Messiaen Festival off to a rousing start

Chicago Tribune
October 6, 2008
By John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune critic

Olivier Messiaen would have been overjoyed by the opening weekend of the University of Chicago 's Messiaen Festival in Mandel Hall, a 10-day feast of concerts honoring the centenary of the great French composer and modernist mystic.

Messiaen himself was represented by two minor scores—his birdsong-derived "Oiseaux Exotiques" and his concise, pungent Piece for Piano and String Quartet, written shortly before his death in 1992. The masterpieces will follow later in the festival week.

Saturday's Contempo concert, organized by artistic director Shulamit Ran and played by eighth blackbird, the Pacifica Quartet and guests, traced the master's influence on his pupils Gerald Levinson, Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin and Marta Ptaszynska, as well as on Toru Takemitsu, who considered Messiaen his spiritual mentor.

U. of C. professor Ptaszynska's "Trois Visions de l'Arc-en-Ciel," commissioned for the festival, had its world premiere. The 20-minute quintet for strings, clarinet, percussion and piano ingeniously filters elements of Messiaen's harmonic and timbral language through her own eclectic idiom, ending with a rousing original folk dance, Eastern European in flavor.
…

Like many Messiaen scores, Levinson's "Time and the Bell " draws on Balinese gamelan sounds and the rhythms of Indian raga, to pungent effect. Benjamin's "Viola/Viola" gave violists Masumi Per Rostad and Sibbi Bernhardsson a sonorous bravura workout.

To every score the performers, including pianist Stephen Gosling and conductor Cliff Colnot in the Levinson piece, brought a dedication, virtuosity and intensity of feeling new music needs but doesn't often receive.

…

jvonrhein@tribune.com

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

For the full review, go here.

At U. of C., Messiaen in a bottle
October 5, 2008
BY ANDREW PATNER, The View from Here

[...] The university's Contempo new music collective, which draws on Chicago's eighth blackbird and Pacifica Quartet, stepped up Saturday night at Mandel Hall with a rarely played late and brief work by Messiaen -- the 1991 piano quintet -- and works by five of his prominent students, including a world premiere by U. of C. prof Marta Ptaszynska.  As prepared or led by Cliff Colnot, all were given exceptional performances with Toro Takemitsu's haunting 1982 Ame no jumon ("Rain Spell"), the seminal 1984 Pierre Boulez Derive I, and the 1997 virtuosic George Benjamin duo Viola/Viola standing out.  

Ptaszynska's just-completed Trois visions de l'arc-en-ciel ("Three Visions on a Rainbow") for five players was gripping, moving, and a rare accomplishment -- an homage to a teacher who presented originality to and demanded individuality from his best students.  The Polish composer and percussionist (left), now 65, took ideas and colors from her teacher and ran them through rhythmic and aural fantasy worlds all her own.  Surely the master would have been pleased. [...]

[For Patner's full Festival review, go here.]
Contempo brings out best in Douglas

Chicago Tribune
April 9, 2007

By Howard Reich, Tribune arts critic

For those with open ears -- and minds -- the past weekend produced unforgettable listening.

The best of it attested to the caliber of musicians playing Chicago 's stages these days.

As jazz increasingly becomes a concert music, flourishing well beyond the nightclub, some of its most innovative performers are crafting music that aspires to new levels of subtlety and sophistication.

The protean trumpeter Dave Douglas seemed to be saying as much Saturday night at the Museum of Contemporary Art , where he played the second half of a genre-defying concert that opened with contemporary classical repertoire.

After hearing works by such classical innovators as the Japanese master Toru Takemitsu and the American visionary George Crumb, Douglas faced a predicament.

"What do we do?" he asked himself, as he told the capacity crowd at the MCA. The implication was that it's not easy for a jazz quintet to follow the extraordinarily polished work of Contempo (the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago , which organized this eclectic concert).

The answer, of course, was to play original music at a comparable level, or at least attempt to. Without question, Douglas and his quintet matched the polish and proficiency of the classical players, albeit in a boldly improvised jazz idiom.

Every piece that Douglas and his band played evoked a world of sound unto itself. From the soulful, blues-tinged phrases of his "Invocation" to the chorale-like passages of his "Tree and Shrub" to the whimsical, quasi-funk flavor of his "Earmarks," Douglas and friends traversed a vast musical landscape.

