Reviews
Charles Ives—still radical after all these years, courtesy of the Callisto Ensemble
Read Dennis Polkow's review of the November 29, 2010 concert in the Chicago Classical Review.
In Callisto's Capable Hands, Ligeti's Concerto Enthralls
By John von Rhein
Chicago Tribune
Published February 3, 2006
The Callisto Ensemble must have figured that, since so many other chamber groups are celebrating the Mozart and Shostakovich anniversaries this year, one sure way to stand out from the pack would be to pay homage to another important composer who really could use the attention—the Hungarian master Gyorgy Ligeti...
Listening to the 13 capable instrumentalists navigating the treacherous shoals and reefs of the 1970 Ligeti work under Cliff Colnot's direction, I couldn't think of a group of Chicago musicians this side of the Chicago Symphony better equipped to take on so concentrated a challenge. The performers were duly rewarded with an enthusiastic ovation.
Gottlieb Hall is the Callisto's new home now that problems with Roosevelt University late last year prompted the group to abandon its previous concert venue, Ganz Hall, on South Michigan Avenue.
It's an inviting room for music, both visually and acoustically, but I wondered Tuesday night whether the sound wasn't a bit too warm and diffuse for Ligeti. The composer's signature polyrhythms and mobile clusters of tones needed to be heard in sharper focus. This was especially true of the third movement, where the brass, wind and keyboard instruments, and the pizzicato strings, hammer out obsessive repeating rhythms, an exhilarating effect Ligeti once likened to a half-broken machine starting up.
Otherwise, the concerto enthralled collective ears and minds with its weird rustlings of muted strings, wind instruments played at the extremes of their registers and waves of densely packed, splintery sounds. Colnot balanced the sometimes dense, prickly textures securely, while his musicians—each one a soloist—played with a precision that justified the long rehearsal hours they had logged.
The two remaining works on the program provided welcome variety and stylistic contrast.
Paul Hindemith's "Kammermusik" No. 3 from 1925 suggests a Bach "Brandenburg" concerto filtered through the peppery harmonies and motoric counterpoint of neo-classicism. A cello concerto in miniature, it drew a trim and tidy reading from cellist Julian Hersh and the 10 assisting players under Colnot's crisp direction.
Nicolas Bacri's "Folia," a lyrical, tightly constructed piece for 14 strings based on the famous old Spanish song "La Follia," opened the program. The influence of Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten is strongly felt in a passacaglia structure that does not fully reveal its theme until the elegiac closing pages. Roger Chase was the persuasive solo violist.
The Callisto Ensemble will continue its season in the Merit School's Gottlieb Hall with concerts on March 21 (clarinetist Larry Combs is guest artist) and April 11 (pianist Ursula Oppens and hornist Gail Williams). Each program will hold a different Ligeti chamber work. If you have yet to discover one of the city's finest new chamber groups, now would be an excellent time to do so.
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.