Soirée Lyrique's Stimulating "Viennese Concert"

Vienna is one of the world's great cities, famous not only for its musical legacy, but also for its great thinkers and classic cuisine. Imagine a Sunday afternoon of comic and lyrical songs and waltzes from this great tradition ... now imagine it performed mit höchste künstlerische Qualität in downtown Elgin.

The lovely atmosphere and excellent acoustics of First Congregational Church provided the setting for "A Viennese Concert," presented by Soirée Lyrique NFP, the premiere local arts group devoted to classical vocal performance.

This 90-minute program featured works by Strauss, Mozart, Korngold and Léhar in a variety of periods and styles, performed by a stellar group of soloists, accompanied by pianist Dr. Chiayi Lee and a string quartet from Chamber Music on the Fox.

If you think you have no appetite for opera, one taste of music by soprano Solange Sior, founder and Artistic Director of Soirée Lyrique, will awaken your cravings for more. In solos from Giuditta and Die tote Stadt, her voice was like apricot pastry, both sweet and tart, and so rich it leaves an impression on your conscience as well as your memory.

The cinnamon and vanilla tones of soprano Genevieve Thiers were the coffee of a Viennese dessert: simultaneously light and dark; part vision, taste and temptation. And like the finest torte, the sublety of her execution in solos from The Merry Widow and Die Fledermaus belied the depth of talent and craft in their preparation.

No Viennese coffeehouse would be complete without the aroma of smoking pipes and the glow of gas lights. Nicholas Provenzale's smooth, smoky baritone filled the room with just the right flavor of Italian briar in songs from Die Zauberflöte and The Desert Song, and the white dinner jacket of Simon Kyung Lee reflected the warmth and radiance of his solos "Dein is mein ganzes Hertz" and "Vienna, City of my Dreams."

With characteristically relaxed elegance, the string quartet anchored by cellist Sara Sitzer, founding Co-Aristic Director of Chamber Music on the Fox, reminded us how fortunate we are in Elgin to have the resources of Chicago's world-class music community right in our backyard — and in many cases, literally just down the street.

The changing repertoire and amazing artistic lineup of Soirée Lyrique is exceeded only by the friendly ease and accessibility of its concerts, staged in familiar venues in and around Elgin. Visit soireelyrique.org for details on its upcoming June event.

"The Poetry of Music" at Elgin Art Showcase

After a weekend of amazing live chamber music performances at the Hemmens Cultural Center and Elgin Community College, two other groups joined forces at the Elgin Art Showcase to perform "The Poetry of Music" presented by Chamber Music on the Fox.

The 20-voice Chamber Singers of Elgin Master Chorale (EMC) were accompanied by the Elgin Chamber Players string quartet in Beethoven's "Elegischer Gesang" (1814) to open the death poetry-themed program. The choir made the room sound like a much bigger hall, especially faithful to the upper registers and more than honest with sibilant German consonants. Displaying tremendous dynamic range, the choir was capable of well-balanced fortes that could almost wake the dead.

The singers' gaze rarely left EMC Music Director Andrew Lewis, whose lucid conducting revealed the depth of their skill and preparation. No less a communicator with words, Lewis the educator shared insights on the evening's vocal works in impromptu remarks, for which the audience was overheard to whisper their gratitude during intermission.

The highlight of the choral performance was "Dark Night of the Soul," (2010) by living Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo, an expansive work that opens with a minimalist piano accompaniment played by Jon Warfel, known locally as the Choirmaster of Elgin's First Congregational Church.

Long, sustained vowels and modern harmonies evoked the mood of long Scandinavian nights, combined with the mysticism of the text by St. John of the Cross (1542-1592). Moments of powerful musical rapture fueled by lyrics like "love's urgent longings" were almost too big for the room, as complex chords gushed out overtones like a North Sea gale. "Dark Night" is a beautiful piece whose only critic was the hard surfaces of the Showcase.

Franz Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor ("Death and the Maiden") offered a chance to witness the talents of area musicians Tarn Travers, Eleanor Bartsch (violins), Aurelien Pederzoli (viola) and Sara Sitzer (cello), who is also co-founder of Chamber Music on the Fox.

