A Mostly Enchanted Evening From the East

“All’s well that ends well” may not be an old Russian proverb, but musicians of all tongues and methods know how important it is to end on a note that’s definitive, or at least appropriate.

Even a grossly unfit ending couldn’t ruin the enchanting program Friday night at the Irvine Barclay Theatre: a world music summit, former Soviet bloc division, in which the female choir known as Bulgarian Voices “Angelite” alternated and meshed with Huun-Huur-Tu, the folk quartet from the Siberian republic of Tuva.

For 100 minutes it went like this: The 18 Bulgarians, who first won raves in the West in the late 1980s under the name Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, were the sound of rushing air and of spiritual light filtering into an earthly realm. The Tuvans, with their gruff, oscillating bass tones and keening high-range laments, embodied the terra firma under the Bulgarians’ firmament.

Members of a third, unknown-in-America entity, the Moscow Art Trio, generally were fine team players who brought in strains of Russian folk song and supported the headliners with rhythmic jazz piano currents and inventive, sometimes klezmer-like sallies on melodica, French horn, clarinet and wood flute. Mikhail Alperin, the trio’s leader, had the initial vision of teaming Tuvans and Bulgarians and composed much of the music on their prayer-like joint album “Fly, Fly My Sadness.” He is the musical director for the alliance’s first American tour, which flowed deftly with the assembled talents arrayed separately, together and in various sizes and combinations. The concert added lots of winning zest and humor to the solemnity of the album selections.

It culminated with a wonderful encore of dazzling Bulgarian energy and otherworldly Tuvan “throat singing,” wherein guttural Howlin’ Wolf growls and whistling Moog-like buzzes come simultaneously from a single voice box.

Well, it should have culminated. Instead, Alperin used his clout to butt in with a superfluous end piece by the Moscow Art Trio that wasn’t just woefully anticlimactic but smacked of gross opportunism. This blunder turned afterglow to aftertaste, “all’s well” to “oh, well.”