Martin Luther King Day concert is fanfare for uncommon man

Chicago Sun-Times
By Andrew Patner
January 19, 2011
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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 there 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.

Facing recent physical limits, Freeman 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, made it clear that his mind and spirit remain vigorous. Freeman and the Sinfonietta have recorded Kay’s sparkling 1968 overture to “Theater Set” and Walker’s more somber 1941 “Lyric for Strings,” and they were performed Monday with 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 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.

As for “Porgy,” what a pleasure to hear international baritone Donnie Ray Albert in Chicago in this 1956 arrangement of the 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,” 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 had 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.