Here is my Saturday April 17 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday April 15, 2010, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Carlos Kalmar conducting and featuring the CSO's annual collaboration with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. I'll have more to say about the dance piece after it has its company première in early June.
Alejandro Cerrudo (photo: Todd Rosenberg) and Mason Bates
Dance event brings festive spirit to CSO
Hubbard Street's Cerrudo and (almost) CSO's Bates combine for youthful energy
You know that something is different at Orchestra Hall this week right when you step into the lobby. Young people, casually dressed people, goofily dressed people, laughing people -- there’s a dance audience at a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert!
Thanks to an initial idea by former Hubbard Street Chicago artistic director Jim Vincent and CSO vice president of artistic administration Martha Gilmer and hard work by them and their institutions, what started out as an experiment in 2004 has grown into an annual collaboration that is not only accepted but now feels absolutely natural. Several CSO players early on in this partnership raised questions about having to perform upstage (or above the stage, depending upon the work presented), but the musicians look pretty happy now as the program moves into its orchestra-only portions and those dance kids in the audience are giving their “Whoop! Whoop!” cheers and won’t let anybody leave the stage, even after Ravel’s Mother Goose, until everybody has taken multiple bows.
Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, the festivity was well met by this seventh joint offering. Deep Down Dos, set by rising Hubbard Street resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo to Mason Bates's Music from Underground Spaces (2007) will have its Hubbard Street company première with recorded score and full staging June 3-6 at the Harris Theater. For now, it’s enough to say that Cerrudo, 29, and Bates, 33, and one of the CSO’s two incoming Mead composers-in-residence, have interests and styles that work well together and can connect with the contemporary without merely being fashionable. And the audience cheered the CSO as much as the nine superb dancers and the two creators. In a very thoughtful touch, Vincent, now artistic director of the Nederlands Dans Theater, flew in from The Hague for the performance.
Bates must have felt some relief, too. This project had been discussed parallel to his being selected to come to Chicago to compose and curate other programs. He gave Cerrudo a few of his pieces to choose from, and the Spanish dancer-choreographer chose this 14-minute work for traditional orchestra and electronica, here a drum pad and laptop manned by the composer. So Bates made his CSO debut under unusual circumstances, but with success. He shows a good feel for both the acoustic and electronic sides of things and has a wonderful sense of action and narrative in his music. We’ll have at least two seasons to see how he works with these two genres and how a still-growing composer develops.
This is also an unusual week because an otherwise familiar Chicago podium figure was making his CSO subscription concerts debut. Grant Park Music Festival principal conductor Carlos Kalmar was a last-minute substitute for Finland’s Esa-Pekka Salonen, who withdrew from these concerts for undisclosed personal reasons. Kalmar, celebrating his 10th season at Grant Park this summer, is also music director of the Oregon Symphony Orchestra and took up the set program without changes. The Three Dances from Falla’s El amor brujo (1915-1916) found the Uruguayan-born conductor at home rhythmically and harmonically. Perhaps it was a general lessening of tension after the excitement of the dance work, but the complete Mother Goose ballet (1910-11) seemed slow going, albeit with beautiful solos from many section leaders. The same composer’s La valse (1919-20) clearly speaks to Kalmar’s Viennese roots and training; he knows this work should not sound too “French.” But the apocalypse came a bit early. If you get going too quickly in this piece, all you can do is then go even faster, and that’s not its or Ravel’s point.
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