PERFORMING ARTS

Jeffrey Cohan, George Shangrow

Though an arcing Romanesque sanctuary and an antebellum exterior might seem to make strange bedfellows, they're a perfect match for St. Mark's Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill and for musicmaking. This week flutist Jeffrey Cohan is showing how beautifully all these elements mesh in the fifth Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival. He starred Saturday on a slender, mellow-toned baroque flute, along with George Shangrow on a two-manual (double-keyboard) harpsichord built by David Rubio in 1972.

You might wonder how a concert made up of Handel sonatas written nearly three centuries ago -- and designed for two apparently mild-mannered instruments -- might rivet an audience's attention for an entire evening. But Saturday it worked gloriously. Superb playing outlined Handel's bizarre melodic turns and jarring harmonies, reproducing the dramatic impact of opera arias by a composer who, above all, wrote for the theater and whose characters erupted onstage with steely, single-minded emotional force.

Cohan transformed Handel's often bare, skeletal melodies, with improvisations unwinding in fancifully embellished peregrinations -- all mellow-toned, yet exhorting a "message" in character portrayals with the dogged exuberance of a political candidate. Shangrow's harpsichord echoed the flute's ornaments with gusto. Ideally balanced, the performers fueled the music's gripping metrical drive, escaping into rhythmic elasticity for momentary expressive asides.

-- Cecelia Porter

The Roots

It's tough being the opening act. Just ask the globe's finest hip-hop band. Although the Roots' latest disc nabbed a top-five Billboard debut, they still hit the Nissan Pavilion stage during daylight hours Friday, opening for rap/rock/reggae outfit 311 and before an overwhelming majority of folks even began to take their seats.

Tossing their tunes into a cavernous theater where sparse attendance means mediocre acoustics, the Roots tried their darndest to capture the crowd through an hour of mostly new jams and elongated instrumental solos.

The group arrived in Hawaiian shirts and rhymer Black Thought introduced himself to the crowd with an "Aloha." He followed by tearing into their current record's most ferocious cut, "Boom!" "Seem like none of y'all chumps is learning / You're hopeless," he rapped. Those rhymes were probably penned as braggadocio aimed at anemic MCs, but they could easily have been aimed at the lethargic folks who yearned for 311's time on stage. The crew also caught steam with the highly satisfying "Don't Say Nuthin'," currently playing on MTV and purposely armed with one of hip-hop's most unintelligible, mush-mouthed choruses.

The underwhelming set's tail end swerved into a loose medley of unlikely selections including Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" and Bill Haley's raucous "Shake, Rattle and Roll," which was punctuated by keyboardist Kamal Gray's fiery stabs.

-- Craig Smith

Arab-Israeli Orchestra Of Nazareth

From a part of the world associated with conflict, it's a refreshing contrast that all of the songs performed by the Arab-Israeli Orchestra of Nazareth are about love. The orchestra hails from the largest Arab city in Israel and the ensemble's mission, particularly in its first U.S. tour, is about more than music -- it's about building cultural bridges.

The singer and seven instrumentalists were led by violinist Nizar Radwan. The instruments include those familiar to Western audiences: two violins, cello and a tambourine. But there's also an oud, a lutelike instrument plucked with a pick, a lap-held dulcimer called a kanun, and a darbuka, a drum whose body is made of pottery.

The music is characterized by the use of the melodic minor scale, the scale that gives Middle Eastern music its distinct flavor. The darbuka and tambourine rhythmically anchor the ensemble, with oud and kanun plucking harmonies against the melodies bowed by violins and cello.

Singer Lubna Salameh's vocal lines were full of slides and tremolos, echoed by the tremolos played on the strings. Salameh, singing primarily in Arabic, snapped her fingers and encouraged the audience to clap along. As the tempos wended from slow and sultry to lively and danceable, it was nearly impossible not to get one's body caught up in the infectious rhythms.

-- Gail Wein

W.A.S.P.

Blackie Lawless didn't bring his codpiece to Jaxx on Friday. The guy who helped make Tipper Gore famous didn't drink any blood from skulls, either. There weren't any flamethrowers onstage this time around. Instead of the leather and chains attire, the W.A.S.P. frontman and master of macabre metal wore a licensed Oakland Raiders jersey. For the first time in his career, Lawless let music be the centerpiece of his live show.

The songs remain profane.

The absence of theatrics reduced the length of his set to just about an hour. But W.A.S.P. followers, who over the years have witnessed such routines as the chain-sawing of a pig and the defiling of a mannequin in a nun's habit, embraced the more-rock, less-nonsense approach. From the opening bars of "On Your Knees," they headbanged along with the quartet.

Of course it wasn't the ghastly performance gags that brought W.A.S.P. to the attention of Gore and her Parents Music Resource Center -- Lawless is as responsible as any rocker for the evolution of parental advisory stickers on CDs. No, it was Lawless's song "Animal," a piece of mid-'80s filth that still packs a wallop. Other vintage shock rock in the set included "Chainsaw Charlie (Murders in the New Morgue)," "Wild Child," "L.O.V.E. Machine" and "Blind in Texas."

Lawless, 47, is now touring in support of his new CD, "Neon God, Pt. 1." It's a concept album about an abused boy who becomes a messiah -- sort of a W.A.S.P.-y "Tommy." On "Sister Sadie (and the Black Habits)," a track from the new record, Lawless sang of the abused boy's encounter with an evil member of the clergy. The tune presented Lawless with a fine opportunity to reprise the filthy bit with the mannequin. But on this night there would be only shrieking. At song's end, Lawless didn't respond to the fans' roar with the devil's horns salute they've grown to expect. No, he gave them a thumbs-up.

-- Dave McKenna