Sinfonietta puts new spin on ‘Planets,’ ‘Voodoo’

Chicago Sun-Times
By Wynne Delacoma
Classical Music Critic
Published May 17, 2006
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Next season, the Chicago Sinfonietta will celebrate its 20th anniversary, an impressive achievement for any ensemble, not to mention one whose stated mission is to bring a more diverse audience and player roster to classical music.

On Monday night in Symphony Center, the Sinfonietta closed its 19th season doing what it does best, giving traditional orchestral programming a bracing shake. It offered a violin concerto with an amplified solo instrument and the descriptive title “Voodoo,” and a performance of Holst’s “The Planets,” accompanied by an elegant video with awesome views of the planets photographed from probes floating in outer space. This is not standard operating procedure for your average symphony orchestra, but it sent the Sinfonietta’s loyal audience into delighted applause.

Classically trained, Daniel Bernard Roumain is a young Haitian-American composer and violinist who goes by the initials DBR and wears waist-length dreadlocks. He mixes funk, minimalism and virtuoso riffs in his “Voodoo” Concerto. Composed in 2002 and scored for tiny ensemble including synthesizer and amplified guitar as well as standard orchestral instruments like violin and woodwinds, the concerto has four movements that are supposed to evoke rituals and rites of passage.

The musical content, mostly full of perky rhythms and repetitious melodic fragments, seemed too light for such a heavy message. But Roumain is an entrancing performer, confident and polished, able to make his richly amplified violin sing, shriek or seduce. Though tethered to an amplifier, he moved easily onstage, bouncing to the rhythms and sauntering about as naturally as any young rock and roller. He and the other musicians fed off one another’s energy while Paul Freeman, the Sinfonietta’s intrepid founder, was the ever-unflappable, vigilant conductor. Roumain’s solo encore, a free-form “Amazing Grace” was deeply felt.

Freeman turned to the Adler Planetarium and one of its astronomers, Jose Francisco Salgado, for images to accompany “The Planets.” Salgado assembled everything from meticulously detailed 17th century charts and maps on aged, sepia-tinged paper to contemporary photos of impossibly round, color-striped orbs floating against the black sky like austerely modern art objects.

In the Mercury movement, the sun was a massive, boiling circle, its surface constantly erupting with white- and red-hot spots. Video of the vehicle exploring Mars’ surface revealed a sturdy little contraption with the body of a Jeep and the neck and vigilant eye of a swan. At one point, Uranus hung in the night like a sleek turquoise ball of brushed aluminum.

The images were so captivating that the music became distinctly secondary. At times, the playing sounded raw and bombastic, but there was a nice menace to the march of the low brass in Uranus, and sweetly mellow horns and woodwinds in the gentle Venus movement.