Performing Arts Chicago, which for 40 years has been bringing arts events to the city, clearly thinks it has a winner in the American Concerto Orchestra.
It is quite right.
The orchestra–more of a chamber ensemble at Tuesday’s concert–brings together some of Chicago’s most polished and professional musicians. They put a high gloss on an interesting program: an unexpected, tasty salad including Bach and 20th Century American music.
Artistic director Stephen Burns played multiple parts as conductor, trumpet soloist and orchestrator, turning in distinguished work in all three. He shared star billing with soprano Jonita Lattimore, who ranged effortlessly from Bach cantatas to spirituals; flutist Mary Stolper; and Chicago Symphony oboist Michael Henoch.
Burns, playing the pocket-size piccolo trumpet in B-flat, made the Bach “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 3 sound like a musical high-wire act. One just doesn’t expect the bright, piercing trumpet sound to fly so high or stunt so nimbly, and Burns made the brisk, capering outer movements sound like a kite in a stiff breeze.
Absent the trumpet, the second movement was a gentle conversation among the woodwinds and Sharon Polifrone’s violin.
Following Bach with Howard Hanson’s 1946 “Serenade” for flute, harp and strings was evidently meant to show some likeness between the two composers. I couldn’t hear any, except that each had beauties of its own.
For all its spare instrumentation, Hanson’s piece almost insists on the adjective “lush.” It is wide-spaced and airy, the flute melody wayward and swooping.
Stolper’s sound stayed full and round. A lovely, fresh-air piece, sensitively played.
Lattimore sang arias from two of the Bach “Passions”–the St. Matthew and St. John–and from Cantata 151, “Jauchzet Gott.” She has a fine voice, powerful without effort, bright and rich in overtones.
The “St. John” aria, “I follow thee gladly,” illustrated itself, with Stolper’s flute echoing the vocal line. In the cantata Lattimore’s slow-paced line made a serene overlay to the racing excitement in the strings.
In its Chicago premiere John Harbison’s “Snow Country,” written in 1979, was not only timely, it was clearly worth welcoming. This is a brooding, wintry piece for oboe.
Henoch’s oboe sang a long cry of sorrow and deprivation over the strings. The piece is dissonant by textbook rules, but deeply communicative.
Stolper returned with one of Bach’s most light-hearted and popular pieces, the Suite in B Minor. It is set of perky, tuneful dances in a minor key. Lattimore offered a world premiere–“Five Songs of Laurence Hope,” by Henry Burleigh, the African-American composer who inspired Dvorak and was inspired by him.
The poems are exotic and as passionate as a Victorian woman poet dared (“Hope” was her pen name). Burleigh’s rich musical palette could handle the “exotic” part well, and Burns’ orchestration enhanced it. Lattimore’s diction was obscure, but her voice was a treat. She closed with two spirituals, “I Wonder as I Wander” and “Mary’s Boy Child,” in a swingy Jamaican beat. They were delightful.