Here is my December 15 suntimes.com and wfmt.com review of the Monday, December 13, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW program at the Harris Theater.
CSO Mead composers-in-residence Anna Clyne and Mason Bates. Photo: © Todd Rosenberg Photography
Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW
2010-11 Season -- Program 2: December 2010
at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park
BY ANDREW PATNER
For their second MusicNOW concert as Chicago Symphony Orchestra Mead composers-in-residence, Anna Clyne and Mason Bates curated a program of five works with jazz and popular music influences. The results were mixed, as combinations of new things will often be, but the playing was, as ever, superb, and the large crowd was pleased.
These two young musicmakers have already shown sufficient variety in what interests them that there’s little point offering any larger judgment on their work until season’s end. (The next show in the series, featuring German electronica artists Mouse on Mars, is set for January 31, and each composer will also have a new work on the March 21 concert.) They have offered a fresh spirit, are regular presences in the city and on its music scenes, and they have thoughtfully and creatively streamlined the structure of these inexpensive and intermissionless programs at the Harris Theater and their onstage interviews with guest composers.
That said, this listener at least would like to have works with a bit more rigor than the first three of the five pieces heard Monday. Berkeley composer Edmund Campion’s 2000 “Corail” (French for coral) featured virtuoso jazz saxophone player Jim Gailloreto in an extended solo moving around the darkened Harris seating area while "dueting" with interactive software controlled by Campion. The idea of the piece is that the soloist exists in an environment, but we got that idea in the first minute and the piece was 12 minutes long.
Princeton-based composer-clarinetist Derek Bermel’s 2001 “Three Rivers” for 12 players has a Pittsburgh origin as its title indicates and is driven by the clever concept that three different rhythmic systems move with and around each other. But the jazz used was obvious and cliched. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story opened in 1957 and all we were missing in this presumably unintentional 13-minute knock-off was the Jets' finger-snapping. New York-based Italian Paola Prestini’s 2009 “Spell” for amplified clarinet, 'cello, and percussion/vibraphone was briefer at seven minutes but little more than New Age noodling.
Jason Eckardt, another New Yorker, wrote “Tangled Loops” for soprano saxophone and piano in 1996 when he was just 25. Having started out in music as a guitarist in heavy metal bands, Eckardt had a conversion experience when he heard the intense and spare earlier-20th-century Modernist music of Anton Webern. Both the virtuosity required by metal and the discipline demanded by Webern are strongly evident in this accomplished, often manic nine-minute piece. Jeremy Ruthrauff was the lead soloist with Amy Briggs his highly-focused piano partner. I would love to hear what this young composer has been writing in the 15 years since “Loops.”
Coming up on 55, Princeton composer Steve Mackey is well-known to Chicago audiences. His 1999 five-movement, 20-minute “Micro-Concerto” for percussion and five instruments also combines virtuoso requirements -- here brilliantly dispatched with almost nonchalant ease on a seeming storeroom’s quantity of instruments by CSO principal percussionist Cynthia Yeh -- and intricate and attractive scoring.
MusicNOW principal conductor Cliff Colnot expertly prepared and led the Bermel and Mackey works. Yeh had important parts in the Bermel and Prestini as well as the concerto. Several of the other important roles in the evening were taken by retired CSO principal clarinet Larry Combs, principal second violin Baird Dodge, 'cellist Jonathan Pegis, bassist Robert Kassinger, and acting principal clarinet John Bruce Yeh.
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