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“We know that dance happens, but it also vanishes when it happens,” he said. “All we are creating is air. We are giving society a different air, that’s all.”

So it is intriguing to learn that this work, depicting a timeless spiritual quest for “asceticism and quietude”, is a characteristic offering from a company that emerged from one of the most turbulent periods of modern Asian geopolitics.

The music is the first and most direct connection to Bowie, but the tribute is also in the movement. Rhoden’s vocabulary is infused with androgynous and serpentine spines, articulate hips, small and precise hand gestures, large sweeping lines of the arms, unorthodox head movements, sinewy walks and forced arches.

She’s been well known, and highly regarded, for the dramatic quality she employed in the opera repertory, and immediately it was clear this was going to be no lighthearted run-through of pop-flavored material.

It all added up to a long, packed and thoroughly enjoyable evening; the capacity audience in the Concert Hall certainly got its money’s worth. Rather than witnessing a memorial to a soprano’s storied past, we got something vital and compelling and very much in the present; and I came away with new respect and admiration for Battle.

Ms. Battle, of course, was the star. I was especially moved by the spirituals when she sang with just the piano, like “City Called Heaven,” in which she conveyed a poignant mix of longing for the promised city, sadness and childlike innocence.

Here, the wondrously talented Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski opens daringly with Brahms’s wistful Intermezzo, Op117, before a dazzlingly reading of the Op24 Variation and Fugue on a theme by Handel. 

ow to make Chopin your own? That’s a challenge every pianist faces, and those who cheered Simon Trpčeski on to a perhaps excessive five encores at the end of this recital would say their man has met it. 

Seeing cross-cultural and cross-generational audiences at performances of “Feathers of Fire” fulfills Rahmanian’s deepest dream: to share his homeland’s rich visual and literary culture with the West.

“intellectual and emotional, earnest and sentimental, complex and heartbreakingly simple.”