MUSIC

Orchestra Baobab

The Birchmere booked Orchestra Baobab into its spacious, no-seats dance hall on Thursday night, rather than the usual stage-and-tables performing space. Good thing -- it's impossible to sit still when this Senegalese band gets moving, and it gets moving fast. Churning out a set of Afro-Cuban dance pop (a style the group virtually invented back in the 1970s) it kept the crowd jumping all night, from the loose, sultry rhythms of "Nijaay" (off its newest album, "Made in Dakar") to the explosiveness of "Bul Ma Miin."

Lead singer Medoune Diallo was in fine form, leading the nine-piece band through its famously eclectic range of styles, which includes calypso, Congolese rumba and even American blues. Despite an ill-fated effort at a singalong (and really, how many people can sing in Wolof?), Diallo had the crowd with him from the opening notes of "Ndiaga Niaw" and held it to the end.

But he may have been upstaged by tenor saxophonist Issa Cissoko, who appears to be the happiest man on the planet. Smiling, dancing and firing off riffs in tunes like "Colette" and "Ndongo Dara," Cissoko looked like there was nowhere else he'd rather be, and the effect was infectious. Even guitarist Barthélemy Attisso -- whose low-key demeanor belies a ferocious musical brain -- couldn't help but crack a smile.

Attisso's playing, in fact, was almost reason enough to see the show. The Orchestra Baobab's strength comes from its feel-good, imaginative music rather than the virtuosity of its players; there isn't a lot of showing off onstage. But Attisso's a fascinating musical thinker, as he proved again and again -- particularly on the irresistible, Cuban-flavored "Jiin Ma Jiin Ma."

-- Stephen Brookes

Xiayin Wang

Some call China the world's manufacturing floor, and that might extend to pianists. Shanghai-trained Xiayin Wang, who arrived in New York in 2000, is among the slew of piano talent to emerge from that country in the past decade. On Thursday evening at the Freer Gallery, Wang performed a varied program that traded more in bravura virtuosity and pyrotechnics than poetry and expression. She smartly explored the nooks of harmony but positively reveled in hard-driving, effect-filled music.

Bookending the recital were works in which composers take musical forms to their limits. Busoni's arrangement of Bach's Chaconne in D Minor maintains the visceral sense of physicality and innate drama of the original violin version. Wang took the searching theme to a poignant climax that hovered like a blazing star over the churning bass accompaniment. Ravel's "La Valse" was a scintillating display of rhythm and color, similarly moving from a cultivated ebb and flow toward a searing explosion.

Wang showed her Asian roots in contemporary compositions. Marc Chan's "My Wounded Head" went from quietly intoned sound points to grand waves that warbled and thundered. Sung J. Hong's "Ecstatic Rhapsody" deserves a prize for sheer quantity of notes, if not for expressive depth. Wang made Wanghua Chu's "Celebration of New Life" and Peixun Chen's "Autumn Moon Over the Calm Lake" respectively joyous and peacefully evocative.

Showy scores truly put Wang in her element. The five steely movements of Prokofiev's "Sarcasms," Op. 4, were unfailingly incisive and vital. Scriabin's Fantasie in B Minor, Op. 28, was a luscious wash of color, infused with big swirls of sound. Her soon-to-be-released recording of the composer's music on the Naxos label should be a dandy.

-- Daniel Ginsberg