Reviews
Callisto Sketches Musical Masterpieces
By Wynne Delacoma
Chicago Sun-Times
Published January 12, 2005
Sometimes it is impossible to be pessimistic about the future of classical music.
Orchestras may be struggling with deficits, and, for too many people, cell-phone ring tones provide their only encounter with the music of Beethoven or Bach. But then along comes a concert like the Callisto Ensemble's chamber music recital Monday night in Roosevelt University's Ganz Hall, and classical music's vitality literally fills the air and bounces off the walls.
Barely two years old, the ensemble offers a musical mix on multiple levels. Core members, including such familiar, distinguished Chicago-based musicians as violinist Stefan Hersh, cellist Stephen Balderston and resident conductor Cliff Colnot, regularly invite exciting young players to share the stage. Callisto's programs showcase contemporary pieces, some of them world premieres, alongside more standard fare. The concerts are designed to light sparks that shine new light on familiar works and bring unfamiliar music into clear relief.
Monday's concert of works by Ravel, Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, the contemporary Israeli composer Betty Olivero, and Augusta Read Thomas, currently composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, must be counted among Callisto's best. Each work was vigorously drawn, from the sharp angles of Olivero's "Bashra'v," composed in 2004 and infused with somber Middle Eastern harmonies, to the ecstatic vocal line and expansive sweep of Thomas' "Prairie Sketches/Diamonds on Orchid Velvet." The program, also performed Sunday night in the DePaul University Concert Hall, included Ravel's Introduction and Allegro and "Rain Spell," a 1982 work by Takemitsu.
The evening's world premiere was "Prairie Sketches," scored for solo soprano, a chorus of three sopranos and seven instrumentalists including flute, clarinet, harp, strings and percussion. Based on a poem by Suzann Zimmerman and commissioned by the poet, it will be heard later this year in a version with Zimmerman's Chicago Kinder Voices Children's Chorus replacing the three soprano choristers.
Like all of Thomas' compositions, "Prairie Sketches" explodes with color. Few composers have as keen an ear for the expressive possibilities in a cello's deep, dark rumble, a clarinet's smoky velvet or the clarion authority of a single, plucked harp string. Echoing Zimmerman's evocation of tall, wind-blown prairie grass and a sprawling night sky, Thomas' harmonic lines often pressed tightly against each other. Never losing their own sharply etched contours, they alternately tangled and separated like resilient wild flowers. Dissonance was a judiciously applied spice, and even the astringent, stratospheric song of solo soprano Tony Arnold had a lyrical, long-lined shape. In Thomas' music, Zimmerman's vast Kansas prairie was a joyful place of endless possibility.
Two young musicians, violist Yuval Gotlibovich and harpist Kelsey Erdahl, were among the evening's standout soloists. In the opening bars of Olivero's "Bashra'v," Gotlibovich's austere solo line was both commanding and full of fury. In the varying moods of Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, Erdahl's harp was both sumptuously assertive and ethereally exquisite.