Here is my full Saturday April 11 suntimes.com and Sunday April 12 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday afternoon April 10, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Xian Zhang and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Jim Vincent, artistic director and choreographer. The Sunday paper carries a fine shot of the dance performance by John J. Kim of the Sun-Times.
Hubbard Street-CSO stage
one of finest collaborations
BY ANDREW PATNER
Dance: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Concert: RECOMMENDED
Repeated Saturday April 11 at 8 p.m. and Tuesday April 14 at 7:30 p.m.
A highlight of Jim Vincent’s nine seasons as artistic director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has been the series of six annual collaborations between the dance company and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Each entry has been intriguing, several exciting, and some have entered the HSDC repertoire.
With Vincent (above, right) preparing to leave Chicago to take over the Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague, it’s fitting that this year’s installment, seen Friday afternoon at Orchestra Hall, is one of the finest marriages of a new dance and live music in the partnership thus far. Slipstream, a dance of Vincent’s own making, is set to Benjamin Britten’s early Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10. It’s also a breakthrough for the choreographer whose language in the past could sometimes seem too private or, when not, obvious.
Five couples take to a darkened stage as a reduced string orchestra, performing on a raised platform behind a black dance floor, begins the 1937 tribute of a brilliant young composer to his demanding and liberating teacher. As Britten’s ten variations -- ranging from caricature of Italian opera, to a Bergian take on the Viennese waltz, to a funeral march and a fugue -- unfold the dancers respond to the music and, as couples, to each other, in ways that capture both the emotions of relationships and the movement of time.
That Vincent knows this music well -- he says he has carried it with him for half of his life -- and audiences do not, works to the collaboration’s advantage. We needn’t wonder how a choreographer will run up against our understanding of a Bach suite or feel a need to parody, or be obsequious to, a Mozart piano concerto. The passionate music of transformation and human change and the dance on the same themes meld together as one, aided as well by the lighting -- of both stage and hall -- by Nicholas Phillips.
Guest conductor Xian Zhang (above, left), with her strongly accented baton, was the dancers’ excellent colleague simultaneously delivering Britten’s haunting score and keeping the pulse moving for the dance. One of the few women ever to lead a subscription week at the CSO, Zhang, 35, a native of eastern China at the border of North Korea and the associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic, will also be the first woman to take up the leadership of an Italian orchestra when she become music director of Milan’s “La Verdi” in the fall.
Her firm hand in the lighter fare of the concert’s first half -- including first-ever CSO performances of Respighi’s delicate 1927 Botticelli Triptych and Henri Rabaud’s 1906 orchestration of Faure’s 1893-97 piano duets suite known as Dolly -- made these gentle works both clear and characterful. David McGill’s bassoon solos in the Respighi were superb as were Eugene Izotov’s on the oboe in Ravel’s 1914-20 Le tombeau de Couperin, a frequent visitor.
Slipstream will have a second première, without the CSO but on Hubbard's full stage at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park, at the company's season-closing programs June 4 to 7.
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