Sinfonietta blends Beethoven 5th with nature’s pristine, soiled sides

Chicago Tribune
By John von Rhein | Tribune music critic
Published October 31, 2007
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From music from early 19th Century Vienna to new music for the Native American wooden flute, the works conducted by music director Paul Freeman spoke largely of the shared human experience and man’s increasingly fractured relationship with the natural world.

This year’s festival theme, the potentially devastating environmental fallout from global climate change, enlisted an unlikely spokesman: Ludwig van Beethoven.

The Sinfonietta’s performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony served as a pretext for a never-before-seen video illustrating some of nature’s wonders and industrialized man’s despoiling of them. The video, created by Bill Foster and curated by the Notebaert Museum from still photos provided by Linda and Thomas Litteral, was projected onto a large overhead screen during the symphony’s final movement.

Up to then, the reading was tidy, conscientious but seriously wanting in drama. Once the imagery kicked in, however, Beethoven’s triumphant blaze of C Major took on a subtly sinister subtext.

The music was juxtaposed with shots of ice floes dissolving into wastelands, penguin colonies morphing into oil refineries. Pristine Alaskan lakes and forests were set alongside multiplying automobiles and jets. Using Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony might have sharpened the ironies, but that would have made this superb video feel preachy, which it decidedly was not.

Michael Abels’ “Global Warming,” one of three works sharing the first half of the program, addressed the festival theme directly, with a similar lack of didacticism.

The opening and closing pages suggest a desert, the arid string harmonics and rasp of a gourd set off by solo violin and cello. The middle section brings relief from the dry heat, as Irish and Middle Eastern folk tunes blend, with surprising success, in the full orchestra.

More compelling musically was James DeMars’ “Two World Concerto,” an ode to the unspoiled beauty of Minnesota lakes, forests and wildlife as much as it is a loving tribute to the sensitive and gifted soloist, R. Carlos Nakai, playing the Native American flute.

The wooden wind instrument has an unusual scale and a sound all its own, floating over the orchestra with a mournful stillness, its soft loon-cries subtly echoed electronically. Nakai cast a remarkable spell over his rapt audience.

Fred Onovwerosuoke’s brief “Fanfare for Strings and Timpani,” in its world premiere, was a rousing evocation of a Nigerian war dance, complete with the clanging of machetes — fortunately only simulated.

Copyright © 2007 Chicago Tribune