One of the responsibilities of Present Music’s Artistic Director Kevin Stalheim is to conduct the ensemble in performance, but he’s happy to relinquish the baton once each season. Now in its third year, Present Music’s chamber concert features six musicians who have worked out the tempi and pitch amongst themselves. This year’s concert, “Connecting in the Chamber,” features older and newer work in surprising contexts plus a Milwaukee premiere.
“Connecting in the Chamber” will be performed four times in three locations: the Walker’s Point Anodyne Coffee, Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum and a private home on Milwaukee’s East Side. “It’s in the old tradition of chamber music being performed in small places—in chambers,” Stalheim says. “The venues fit with our old and new theme—Villa Terrace is old, Anodyne is new, and doing it in a house—that’s where chamber music began.” The house belongs to longtime donors John Shannon and Jan Serr.
This year’s program is arranged as an idiosyncratic chronological history tour of the Western music tradition, even if the order of the works is less about their precise date of composition than mapping out an intriguing sonic design. The concert will open with Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales by Harry Partch. Although better known for devising whirligig instruments and music to go along with his inventions, the mid-century American composed this piece around Grecian modes. “You sense the ancientness of it,” Stalheim says. Next comes Fortuna Sepio Nos by Present Music’s house composer, Kamran Ince. Fortuna was the Roman goddess of luck and, as Stalheim explains, “It’s inspired by something ancient.”
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Contemporary composer Bruce Adolphe likewise seeks inspiration from olden times in Oh Gesualdo, Divine Tormentor!, based on Renaissance themes by Carlo Gesualdo. Sofia Gubaidulina’s self-explanatory Reflections on the Theme of B-A-C-H is followed by excerpts from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B Flat Major with Grammy-winning pianist Cory Smythe improvising around the melody. “We needed something to bridge the gap between the Baroque and now,” Stalheim says of Maurice Ravel’s Impressionistic early 20th-century piano piece, Scarbo, the challenging third movement from Gaspard de la Nuit. Then, on to the Milwaukee premiere of John Zorn’s Novalis, written for Smythe and inspired by Gaspard. With its references to waltz, ragtime and jazz, Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat was a foretaste of Present Music’s agenda of melding high and low, art music with popular tunes. “It’s two worlds coming together,” Stalheim says.
The concert concludes with Nico Muhly’s Motion. “It’s based on Renaissance music and it’s out of the chronology,” Stalheim admits. “But it’s a good way to end the concert—a curtain closer, with an exuberant conclusion unlike many of the program’s pieces, which speak softly.”
Present Music’s “Connecting in the Chamber” will be performed 7:30 p.m., Feb. 19-20 at Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co., 224 W. Bruce St.; 11 a.m., Feb. 20 at Villa Terrace, 2220 N. Terrace Ave.; and 7:30 p.m. in the home of John Shannon and Jan Serr, 3017 N. Marietta Ave. For tickets visit presentmusic.org.
