Sinfonietta announces ’07-08 lineup

Chicago Tribune
By John von Rhein
Tribune music critic
Published May 18, 2007
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CLASSICAL MUSIC

First-time collaborations with the Chicago Jazz Ensemble and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and a celebration of International Women’s Month highlight the 2007-08 season of the Chicago Sinfonietta, the orchestra’s 21st under music director Paul Freeman.

Freeman will open the series Sept. 16-17 with a program merging jazz and classical works. Selections from Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” Suite will be paired with jazz arrangements of that music by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn as played by the Chicago Jazz Ensemble. Rounding out the program will be Duke Ellington’s concerto grosso for jazz ensemble and orchestra, “Harlem,” and Russell Peck’s “Harmonic Rhythm,” with timpanist Robert Everson as soloist.

On Oct. 29, the Sinfonietta and the Chicago Humanities Festival will join together for the second consecutive year to present a mixed-media concert tied to this year’s festival theme, “Climate of Concern.” The program holds works by Nigerian and American composers, with R. Carlos Nakai as flute soloist in James DeMars’ “Two World Concerto.” A new video curated by the Notebaert Museum will be screened while the orchestra performs Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

The annual tribute concert to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jan. 20-21, 2008, will include the debut of a new work by Chicago’s Deeply Rooted Dance Theater. Returning to the series will be the Apostolic Church of God Sanctuary Choir, performing gospel music and traditional songs. Violinists Christina Castelli and Melissa White, past winners of the Sphinx Competition for young artists, will be the soloists.

Cuban-American composer Tania Leon is guest conductor for the March 30-31 concerts, presented in honor of International Women’s Month. The program includes her own “Horizons” and music of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Augusta Holmes and Chen Yi. The soloists are pianist Jade Simmons and trumpeter Alison Balsom.

For its season finale May 11-12, the Sinfonietta will join with the Chicago Blues Festival and the Major’s Office of Special Events to literally sing the blues. Soloists will be John Primer, longtime guitarist of the Muddy Waters Band, and pianist Leon Bates, who performs Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

The concerts will open with David N. Baker’s “Shades of Blue” and conclude with the Mussorgsky-Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Accompanying the latter will be a video created by Jose Francisco Salgado of Adler Planetarium.

Subscription concerts will be given at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; and in Lund Auditorium, Dominican University, 7900 W. Division St., River Forest.

Orchestra members also will present a chamber music series showing the influence of the cultures of Mexico and Central and South America. Those concerts will take place Nov. 16, Feb. 1 and April 25 at the National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St., in the Pilsen/Little Village neighborhood.