Chicago Sinfonietta: Paul Freeman living Dr. King's dream, one more time

Here, with small cuts restored, is my Wednesday January 19 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Monday, January 17, 2011 Chicago Sinfonietta Martin Luther King, Jr. Day concert with Paul Freeman and Leslie B. Dunner, pianist Reginald Robinson, vocal soloists, and the Chicago Community Chorus.

Paul Freeman, pictured with the Chicago Sinfonietta in an earlier concert, conducted his final King Day concert as music director Monday.

King Day concert is fanfare for uncommon man

BY ANDREW PATNER

As a young man, Paul Freeman, the Chicago Sinfonietta’s visionary founder, met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Atlanta airport in March 1968, just a few weeks before King’s assassination. When Freeman, then 32, told the civil rights leader that he was coming into town to conduct the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra King exclaimed, “The last bastion of elitism . . . Glory, Hallelujah!”

That encounter stayed with Freeman and fueled his mission to launch an orchestra devoted to diversity and excellence, that saw excellence as coming in part from diversity. Nearly a quarter century after the Sinfonietta’s debut, its annual King Day commemorative tribute Monday night at Orchestra Hall was a varied, beautifully executed, and moving concert, one of the finest I have heard in some time from this essential group..

Facing recent physical limits, Freeman, 75, will step down as music director after this season.  His leadership of two important abstract works by African-American composers Ulysses Kay (1917-1995) and George Walker (born 1922), as well as his witty banter with the audience as he led a hall-wide concert-closing singing of “We Shall Overcome," made it clear that his mind and spirit remain vigorous. Freeman and the Sinfonietta have recorded both Kay’s sparkling 1968 Overture to Theater Set and Walker’s more somber 1941 Lyric for Strings, and they were performed Monday with both care and grace.

Freeman ceded the podium to Leslie B. Dunner for two larger works: the 2007-10 Concerto for a Genius, a collaboration between Chicago trumpeter and orchestrator Orbert Davis and young ragtime piano wonder and MacArthur Fellow Reginald Robinson, and Robert Russell Bennett’s “concert version” of the Gershwins and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy and Bess.  Cross-genre and fusion works are always a challenge for composer and performers.  Working with four original solo neo-ragtime numbers from Robinson’s 2006 album Man Out of Time, Davis created a rich orchestral setting, sometimes too rich, so that even Robinson’s amplified (!) Steinway was overtaken by its admittedly intriguing accompaniment.  A solo encore let Robinson loose and won an additional ovation.

As for Porgy, what a pleasure to hear and see international baritone Donnie Ray Albert in Chicago in this 1956 arrangement of the great 1935 American opera.  His vocal and physical offering of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” with soprano Lisa Daltirus took us back to the great William Warfield.  Tenor Chauncey Packer was a spirited Sportin’ Life in the razzle-dazzle character’s two interpolated showstoppers.  And the spirit of Keith Hampton’s life-affirming, mature, and all-volunteer Chicago Community Chorus and the superb shaping and playing of the score by Dunner and the orchestra capped off an inspiring concert.

When Freeman returned for the shared singing of “We Shall Overcome” with the large and wonderfully mixed audience, it was hard to separate one’s mind from recent tragic events, King’s life and sacrifice, or the continued lack of diversity in the ranks, programming, and audience of the higher-profile Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

It’s clear that Freeman, who has done so much to advance diversity in classical music, is leaving the Sinfonietta in excellent artistic and organizational shape.  “The last bastion of elitism . . .  Glory, Hallelujah!” indeed.