2003 - 2004 Season
WP = World Premiere / AP = American Premiere / CP = Chicago Premiere
November 2, 2003
Family Concert : Chicago Humanities Festival: A Musical Celebration of Caldecott Illustrators
12:00pm - 1:00pm @ Art Institute of Chicago : Fullerton Auditorium 111 S. Michigan
For All Ages
Experience a spectacular family concert featuring Caldecott-winning author Ed Young's Cat and Rat: The Legend of the Chinese Zodiac , set to Stephen Burn's original score based on traditional Chinese music performed by Fulcrum Point with “ Silk Road ” guest artists Yang Wei and Betti Xiang. The celebration continues with a world premier of a David Stock composition inspired by the Caldecott-winning children's book Joseph Had a Little Overcoat by Simms Taback. The authors narrate their stories, accompanied by illustrations from the books.
December 2, 2003
6th ANNUAL CANDELIGHT CONCERT FOR PEACE PRESENTED BY PERFORMING ARTS CHICAGO: INNER VISIONS
7:30pm @ St. James Cathedral, 65 East Huron, Chicago
Embrace music's ability to explore the essence of life. Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question revolutionized American music in 1908, seeking inspiration in transcendentalist philosophy; while the string quartet performs a cosmic chorale, a lone trumpet poses angular questions, urged on by a scattering of flutes toward the unknowable. Peter Lieberson's Raising the Gaze , from 1998, embraces the world with a blend of the ethereal and intense; this invigorating, overflowing soundscape suggests a direction, a hope, a message for human aspirations. Chen Yi's Qi takes its name from the life force (also written as “chi”); using a gentle tempo and spare melody, her 1997 piece captures the joyful calm of the contented human spirit. Osvaldo Golijov's Last Round is his1996 memorial to Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla, a man as famous for his brawls as his passionate music. In the first section, two string quartets and a double bass dart after each other, facing off in a musical fistfight or possibly the tango, while in the second section they unite to recall the breath-like final sigh of the master's bandoneon.
December 21, 2003
SUNDAY SALON SERIES: THE FULCRUM POINT NEW MUSIC PROJECT - THE FRENCH CONNECTION
3:00pm @ Chicago Cultural Center, Preston Bradley Hall, 78 E. Washington
In honor of the exhibition Manet and the Sea, currently on view through January 19, 2004 at the Art Institute of Chicago, Fulcrum Point New Music Project will perform an afternoon of music by French composers at the Chicago Cultural Center 's beautiful Preston Bradley Hall. Program will include works by Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Jacques Ibert, among others.
The French Connection features Fulcrum Point Artistic Director Stephen Burns, trumpet, Peggy Michael, oboe/English horn and Jeffrey Panko, piano.
The Fulcrum Point New Music Project is a Chicago organization dedicated to the fusion of classical music and popular culture.
Start your day with a visit to the exhibition Manet and the Sea (Art Institute Sunday hours are 10am-5pm), then head to the Chicago Cultural Center for this exciting FREE concert at 3pm!
January 27, 2004
OCEANS
7:30pm @ Joan W. and B. Harris Theatre for Music and Dance
To confront the ocean is to struggle with immensity, to face mystery and danger, to witness a history of conquest. Fela Kuti’s 1975 work Water No Get Enemy is James Brown-inspired Afrobeat, a riot of uplifting funk and protest.
In contrast, John Cage’s Water Music from 1953 tries to capture the ripples and roar of a world of sound, using instruments as unique as playing cards, whistles, and water poured from one container to another. (The amusing written score will be on view as well.) Then wade into the world of American surrealist George Crumb’s 1971 piece Vox Balaenae, a highly theatrical work performed by a trio of masked, amplified musicians invoking the eerie majesty found in the singing of humpback whales. Frank Zappa’s The Yellow Shark is one of the maverick musician’s final pieces, a jumble of irreverent and ambitious instrumental sketches named for the carved, yellow fiberglass fish, teeth dripping droplets of blood, that served as the project’s mascot in 1992.
March 02, 2004
RIVERS
7:30pm Joan W. and B. Harris Theatre for Music and Dance
Rivers have always inspired exploration, channeling the current of cultural exchange. During the 1890s, Charles Ives borrowed “The Shining Shore” from Civil War-era composer George F. Root, recontextualizing both the tune and its sacred vision of a heavenly shore.
In contrast, Rios Profundos (receiving its Midwest premiere) is Gabriela Lena Frank’s 200x reflection on a novel by Peruvian folklorist Jose Maria Arguedas, a cello and piano duet swirling with influences of the Quechua Indians amidst a dominant Hispanic culture.
Steven Mackey composed Humble River (the second Midwest premiere on the program) for flute and string trio in 1997; the music itself forms a stream of sound, a rush of movement originally meant to make four islands of Mozart’s flute quartets but thrilling to drift down on its own.
Derek Bermel’s 2001 composition Three Rivers (a third Midwest premiere) finds inspiration in the journey of jazz up the Mississippi from New Orleans, rushing onward with big-band swagger and overlapping riffs.
March 30, 2004
RAIN/TEARS
7:30pm @ Joan W. and B. Harris Theatre for Music and Dance
When storm clouds burst (literally or emotionally), the downpour leads to cleansing and renewal. Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Coming, from 1982, revels in the sensuous side of nature, tracing the silence between splashes of timbre and texture.
Acid Rain, composed by Bang on a Can Festival-founder Michael Gordon in 1986, is much more furious— a storm of roughed-up rhythms and thunderous noise, as intense and spooky as a blackened sky
Benjamin Britten’s 1949 composition Lachrymae fractures a melancholy song by 16th-century lute-player John Dowland; as a viola and harp explore fragments of the sad melody, their sorrow builds until the full form of the original love-lorn lament pours forth.
Rainwaves by Joan Tower is a trio from 1997, an organic interplay of violin, clarinet and piano, sketching the dance of showers as they pass, while Steve Lacy’s three-part Precipitation Suite dates from 1969 and drips with the cool atmosphere the composer soaked up playing soprano sax in the bands of Thelonius Monk, Cecil Taylor, and Gil Evans.
June 1 , 2004
BLOOD: Blood On The Floor
7:30pm @ Joan W. and B. Harris Theatre for Music and Dance
Blood is thicker than water, but it spills just as easily. Francis Bacon’s 1986 painting “Blood on the Floor” is a stark canvas: a hanging light bulb, lurid orange walls, and violent stain of blood. The wounding is already over.
When British composer Mark- Anthony Turnage crafted a nine-movement outcry against the drug culture that killed his brother, he titled the 1996 work after Bacon’s painting. He also turned to the Langston Hughes poem “Junior Addict” for further inspiration.
Working in a powerful fusion of styles, the piece obliterates the boundaries between classical music and Miles Davis-inspired jazz, between notation and improvisation, between beauty and brutality. Furious tantrums alternate with melancholy elegies until the last section makes room for a tough-hearted hope, culminating in what The Guardian calls “the most ravishing music Turnage has written."