Lera Auerbach’s The Infant Minstrel and His Peculiar Menagerie is a genre-defying symphony for solo violin, choir and orchestra, at once concert work, music theatre, dark fairy tale, choral pageant and metaphysical cabaret. The solo violinist becomes a traveling child-bard who leads the audience through a strange procession of comic, grotesque and luminous figures.

The solo violinist performs the lead role of a traveling musical storyteller who introduces a collection of wondrous tales by the mysterious author Erroneous Anonymous. The Infant Minstrel guides listeners in a voyage of imagination, speaking to the young and the young at heart through child-like, enigmatic and humorous poems.

The work draws on the tradition of literary nonsense — Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Mother Goose, Hilaire Belloc, Edith Sitwell, Shel Silverstein, Edward Gorey and Tim Burton — but transforms it into something unmistakably Auerbachian: playful on the surface, unsettling beneath and finally profound.

Its nursery-rhyme absurdity opens into questions of childhood, freedom, violence, loneliness, imagination and spiritual survival. We meet characters such as the Common Corporant, the Moon-Rider and the Flying Pig that enjoys sitting on a cloud watching the crowd. With humor, the work embraces the traditions of the British and Gaelic bard and the troubadour, while also finding inspiration in the menagerie, the sideshow and the presentation of oddities and the bizarre.