Yet Douglas ' solos stood at the center of this ensemble's achievements, each statement overflowing with intriguing, unexpected ideas.

With drummer Clarence Penn raising Cain behind him and bassist Scott Colley and keyboardist Uri Caine churning rhythms with nary a pause, this ensemble achieved tremendous musical momentum.

Nevertheless, one wished that Donny McCaslin -- a poet of the tenor saxophone -- might challenge Douglas , rather than merely defer to him. Whenever Douglas plays alongside a more assertive tenorist, the music acquires that much more texture and expressive intensity.

Even so, the Douglas quintet neatly counterbalanced the more formal music-making of Contempo, which produced its best work in the Chicago premiere of Josef Bardanashvili's "Nekudot" for string sextet. Though harmonically conservative and melodically neo-romantic, the piece never tired the ear.

On Friday evening, in a still more exalted setting, two other jazz innovators played extended improvisations of considerable craft, though with mixed artistic results.

In the duets that opened their Friday night concert at Symphony Center , guitarist Pat Metheny and pianist Brad Mehldau -- artists of very different sensibilities -- at first brought out the best in each other. Thanks to Mehldau's probing pianism and iconoclastic spirit, Metheny generally avoided the trite, pop-lite aspects of his work. Once the duo expanded into a quartet, however, it didn't take Metheny long to crank up the volume on bland, accompanying chords, often at the expense of Mehldau's decidedly more substantive solos. Nevertheless, the craggy individuality of Mehldau's playing consistently elevated the level of discourse.

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hreich@tribune.com
Contempo reaches out with 20th century music
Chicago Sun-Times
February 5, 2007

By Andrew Patner
It might have been sub-zero outside on Saturday night, but Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Shulamit Ran's 150-kilowatt smile lit and warmed the standing room only Claudia Cassidy Theater at the Chicago Cultural Center downtown.

Ran, the artistic director of Contempo, the University of Chicago's Contemporary Chamber Players, has been looking for some time for ways to bring more people to the 42-year-old organization's concerts and to bring its new music offerings to more parts and communities in the city. This weekend's "Pacifica Quartet and Friends" concert seemed to have done the trick with a couple of hundred people turning out for a program where the most familiar composer was the guru of atonality, Arnold Schoenberg.

While the largely youthful audience, which seemed to include many who were new to 20th century art music, had probably not come out for Schoenberg's own work, the rare chance to hear his Second String Quartet in F-sharp minor, Op. 10, exactly 100 years after he began composing this still- astonishing piece made this a concert that could not be missed. Over the course of just 30 minutes, Schoenberg seems to survey the history of both tonality and the string quartet.

And the introduction of a soprano singing poems by the German mystical poet Stefan George as an integral part of the quartet's third and fourth movements undertakes a break with and adaptation of earlier forms as shocking and right as Beethoven's introduction of a chorus and singers in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony. East Coast soprano Mary Nessinger was the authoritative representative of otherworldliness who sang, "I feel the air of another planet" -- and made us feel it, too.

Three works from the late 1990s received Chicago premieres after the Schoenberg:

Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh has been a favorite of the trend-setting Kronos Quartet, and her 15- minute 1998 "Oasis" for quartet and tape -- of water dropping, men's murmuring voices, etc. -- is one of the better examples of a style that hovers somewhere between spirituality and gimmickry.

Josef Bardanashvili's 1998 "Metamorphoses" for viola and piano allowed Pacifica violist Masumi Per Rostad to step up with a marvelous run-through of this 12-minute gallop of expressive melodies and quotations recast in virtuosic forms.

After these over-the-top entries, Kotoka Suzuki's 12-minute five-movement quartet "Minyo" (a Japanese genre of folk music) was refreshing and also brought out the best playing from Pacifica. It is a strong and welcome piece, a sort of Japanese set of Ligeti miniatures.

Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7).
Pacifica, eighth blackbird unleash power of Chicago composers
Chicago Sun-Times
January 25, 2005

By Andrew Patner
When Ralph Shapey left New York City in 1963 to become the first composer on the music faculty of the University of Chicago, he did so with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation challenging him "to make the desert [of contemporary music performance] bloom."

