Chicago Sinfonietta review: A message of hope and honoring of heroes sent via cyberspace
The Chicago Sinfonietta opened its 33d season in a new location: cyberspace.
But that wasn’t the only way the performance – prerecorded at North Central College’s Wentz Concert Hall in Naperville – broke ground. The concert, posted Saturday evening on the Sinfonietta’s website, also featured a world premiere by the orchestra’s new artist-in-residence, composer Kathryn Bostic.
Like Bostic’s work, “Portrait of a Peaceful Warrior,” the entire program seemed designed to offer hope and resilience in difficult times.
“Tonight, in our opening concert titled ‘Common Ground: Collective Stories,’ we honor those heroes who have helped us during the pandemic,” said Sinfonietta music director Mei-Ann Chen in her online commentary.
“In this unique time in our country’s history and in the world, we continue to seek a path to equity and justice through common ground. That which connects us and brings us together can help to unite us in a time where the world is being challenged.”
Bostic’s commissioned work built on those sentiments, her thoughts expressed first in an onscreen letter that preceded the premiere.
The composition, wrote Bostic, “is a tribute to the vast and diverse voices of humanity coming together to stand up for justice, equality, inclusion and human rights; core values of the Chicago Sinfonietta. … A global pandemic, racial injustice, climate change, economic and political imbalance (and more) are a clarion call for us all to make choices in our beliefs and actions for purposeful authentic service to humanity and our own self-awareness.”
Even if you didn’t read this text, there was no mistaking the life-affirming qualities of Bostic’s tone poem, which ran a little over three minutes. Penned for brass and percussion, “Portrait of a Peaceful Warrior” was built on surging rhythm, Copland-like syncopation and a conservative harmonic vocabulary. Though fashioned to be accessible to a wide audience, the work also showed considerable craft in voicing and melodic phrase. It’s easy to imagine this piece having a future life with other ensembles.
Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango” ranks among the Argentine composer’s more frequently performed works, but this time it appeared in a less familiar guise: an arrangement by Jeff Scott of the Imani Winds. Conductor Chen led the Sinfonietta’s wind quintet in an idiomatic reading that captured the rhythmic charm and lyric elegance of Piazzolla’s original.
The music world lately has been awakening to the allure of music by Florence Price, an African American composer who shattered barriers in 1933 when Frederick Stock conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of her Symphony No. 1. The Sinfonietta shed additional light on Price’s oeuvre with a string orchestra arrangement of the second movement of her String Quartet in G Major. Conductor Chen’s performance showed that there’s more to Price’s art than just its graceful melodic lines, the conductor bringing forth subtle harmonic underpinnings.
Most of this year’s planned tributes to Beethoven’s 250th birthday have been canceled due to the pandemic, so one welcomed the Sinfonietta’s contribution, which proved characteristically unorthodox. Rather than offer something wholly familiar, Chen led the Sinfonietta strings in Jeffrey L. Briggs' arrangement of two movements from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 13, “Pathetique.” This may have seemed like a bit of a stunt, in that this music is so inherently pianistic. But there were new pleasures to be drawn from this arrangement. In the adagio cantabile second movement (mistakenly identified onscreen as the third movement), Chen conjured considerable tenderness and introspection. And in the last movement, the conductor took a slower tempo than pianists usually do, giving the music a degree of grandeur it rarely receives.
The concert opened with Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and included Valerie Coleman’s arrangement of the South African National Anthem. Both works proved the value of elegantly stated populism and underscored the Sinfonietta’s message of optimism in the face of global adversity.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
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