Hearing them now

Chicago Sinfonietta kicks off 20th season by making cell-phone rings part of the show

Chicago Tribune
By John von Rhein
Tribune music critic
Published October 4, 2006
original link

MUSIC REVIEW

Cell phones. We love them, we hate them, we can’t live without the damn things stuck to our faces all day.

Every long-suffering classical music lover knows their ill-timed ring tones and beeps murder silence in the concert hall.

Well, if you can’t lick those pesky electronic gizmos, then make them a part of the show.

That’s the novel premise behind the Chicago Sinfonietta’s commissioning of the “Concertino for Cell Phones and Orchestra” that had its world premiere Monday night at Orchestra Hall to launch the ensemble’s 20th season. Founding music director Paul Freeman conducted.

The piece, written by David N. Baker, a distinguished professor at Indiana University and a noted jazz and classical composer, turned out to be less than the sum of its silly, noisy, sometimes funny gimmicks. (Even Freeman admitted the work is an “experiment.”) After one hearing, I wanted to subtitle it “P.D.Q. Bach, Can You Hear Me Now?”

But that didn’t matter much to Monday’s cell phone-wielding listeners, who clearly were enjoying their 20 minutes in the solo spotlight. Baker’s frisky little trifle attracted national media coverage, just the sort of attention Freeman’s artistically healthy, racially diverse orchestra can use as it begins its third decade.

“You are a part of history,” Freeman soberly informed his listeners as he gave them their pre-performance pep talk. When a green light flashed, the downstairs audience was to switch on their ring tones; when a red light appeared, it was the cue for the upstairs crowd to do the same.

Audiences, however, seldom do exactly as they are told, so there often were moments of chiming, jingling chaos as various cell-phone noises went off randomly when they weren’t supposed to. (John Cage would have adored the effect.) Order was restored–sort of–when four players onstage sounded repeating figures on their mobile devices that were picked up by the rest of the orchestra.

The orchestra chugged along in a syncopated jazzy gait when it wasn’t mimicking the rude chirps of cell phones or caressing bluesy tunes. A lot of the piece consisted of nothing more than passing quotations from various classical composers–Brahms, Richard Strauss, Dvorak, Rimsky-Korsakov and many others. I’m not sure what the point of that was, but the fans seem to enjoy playing “name that tune,” and Baker came in for a prolonged storm of applause at the end.

There was a lot more actual music in the first half of the program, which held two standard-issue Romantic concertos, Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, and Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’ “Redes” Suite. The convincing young soloists were pianist Alexander Kobrin and violinist Melissa White.

Kobrin, the Russian gold medalist in the 2005 Van Cliburn Competition, proved himself more than equal to Liszt’s bravura demands as well as his lyrical poetry, even if the Yamaha piano failed to support his wide tonal palette. White, a winner of the 2001 Sphinx Organization Competition, dispatched the fiddle showpiece with a lovely silken tone, poise and rare refinement.