If you came to this page directly click here to return to the Fulcrum Point website.

    1. As a Mac .mov file (8 MB)
     2. As a Windows .wmv file (5 MB)


Stephen Burns Interview

Listen to Stephen Burns on Chicago Public Radio's morning radio show, "Hello Beautiful."  The interview is in three parts on the Chicago Public Radio web site:. 
    1. http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=17900
    2. http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=17910
    3. http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=17917
To download the interview directly, use the links below.
    1. Part one.
    2. Part two.
    3. Part three.

Recent Reviews


'Omega' Caps Off Fulcrum Point's Epic Journey

In an era of ever-shrinking attention spans, Fulcrum Point's five-year concert series, "Essential Arts: Essential Elements," seemed especially audacious at its inauguration in 2003. The ensemble reached the conclusion of the ambitious cycle Tuesday night at Harris Theater with works by composers dear to music director and conductor Stephen Burns. Subtitled "Omega: Earth on Fire," the rather grandiose evocation of a latter-day "Götterdämmerung" may have seemed like a rhetorical stretch, but Burns' commentary stitched together a plausible final act. Derek Bermel's "Continental Divide" opened promisingly, with bold statements that incrementally developed fissures. While intermittently fascinating, it succeeded more as a sonic experiment than a finished musical expression. Steven Mackey's "Ground Swell" grew out of a similar disconnect between ends and means, but the conflict worked itself out more fruitfully. Threads of Americana emerged now and then, but they were colored in unexpected ways. Exhilaration was the guiding force at times, while other passages seemed overcome by vertigo and fatigue. The sophisticated orchestration certainly helped Mackey's cause, as did the superb artistry of violist Hsin-Yun Huang. Her tone was rich and earthy, and she negotiated each phrase with remarkable agility and expressive acumen.

After some early imbalances between soloist and ensemble, Burns and company settled into an impressively authoritative reading. The most vivid memories of the piece were its risky, lopsided proportions. The opening movement ("Approach to Sea") was cut brutally short just as its material began to take shape, while the finale ("Sailing Away") was leisurely, loose and gently repetitive.

"Inner Demons" by the local composer Stacy Garrop seemed at first to be an unabashedly neo-romantic movement with source material redolent of sundry dances and hymn-tunes. The performance was committed and genuine, if a bit untidy. One of Bermel's mentors was Dutchman Louis Andriessen, the composer of the series finale, "Racconto Dall'Inferno." With a text from Dante's "Inferno" as inspiration, the work is a brilliantly evocative mono-drama, sung on this occasion by soprano Tony Arnold with complete technical command and deeply felt artistry.

Michael Cameron, Chicago Tribune, 3/20/08





Chicago's Fulcrum Point Enters 10th Season With a Performance Full of 'Essential Elements'

"The Fulcrum Point New Music Project is devoting the fifth and final season of its multi-year exploration, "Essential Art: Essential Elements," to a condensed recap of all the elements. Indeed, the concert that began the group's 10th anniversary season Tuesday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance vaulted through time and space before reaching for the cosmic light.

Like another of Chicago's splendid contemporary groups, eighth blackbird, artistic director Stephen Burns' ensemble has hitched its star to the Harris Theater in hopes of attracting larger audiences and greater funding. The sizable, attentive crowd that turned out for Tuesday's event suggested it is well on its way toward realizing the first objective. The world premiere of Geoffrey Gordon's "Lux Solis Aeterna" (2007) shared the bill with the Midwest premieres of Sebastian Currier's "Nightmaze" (2005) and Richard Danielpour's "River of Light" (2007). Duke Ellington's "The River" added a symphonic jazz classic to this bracing and brainy mix of new music. Gordon's opus for 13 players -- the Latin title means "Eternal Light of the Sun" -- tries, and succeeds, to evoke cosmic beauty in a dozen minutes of acutely crafted music. The sun rises in iridescent shimmers and sprays of instrumental color, now quiet and glowing, now fierce and eruptive. There is a sacred subtext but the sonic evolution may be enjoyed as pure music, complete with a bebop interlude led by two saxophones. The multimedia "Nightmaze" lasts three times as long and packs half the impact. Currier's pulsing, nervous rhythms for nine-member chamber ensemble under gird a hallucinatory road trip based on a scenario by novelist Thomas Bolt. The text, read by Sandra Binion, has a sleep-deprived college student dreaming of speeding along a blackened highway that has road signs indicating psychic forks and turnoffs -- terror, death, ego, id, infinity and so forth.

I had a couple of problems with the piece. Sage Marie Carter's stark video conspired with the surreal text to reduce Currier's often inventive score to mere accompaniment. Also, entire chunks of narration were drowned out by the musicians or rendered unintelligible by the amplification. Danielpour's elegiac violin ruminations, framed by the piano's tart and muscular chords, were sensitively taken by violinist Sharon Polifrone and pianist Kuang-Hao Huang. Lovely piece. Burns' lush, 44-piece orchestra had a ball with the Ellington suite, and so did the audience.

All four performances, for that matter, represented Fulcrum Point at its considerable best."

-- John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, 01/31/08

“Based on the book by Eleanor Coerr and using the charming chalk illustrations by Ed Young (flashed on a screen behind the ensemble) the 45 minute cantata melds images, narration, and music by Kevin James to recount the poignant real-life story of Sadako Sasaki, a spirited young Japanese girl.  Music, song, image, and spoken word form a seamless and deeply moving meditation. Unutterable sadness at last gives way to the hope that the warring nations will learn to make a better, safer world for their own Sadakos...With the threat of mass nuclear suicide again bullying its way to the center of the world stage, 'Sadako: Prayers for Peace' could not be more timely."