To that end, Shapey founded the Contemporary Chamber Players; now, a decade after his retirement and more than two years after his death, the group is celebrating its 40th anniversary season with a new name, Contempo; additional funding, and a new set of venues.

Largely due to Shapey's larger-than-life influence, Chicago is now home to several nationally recognized new music ensembles and dozens of composers. So Contempo now encompasses two of these new generation ensembles as artists-in-residence – the Pacifica Quartet and the multi-instrumental eighth blackbird – and is led by two Shapey proteges, artistic director Shulamit Ran, a Pulitzer Prize-winning member of the U. of C. composition faculty, and principal conductor Cliff Colnot, a busy member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducting staff.

For the Sunday concert, its first of the calendar year, Contempo offered a well-thought-out program of Chicago composers and demonstrated that the U. of C.'s Court Theatre space is an ideal spot for music. The blackbirds' clarinetist, Michael Maccaferri, opened the program with Shapey's daunting 10-minute Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Group. Fans of eighth blackbird know what a fine player Maccaferri is, but it was a real treat to hear him stepping out as a commanding soloist in another context.

Three pieces by women composers followed, including two by Marta Ptaszynska and Kotoka Suzuki, who, with Ran, make up the U. of C.'s all-female composition team. Ptaszynska's meditative "Moon Flowers," inspired by the paintings of Odilon Redon, was lovingly played by blackbird cellist Nicholas Photinos with blackbird pianist Lisa Kaplan generating eerie tones from her Steinway. And blackbird flutist Molly Alicia Barth was the dynamic live component of Suzuki's tightly executed "Slipstream" for seven-channel surround tape and soloist.

Ruth Crawford Seeger, a pioneering American composer who spent a key decade in Chicago, is becoming increasingly known more than 50 years after her death. Her 1931 String Quartet remains a prophetic masterwork, in anticipating serialism yet never losing its American feel; it was expertly and movingly played by Pacifica.

For many years, John Austin balanced two careers as a Harvard-educated downtown Chicago lawyer and a home-studio composer. Eventually earning his master's from Roosevelt and his doctorate from the U. of C., Austin has more recently been able to devote himself full time to composition. To close the concert, his exciting "Celebrations" for piano and chamber orchestra received its world premiere. Completing an eight-year cycle of larger works that Austin calls "A Song of Hours," "Celebrations" fuses two major schools of American composition: the open, folk-inspired work of Aaron Copland (and of Austin's early teacher Roy Harris) and the knottier modernism of Shapey and company.

Over the 24-minute single-movement work, soloist Abraham Stokman and conductor Colnot drove a performance that was simultaneously lyrical and powerful, in keeping with the piece's conception of a joyful outcome of a life filled with exploration, loss and revival. Blossoms all around, and hardly a grain of desert sand in sight.
CCP shines in challenging season opener
Chicago Sun Times
October 27, 2003

By Wynne Delacoma
The University of Chicago's Contemporary Chamber Players has had its ups and downs since its founding four decades ago by the indomitable composer Ralph Shapey.

At times, the programs were doctrinaire and performances felt more like graduate-student recitals than professional concerts. But CCP has been on a roll in the last few seasons. With composer Shulamit Ran as its artistic director and Cliff Colnot as conductor, CCP's 2003-04 season opened Friday night with a winning combination of intriguing music and superb performers. There was an air of luxury in Mandel Hall that came from knowing that CCP has some of the city's best young musicians at its disposal ready and willing to play challenging music.

U of C has not one but two outstanding young ensembles in residence, the Pacifica Quartet and eighth blackbird, and both were on hand Friday night. (Both groups have won the Naumburg Award, one of chamber music's most prestigious prizes; Pacifica in 1998 and eighth blackbird in 2000.) The ferociously intense Pacifica was featured in two works, Sofia Gubaidulina's haunting "Perception,'' written between 1981 and 1983 for soprano, baritone, strings and tape, and Osvaldo Golijov's "Last Round,'' a 1996 tango-inspired work for two quartets and double bass. Dorothy Chang's restlessly searching "Wind/Unwind,'' composed last year, was performed by eighth blackbird members Molly Alicia Barth, flutes; Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets, Matthew Albert, violin/viola, cellist Nicholas Photinos and pianist Lisa Kaplan.

