Sinfonietta concert honors women

MUSIC REVIEW

Chicago Sun-Times
By Andrew Patner
Published April 2, 2008
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The alchemy of concerts is complex. How will players, soloists, conductor, program and audience all align? What combinations will work and what ideas will fly?

Sometimes everything comes together and in ways that might surprise the presenter as well as the ticketholders. Such was the case Monday night at Orchestra Hall when the Chicago Sinfonietta offered the program “A Celebration of International Women’s Month.” While the arts season still has a good 10 weeks to run, this was surely one of the finest concerts of the year by any ensemble in Chicago.

For 21 years, the Sinfonietta and its indomitable founder Paul Freeman have put the lie to every myth and canard about blacks, Hispanics, women and classical music. With outstanding performances by remarkable musicians of every background (this is most decidedly not a “minority” orchestra), the Sinfonietta lives by the enviable credo of “excellence through diversity.”

Cuban-born composer conductor Tania Leon was at the helm this week; on her own, as a mixed-race Spanish-speaking woman, she demonstrates the classical accomplishments of all of these constituencies as well as those of a group that she says is even more neglected and dismissed: living composers. In addition to being a superb creator of complex yet magically accessible works, Leon, who turns 65 next month, is a skilled conductor and an engaging ambassador for new music.

Often when a conductor speaks from the stage it’s a time for eye-rolling. But Leon has a way of making the whole audience feel as if it were sitting down in her Brooklyn kitchen for a cafe con leche and a chat. She made the backgrounds of her own works on the program, the 1999 “Horizons” and the 1988 “Kabiosile,” clear and inviting. By seamlessly blending Cuban rhythms with complex Western compositional techniques, she showed us a young woman literally flying out of her native land toward her future and a celebration of African-imported island rituals joyously combining with modern European tonalities.

The soloist in “Kabiosile” was pianist Jade Simmons, a recent Northwestern alumna and a former Miss Illinois, who played Chopin on the televised Miss America pageant in 2000. An educator, clothing designer and specialist in modern and contemporary repertoire (her biography does not reveal when she sleeps), Simmons topped off her feats in the orchestral work with an impossibly exciting encore of Leon’s 2000 solo piano piece “Tumbao.”

But why should that have been it? Another outstanding young woman led off the second half of the program with Haydn’s famed E-Flat Major Trumpet Concerto. You do not hear women trumpeters every day, and even more rarely do you hear those who have mastered the more lyrical and gentle British form of brass playing as Hertfordshire-born Alison Balsom has. In keeping with her take on her instrument, she offered an encore of her own transcription of Debussy’s flute masterwork, “Syrinx.”

Augusta Holmes, a resident of France, was a 19th century woman composer of varied parentage. Her 1882 “Irlande, poeme symphonique” is as worthy of a place in the concert hall as any piece by Arnold Bax and company. The performance provoked an urge to march about the hall to this wind band tribute to Eire. And the wonderful 1994 “Ge Xu” (“Antiphony”) by the Chinese-trained Chen Yi closed out the evening with a mix of regional folk music, Western methods, and Yi’s ever-optimistic vision.

All of this before an audience that looks and feels like Chicago — what more could anyone want?

Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7).