— Chicago Tribune

"The most energetic and innovative of Chicago’s younger music ensembles, the Fulcrum Point ensemble has built its reputation on boldly straddling the barriers between classical and world music.”

— Chicago Tribune

“Stephen Burns’ intrepid chamber ensemble Fulcrum Point has made a mark in Chicago, providing a bracing shot of youthful adrenaline to the local music scene and drawing a loyal audience to the group’s imaginative concerts of classical works with strong popular music influences.”

 — Chicago Sun-Times

"Hand it to the dynamic young trumpeter-conductor Stephen Burns. Many groups talk about the possibilities of crossover and multicultural programming using classically trained musicians in concert hall settings. His Fulcrum Point New Music Project is doing it, and doing it with remarkable skill and consistently provocative programming.

Presented by Performing Arts Chicago, this season Fulcrum Point ranged from ecumenical meditations on Sept. 11 to Brecht and Weill to contemporary poetry and music. For their season-closer Saturday evening, they paired with the Art Institute of Chicago to offer 'Border Crossings,' a program of three Chicago premieres by Mexican and Mexican-American composers in the museum's spectacularly restored and intimate Fullerton Hall."

— Chicago Sun-Times, Andrew Patner 5/13/02

"The Wolpe quartet, a prime example of his flexibly expressive use of 12-tone techniques, made a good foil to the gritty Brechtian poetry. In his rumpled raincoat, Studs Terkel even looked like a character out of Brecht, and his marvelous readings were all too brief. Paul Schoenfield's manic and enjoyable 'Burlesque' brought the program full circle."

— Chicago Tribune 4/02

"Fulcrum Point dug into Bowles' genially mordant 'Music for a Farce' while Belden read some of Bowles' bizarrely beautiful poetry. Listening to the clash of Bowles' vivid, often violent words against his amiable but austere and unsettled musical lines, I longed to be sitting at a cocktail table nursing a drink in a casually hip spot like HotHouse. With evocative but unobtrusive black-and-white photos filling the wall behind the ensemble, this was a performance to sit back and absorb rather than sit up straight and analyze."

— Chicago Sun-Times 4/02

"The Fulcrum Point ensemble has built its reputation on boldly straddling the barriers between classical and world music. There was some of that barrier-busting in the five 20th Century works for strings, which shared a meditative serenity and a tonal harmonic base despite their composers' different ethnicities and traditions."

 — Chicago Tribune 12/01

"Fulcrum Point Chamber Ensemble at the School of the Art Institute. Fulcrum Point makes children's fare a winner with rock and a show. Burns, a trumpeter and a conductor of the American Concerto Orchestra, has boundless and a restlessly eclectic taste. Ever since settling down here in the mid-1990s, he's given concerts that straddle musical categories from Baroque to jazz to pop. It was only inevitable that he, a father married to a school psychologist, should get around to music for children. What's more, he also realized that the Nickelodeon wouldn't sit quietly just for music.

No surprise, then, that this concert was really a multimedia show, complete with narration (by Channel-7 Chicago anchor Kathy Brock) and slides of crayon drawings (courtesy of patients at Rush Children's Hospital).

Under Burns' crisp direction, the musicians -- violinist Sharon Polifrone, bassoonist Lewis Kirk and piccolo ace Mary Stolper, among others -- played with verve, but they were upstaged by Brock's vivid storytelling in many (well, at least six) voices and by the beguiling, colorful drawings. Kids are notoriously tough customers to please. Fulcrum Point's performance, however, kept this bunch -- and their elders—in rapt attention."

— Chicago Tribune Music Review October 7, 2001

"Frankenstein" Lives! Fulcrum Point toys with a classic to the audience's delight.

"Conductor Stephen Burns ably guided Fulcrum Point through an often complex score. The costumed instrumentalists, whose conservatory classes surely were lacking in the finer points of the toy saxophone, performed with admirable aplomb. A highlight for me was repeated paper bag explosions at the outset, an opinion seconded by the enthusiastic outbursts from the youngsters present."

— Chicago Tribune 10/00

"The fledgling Fulcrum Point, two years old, is already distinguishing itself through uncommon and often brilliant musical juxtapositions. Its Performing Arts Chicago program focused on the kinship between jazz and classical music, as director and solo trumpet Stephen Burns led a program that showed off the group’s delectable playing. String work meshed seamlessly, with a burnished hue that triumphed over the decidedly not classical-friendly Park West acoustics. Deftness was the calling card.”

— Chicago Sun-Times 5/00

“Stephen Burns’ intrepid chamber ensemble has made a mark in Chicago, providing a bracing shot of youthful adrenaline to the local music scene and drawing a loyal audience to the group’s imaginative concerts of classical works with strong popular music influences.”

— Chicago Sun-Times 2/00

 “The most energetic and innovative of Chicago’s younger musical ensembles, the Fulcrum Point ensemble has built its reputation on boldly straddling the barriers between classical and world music.”

— Chicago Tribune 12/99

“In a lean-and-mean envelope pushing mode, Stephen Burns and Fulcrum Point presented a bracing evening of edgy chamber music that was daring, imaginative and exhilarating.”

— Chicago Tribune 12/99

“Few of Chicago’s musical ensembles combine audacious programming and full-throttle musical energy with such flair as Fulcrum Point...Burns led the group in a performance bristling with energy and bite. It was a terrific performance.”

- Chicago Tribune 11/99

"The ensemble displayed uncommon exuberance in its first Chicago appearance (3/98). Burns has shown himself to be a meticulous, energetic conductor who draws the most eloquent articulations from his players, and his programming already looks promisingly irreverent.”

— The Reader 10/98