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Next season, the Chicago Sinfonietta will celebrate its 20th anniversary, an impressive achievement for any ensemble, not to mention one whose stated mission is to bring a more diverse audience and player roster to classical music.
On Monday night in Symphony Center, the Sinfonietta closed its 19th season doing what it does best, giving traditional orchestral programming a bracing shake. It offered a violin concerto with an amplified solo instrument and the descriptive title "Voodoo,'' and a performance of Holst's "The Planets," accompanied by an elegant video with awesome views of the planets photographed from probes floating in outer space. This is not standard operating procedure for your average symphony orchestra, but it sent the Sinfonietta's loyal audience into delighted applause.
Classically trained, Daniel Bernard Roumain is a young Haitian-American composer and violinist who goes by the initials DBR and wears waist-length dreadlocks. He mixes funk, minimalism and virtuoso riffs in his "Voodoo'' Concerto. Composed in 2002 and scored for tiny ensemble including synthesizer and amplified guitar as well as standard orchestral instruments like violin and woodwinds, the concerto has four movements that are supposed to evoke rituals and rites of passage.
The musical content, mostly full of perky rhythms and repetitious melodic fragments, seemed too light for such a heavy message. But Roumain is an entrancing performer, confident and polished, able to make his richly amplified violin sing, shriek or seduce. Though tethered to an amplifier, he moved easily onstage, bouncing to the rhythms and sauntering about as naturally as any young rock and roller. He and the other musicians fed off one another's energy while Paul Freeman, the Sinfonietta's intrepid founder, was the ever-unflappable, vigilant conductor. Roumain's solo encore, a free-form "Amazing Grace'' was deeply felt.
Freeman turned to the Adler Planetarium and one of its astronomers, Jose Francisco Salgado, for images to accompany "The Planets.'' Salgado assembled everything from meticulously detailed 17th century charts and maps on aged, sepia-tinged paper to contemporary photos of impossibly round, color-striped orbs floating against the black sky like austerely modern art objects.
In the Mercury movement, the sun was a massive, boiling circle, its surface constantly erupting with white- and red-hot spots. Video of the vehicle exploring Mars' surface revealed a sturdy little contraption with the body of a Jeep and the neck and vigilant eye of a swan. At one point, Uranus hung in the night like a sleek turquoise ball of brushed aluminum.
The images were so captivating that the music became distinctly secondary. At times, the playing sounded raw and bombastic, but there was a nice menace to the march of the low brass in Uranus, and sweetly mellow horns and woodwinds in the gentle Venus movement.
Copyright © 2006 Chicago Sun-Times
In closing out its 19th season, the Chicago Sinfonietta, led by music director Paul Freeman, turned the concept of going to "see" the symphony inside-out. For most of a mind-grabbing concert at Dominican University’s Lund Auditorium on May 14, the Sinfonietta was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the rousing opener featured a rock combo drawn primarily from the orchestra’s principals as the back-up for "DBR," an electric violinist. After a brief sighting of orchestra players scattered about the stage warming up, a translucent screen descended and the musicians receded into the shadows for The Planets, a tone poem by Gustav Holst.
Daniel Bernard Roumain’s (DBR) "Voodoo Concerto No. 1" was indeed electric, and not simply because the violin and back-up ensemble were amplified (uncomfortably and unnecessarily loud for this reviewer’s taste). This young violinist stirred up a stunning mix of Haitian folk idioms, improv à la Jimi Hendrix, and plaintive American hymns, peppered with his own vibrant musical imagination.
DBR’s four-movement composition is a bona fide concerto in the best sense: there was plenty of room for the soloist’s scintillating fireworks, in this case complete with percussive effects, stomping, and other-worldly, but highly- controlled, screeches from the bow. As for bow control, which string players are always aiming for, DBR at one point perched the bow skillfully between his teeth in order to free up both hands for slapping and tapping the fingerboard like the best of drummers.
DBR explored enough extremes of mood and arresting sounds for a lifetime—
this concerto was meant to be partly autobiographical, telling the story
of a life
lived beyond the edge without caution and restraint. His intense and
sometimes
near violent playing raised the question whether the fragile violin itself
would
weather more performances. But at least violins are replaceable, unlike
imaginations, and one must hope that DBR’s immensely inventive
musical
imagination will weather the taming of age.
With the orchestra out of view, there was more to see in the second half:
a
fascinating parade of images designed by gifted artist and astronomer
Dr. José
Francisco Salgado of the Adler Planetarium. Like DBR, Salgado explores
artistic expression in uncharted territory. The medium for his imagination
was a
silent film sequence of inspired, highly communicative images from historical
documents and current research related to each planet.
Trained as a scientist, Salgado revealed an acute musical sensitivity and keen eye for pacing and editing that matched Holst’s music seamlessly. His work was so effective as to arouse reverence—for his artistic eye and for the magnificence of the planets themselves. Having the orchestra mysteriously out of view, but still playing impeccably and precisely, only increased the mysterious aura of an unexplored universe.
One can draw an obvious connection between Debussy, Holst, and the mesmerizing effect of Asian music, which is so apparent in The Planets, but the images were so captivating that I had to keep reminding myself to notice the orchestra’s especially lush and warm sound in near-Debussy-like passages from Holst.
Salgado ingeniously provided footage from NASA animations of robots exploring Mars, while the incessant snare drum, carefully executed, backed up Holst’s driving and alarming ostinati in "Mars, the Bringer of War." Effortless and graceful solos from principal horn and violin were accompanied by classical images of the goddess Venus, "Bringer of Peace."
Whirling red-orange landscapes depicted "Mercury, the Winged Messenger" as the orchestra took on Holst’s playful Scherzo with quick fingering in the fancy melodic figures. Notably wonderful playing on the celeste further developed the sense of the haunting stillness of extra-terrestrial terrain.
In "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity," with cellos warmly introducing the expansive, hymn-like melody, a chartreuse and pock-marked planet rose larger and larger before our eyes. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was paired perfectly with the brass fanfares, played brilliantly and cleanly.
The voyage continued to Saturn, the icy "Bringer of Old Age," with the orchestra’s long and well-balanced crescendo against the familiar rings in cool colors. As we heard the bassoon mimicking a sorcerer in Uranus, "The Magician," we saw news of the discovery of its first moons by William Herschel in 1787. Neptune, "The Mystic," closed out the concert with a patiently long and lingering diminuendo, as the sounds and sights disappeared to the outer extremes of uncertainty.
The real test of extremes at this concert was proven by the children sitting in front of me. Yes, compliments to the Sinfonietta for attracting a lot of children to this event. These two sat still, spellbound like the rest of us throughout the amazing two-hour trip.
Copyright © 2006 Wednesday Journal, Inc