Here is the full version of my Saturday, October 25, 2008 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday, October 23, 2008 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya with Jennifer Warren-Acosta and Kenneth Olsen as soloists.
Baffling 'Inca Trail' veers off course
A graduate student in this area could have a field day with this week's Chicago Symphony Orchestra program. Assembled and led by the young Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Music from the Inca Trail/Caminos del Inka starts with Harth-Bedoya's native Peru and moves around several other South American countries, mostly those on the Pacific coast.
Harth-Bedoya (left) is clearly inspired by Yo-Yo Ma's massive Silk Road Project and has assembled audiovisual artists, soloists, and composers to help him build up his vision. But as with Ma's concept, which had a lengthy residence in Chicago last season, The Inca Trail is often confusing and confused.
Are we looking for musical influences here between Europe and South America, Western and native peoples? Are we trying to see how South American composers of various and variously mixed ancestries worked and work in the idiom of Western art music? Are we hearing music that has been selected for reasons of quality or geography? And why must we be distracted by film and video images when we are trying to listen?
As muddled as the agenda is here, and as schlocky and tasteless as some of the arrangements of historic compositions are, the program does showcase two talented soloists, one a member of the CSO, and introduces us to another promising young composer.
Jessica Warren-Acosta's work on Andean flutes in Peruvian-American Gabriela Lena Frank's 2004 tone poem Illapa (named after the Andean weather god) was striking, but the music sounded like something you would hear in the waiting room of a day spa, as did Ecuadorian composer Diego Luzuriaga's 2000 Responsorio.
In just three years and in his very first job, CSO assistant principal cello Kenneth Olsen (left) has become a linchpin of the orchestra and the local chamber music scene. In the Chicago premiere of Osvaldo Golijov's new orchestral reworking of his 1999 cello and marimba piece Mariel, Olsen's remarkable singing tone in all registers and his deep interpretive skill showed him to be one of the best cellists out there. He made the music, with its sappy, second-rate Disney film-style orchestral accompaniment, sound like something for the 10 minutes of his solo.
Even the program notes suggested that Enrique Soro's 1942 Three Chilean Airs was on the level of movie music. They were generous. Three pieces of popular music collected by 18th-century Peruvian bishop Baltasar Martínez y Compañón were fascinating if too-heavily orchestrated.
Fortunately, Peruvian composer Jimmy López (right), a Harth-Bedoya protege, just 30 and with an intriguing seven years of study at the Sibelius Academy in Finland, displayed a real sense of making music from disparate sources in his ill-titled Fiesta! (2007). The intriguing blend of trance, techno, Latin rhythms, and a keen understanding of orchestral instruments made the 10-minute piece a highlight of the evening.
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