It might be called MusicNOW, but Jessie Montgomery’s first season curating the Chicago Symphony’s contemporary music series was one for the ages.
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The CSO composer-in-residence blazed out of the gates with a smart, savvy program in November that featured composers with feet in both Chicago and New York, her hometown. Then, March’s sequel shook up the instrument-heavy MusicNOW with an evening of fresh, profound art song — again with special deference to Chicago-based magicians of that form, like Shawn Okpebholo and Ayanna Woods.
Monday’s season finale also exalted a mostly overlooked genre in the MusicNOW canon: concertos. In previous years, audiences heard just a couple a season, prior composers-in-residence mostly gravitating toward works that distributed virtuosity among chamber ensembles instead of vesting it in soloists.
“Concerto” argued those ideas aren’t so oppositional after all. Three of the four works — all composed between 2009 and 2022 — brought ensemble and soloists eye-to-eye in their acrobatics.
American musical doyenne Joan Tower, whose presence at Monday’s concert unleashed an extended peal of applause, does so most pointedly in her “Rising” for solo flute and orchestra. Alluding to a traditional sonata form and cadenza structure, the concerto foregrounded CSO principal Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson’s intelligent, understated intensity but roiled with fitful string writing, most flashily in a cello solo played con fuego by cellist Richard Hirschl.
More sparks flew off that instrument in Alyssa Weinberg’s cello concerto “Caligo,” played by the composer’s longtime collaborator Gabriel Cabezas. The piece’s name comes from a Latin word describing a dense, disorienting fog, and it’s easy to see why. Soloist and section strings dance around harmonics on the string, lending gauzy transparency to the sound, while wind players start blowing unpitched air through their instruments. Then, like suddenly noticing one can’t see the road ahead, the ensemble shifts almost imperceptibly into opacity, all dense clusters and husky sul ponticello bowings in the strings.
It’s rare that this reviewer’s pen is totally still for a performance of a new work — it’s usually working overtime jotting impressions. But “Caligo” and Cabezas are quite literally stunning, kneading more meditative explorations of the harmonic series by composers like Éliane Radigue or James Tenney into a dramatic narrative. And Cabezas is nothing short of brilliant, his musicianship soulful and probing. Let’s hope we hear him here again sooner rather than later.
It was hard to imagine a worthy rejoinder to “Caligo.” But how about the world premiere of an electric guitar concerto?
Princeton composition student and guitarist James Moore played double duty as composer and soloist in “Sleep is Shattered,” originally written for Tom Waits and Elvis Costello sideman Marc Ribot. That piece was a highlight among highlights, not only for Moore’s sharp-eared handling of the solo guitar lines and loop pedals but his remarkable orchestral writing. Electric guitar stands in resonant relief with the ensemble but mostly extends its sonorities, sometimes heightening its harmonic tension or slackening into humid, beachy languor, as did Moore’s lap steel-esque passages near “Sleep’s” middle.
Nor is “Sleep” an amalgam of genres usually associated with electric guitar: Though drum kit and feedback whines crop up on occasion, the piece is squarely in the contemporary classical tradition. It’s an enthralling addition to the guitar repertoire.
Stepping in for former Solti Conducting Apprentice Erina Yashima due to a scheduling conflict, Jeffrey Milarsky led “Sleep is Shattered” for the first time since he workshopped the work with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. In this familiar work and throughout the evening, Milarsky’s leadership was sensitive, flexible and thoughtful — a podium standout after his long hiatus from MusicNOW.
Milarsky eschewed a baton to lead Jessie Montgomery’s opening “Overture.” That work, the newest on the program, didn’t plant a soloist front and center, instead interpreting the “concerto” theme as more a “concerto grosso.” But it was a winsome, taut curtain-raiser, marked by extended chords and idiosyncratic voicings. Its orchestrational inquisitiveness sometimes recalled Montgomery’s recent CSO commission “Hymn for Everyone,” which similarly winds through different instrument pairings.
But don’t take my word for it. “Overture,” an excerpt from Montgomery’s “Because, A Symphony of Serendipity” will get a repeat local performance this summer at a kids’ program at Ravinia.
Monday’s rich rewards left one wishing Harris Theater had been better attended, despite MusicNOW’s reinstatement of complimentary post-concert pizza and beer. (At the very least, actor Bill Murray made an appearance, milling around the reception. CSO representatives confirmed Murray is a family friend of Montgomery’s.)
But if MusicNOW’s 25th season next year is anything like its 24th, it could be the strongest in recent memory. A few featured composers have already been announced, among them Osvaldo Golijov, Carlos Simon, Alvin Singleton and, of course, Montgomery herself. Fall couldn’t come sooner.
MusicNOW’s 25th season has been partly announced, with concerts Oct. 24, Nov. 21, Feb. 20 and April 24 at Symphony Center; 220 S. Michigan Ave.; check cso.org for more information.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
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