Coming after intermission, Gubaidulina's 13-section "Perception'' was the major work. Colnot conducted soprano Tony Arnold, baritone Stephen Swanson and the Pacifica plus violist Claudia Lasareff-Mironoff, cellist Daniel Klingler, bassist Kathryn Nettelman and David M. Gordon handling additional pre-taped material.

With its text drawn from the Psalms, poetry by Gubaidulina and her friend, the German poet Francisco Tanzer, "Perception'' unfolded with Gubaidulina's signature atmosphere of austere, awe-struck mysticism. Arnold was spellbinding, whether reciting Tanzer's text in an urgent, ghostly whisper or sending forth Gubaidulina's deliberate, wide-ranging vocal line with laserlike clarity. Swanson found understated drama in his long stretches of spoken declamation and quasi-sung speech. But in the seventh movement titled "At the Sea,'' he found warm nobility in the Bach-like melodies.

Golijov's "Last Round'' opened the concert with the steamy parry and thrust of tango partners dancing to kill. Despite the often dense, noctural moments of "Wind/Unwind,'' eighth blackbird never submerged their strongly colored, individual voices.
Contemporary Chamber Players at Mandel Hall
Chicago Sun-Times
April 23, 2002

By Wynne Delacoma
The University of Chicago's Contemporary Chamber Players have been experimenting with both their musical mission and administrative setup in recent years.

Founded in 1964 by Ralph Shapey, the formidable composer and University of Chicago faculty member who oversaw the group until 1993, the Chamber Players' programming is now chosen by a committee of music faculty members. Two young, lively ensembles – the Pacifica Quartet and eighth blackbird, which specializes in new music – are in residence for performances and sessions with student and established composers.

With such major changes in the air, it was fascinating to hear a CCP concert devoted to ritual Sunday afternoon at the U. of C.'s Mandel Hall. The program opened with John Adams' powerfully minimalist "Shaker Loops" from 1978, performed by the Pacifica's four string players, plus two from eighth blackbird, and guest bassist Doug Johnson. Jan Radzynski's "Three Hebrew Melodies," completed in 1984, followed with the Pacifica and eighth blackbird's pianist, Lisa Kaplan. The concert closed with Stephen Hartke's "Tituli," a setting of ancient Roman inscriptions composed in 1999 featuring the Aguava New Music Studio, a vocal quintet, plus violin and percussion, conducted by CCP's resident conductor Carmen Helena Tellez.

Rituals, ceremonies devised to mark human events from birth to death, imply repetition. We use rituals to mark major, universally experienced life transitions, as if by returning to prayers or actions we know well we can smooth the way to a new, perhaps unwelcome, stage in our lives. Sunday's works by Adams and Radzynski took the concept of repetition one step beyond, emphasizing the element of repetition within ritual music itself.

Few composers create more exciting music out of tiny, incessently repeated musical fragments than John Adams, and the CCP players, conducted by Tellez, plunged fearlessly into his urgently driven "Shaker Loops." The violins were incandescent, sending forth an endlessly shimmering line that hung in the air, swaying like a fragile, imminently breakable silken cord. At one point, the pace relaxed, and single strokes leaped from the relentless background with the clear, plaintive sound of a wet finger rubbing the rim of a crystal glass. In the final section, Adams' repetitions took on the thundering power of an accelerating freight train.

Radzynski's arrangements of Jewish melodies from Ashkenazi, Yemenite and Kurdish traditions were a heady mix of dissonance and exotic, darkly minor harmonies. Urged on by the slow, steady clang of Kaplan's piano, the Pacifica Quartet turned the second melody, "Ayalat Khen (Gracious Gazelle)" from Yemen, into a massive, irresistibly rhythmic dance.

Hartke's "Tituli," a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in music, occupied a quieter, more haunted place. The voices of Aguava New Music Studio came and went serenely, sometimes blending into dissonant harmonies, often sailing off into five different, uncharted realms. Hartke's texts were touching, including fragments from a 6-year-old's tombstone and simple inscriptions on gifts given more than 3,000 years ago. Matt Albert's occasional, sharply sweet violin outbursts and the dusky sound of a bow drawn along the edge of a wooden marimba plate added to the hushed, otherworldly atmosphere.