Sinfonietta spans the world of folk music

REVIEW | Dunner adds gusto to eclectic night

Chicago Sun-Times
By Bryant Manning
Published March 25, 2009
original link

So begins the end of an era at the Chicago Sinfonietta. Established in 1987, the orchestra announced Friday that its founder and music director, Paul Freeman, was retiring from his post before a yet-to-be-named replacement takes over by the fall of 2011. The enterprising maestro will conduct in short spurts in the interim as a comprehensive and international search moves forward.

But maybe the hunt won’t have to leave Cook County. Who would possibly protest if guest conductor Leslie Dunner passes his audition? On Monday at Orchestra Hall, the native New Yorker delivered a typically eclectic Sinfonietta program with his uncanny gentlemanly gusto.

For the season’s fourth subscription concert, “Global Voices,” Dunner focused on folk elements from India, Spain and Hungary without generalizing the distinctive character of each.

He was flanked by Canadian-Punjabi singer Kiran Ahluwalia, who worked the first half of the program like a nightclub emcee. Funneling her quick wit and charm into all the opportune moments, she developed a real rapport with the surprisingly sparse crowd downtown. (In hindsight, though, we’d have happily traded some of the lively banter for a few extra songs.)

She sang with tabla player Nitan Mitta and guitarist Rez Abbasi, and melted us with a voice as malleable as it was rich. By focusing on the ghazal (songs composed in couplets that express pain in love), she achingly twisted and bent the Eastern melodic lines over the romantic stylings of the orchestra. The two distinct musical traditions felt as if they had grown old together for centuries. Even the use of a hokey computerized drone generator added much to the South Asian appeal. Before departing, her audience sing-along was upstaged by several uproarious laughs as the increasing complexity of her leads became too much for us amateurs to imitate.

And what a diva to the core the mezzo-soprano Carolyn Sebron proved to be in excerpts from Manuel de Falla’s gypsy romp “El Amor Brujo.” Juicing every dramatic detail into her one-woman operatic show, she left no square foot of the stage untraveled. Her rough-hewn mezzo vividly realized the role of a gypsy woman both bewitched and haunted by her deceased lover.

Zoltan Kodaly’s “Hary Janos Suite” was another matter. Recurring orchestral bloopers undermined an otherwise dazzling performance from soloist and cimbalom player Alex Udvary.