2019s voice.<\/p>\n There was a breakthrough, however, with \u201cComplainers,\u201d the eighth of about a baker\u2019s dozen songs, sung by Bagg. Hearne\u2019s comparatively spare, effective setting showed off this vocalist\u2019s luminous sound in Lasky\u2019s sardonic poetry, beginning with the line \u201cSome people don\u2019t want to die\/Because you can\u2019t complain when you\u2019re dead.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When Hearne returned as lead singer, in \u201cAnother World,\u201d his vocals were less futzed- with, and for the better. He and the band channeled some of Depeche Mode\u2019s booming goth glamour. From there, the balance of the evening did not merely suggest R&B grooves or rock energy from one moment to the next; instead, the songs claimed those textures more sturdily.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Thursday\u2019s performance, of the first three \u201cepisodes\u201d of Pinto\u2019s \u201cThe Approach,\u201d was, at just over 40 minutes, about half as long as \u201cDorothea.\u201d But it still felt like a full meal, and an inspired one.<\/p>\n Conceived as an \u201cepisodic, magical-realist song cycle\u201d that is also a \u201clove story for and about the women of Quince,\u201d Pinto\u2019s narrative has a winking, fourth-wall-breaking quality. In his libretto, the Quince singers experience a meet-cute with a female sailor on the subway after a rehearsal. (The flirting commences with a stretch of mysterious, brazen blinking.)<\/p>\n When not making use of Quince\u2019s polyphonic skills, Pinto also gives each member of the quartet subjective space for solitary meditations similar to arias. His conceit carries traces of the comic-philosophic operas of Robert Ashley. The aesthetic tends toward the chatty, and is strewn with drone-style phrases. And Pinto comes by this influence honestly: As a vocalist, he has been a key part of recent revivals<\/a> of Ashley\u2019s stage works<\/a>.<\/p>\n But \u201cThe Approach\u201d also displays Pinto\u2019s own innovations. For one thing, his texts tend to move with blitzing speed. (The score specifies 220 words per minute at select frenetic junctures.) And although Ashley\u2019s operas include stray pop-song interludes, Pinto pushes for more songfulness; in excerpts that Pinto has posted online<\/a>, you can hear him reveling in the gleaming harmonic interplay made possible by Quince.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At Merkin Hall, \u201cThe Approach\u201d was staged \u2014 modestly, yet stylishly. The Quince singers wore gowns that seemed to line up with the moody sobriquets of their respective characters. Kayleigh Butcher, a mezzo-soprano and Quince\u2019s executive director, wore a dress of green and brown bordering on burnished-gold, a color pattern that seemed to fit her character\u2019s designation as \u201cThe Sad One.\u201d Lyric-quoting videos of Pinto\u2019s design also helped the audience to keep track of the swift moving text.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Quince\u2019s sound, though, was appropriately the true star. And the group offered more in Thursday\u2019s program: \u201cher lover\u2019s hand,\u201d a satisfying, folk-inflected three-song suite from composer Annika Socolofsky. Pinto sang as well, preceding \u201cThe Approach\u201d with \u201cOn Shaller Brown,\u201d his arrangement of the much-adapted work song.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He accompanied himself on piano, while singing with rich textural depth. At one point, video art on the screen behind him instructed audience members to imagine a big chorus joining him, before noting that such a large cohort was beyond this project\u2019s budget.<\/p>\n There was knowing laughter in the audience. Nothing, though, felt cheap about this ecstatic, richly rewarding show. Pinto\u2019s music proved that tough times of leaner budgets don\u2019t require reduced ambitions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n