Despite its nickname, the piece is neither frail nor morose. A better understanding of its subject comes from the medieval "dance of death," understood for centuries as a pushing and pulling between mortals and the Grim Reaper.

The four players traveled a wide range of emotions and musical postures throughout the work's four movements, matching each other's phrasing, dynamic changes and rubatos as if they have played together for a long time. Schubert's startling shifts in key, rhythm and register never put these pros off their game.

The room made it difficult to play soft enough at times, but they are few and far between in this nearly 50-minute masterpiece of the quartet repertoire. Displaying the stamina to match their talents, the players rallied through a dramatic and tumultuous finale with aplomb.

Equally astonishing is the mere fact that performances of this quality are now appearing regularly in venues throughout Elgin, creating critical mass for the arts here, in the middle of what was once viewed as a lifeless suburban cultural desert.

Chamber Music is Alive and Well in Elgin

The first three weeks of 2015 have brought nearly ten diverse Elgin performances of classical and new music by soloists, duos and small ensembles in the venerable format known as "chamber music."

Typically staged in a gallery, church or multi-purpose hall, these concerts showcase some of the finest area talents in an up-close-and-personal way. Moreover, the variety of material ranges from masterpieces rarely heard outside the conservatory, to edgy new music from young composers.

The Elgin Symphony Orchestra has led the way with its frequent offerings at Gail Borden Library and nearby schools and health care facilities. The Elgin Youth Symphony has broadened its programs in recent years to include chamber music events for students and faculty.

Smaller groups, like the Heartland Voices, Soirees Lyriques and the Lenten Concert Series at First Congregational Church bring excellent vocal programs to the community. Some of these events are free or donation-based, while others attract a surprising number of paid admissions.

Melissa Snoza, flute and Jennifer Woodrum, clarinet perform with
Fifth House Ensemble at Side Street Studio Arts gallery

Notable examples are the projects from Chamber Music on the Fox, whose lineup features local appearances by professional chamber groups like Spektral Quartet and Fifth House Ensemble from Chicago.

Still the largest crowds are drawn in to hear Elgin musicians like Rachel Elizabeth Maley and Scott Metlicka, whose January recitals at Side Street Studio Arts gallery offered standing room only for latecomers.

Thus emerges alongside Elgin's established symphony concert tradition, a new entrepreneurial paradigm that composer Aaron Gervais calls the "indie classical" movement. Here in this receptive community, the upside is quite good if these lively arts groups can find ways to strengthen each other through partnerships and collective action.

In Concert: A Dance and Music Collaboration

Movement is the basis of reality, because it organizes time and space into experiences that have meaning.  For this reason, dance — the art of movement — inhabits the largest possible creative medium, where the rewards (or demands) for an audience involve a complete experience of watching, listening, feeling and of course, moving.

More than twenty artists from Elgin and beyond brought it all together in a dance and music collaboration entitled In Concert at the intimate Elgin Art Showcase Friday night. Produced by Side Street Studio Arts in conjunction with Chamber Music on the Fox, the program featured six performances, including multiple premieres.

Three separate pieces consisting of a dancer-and-musician duo examined the politics of couples, the tension of two-mindedness, and the relationships between passing, sitting still and being noticed. In all three, the movements of the musicians were used to poetic effect, echoing the remarks of choreographer and curator Erin Rehberg: "When I witness live music, I see dance."

In a standout premiere performance, musician-dancer Rachel Elizabeth Maley explored the sound and movement of breath in a piece entitled "Peace Breathing." Her meditation of mostly wordless musical chants rose and fell with each lungful of air, ending in a soft cadence of body percussion.

Megan Beseth, Christine Hands, Sara Nelson, Tiffany Philpot,
Ashley Strickland and Cassie Walker of Core Project.

The artists of Core Project Chicago premiered Children, a work of amazing scale in five parts, incorporating six dancers and seven instrumentalists. Dancing solo at times, in pairs or in unison, the ensemble played off each other in episodes of kinetic development that spoke of friends and enemies, safety and experimentation, fidgeting, and flights of innocent discovery.

They used the entire space, including the floor beneath the orchestra while it was performing Child by David Lang, whose music provided a design of sound that struck the right balance between background and foreground. The same can be said for the lighting effects throughout: done so well that they weren't distinguishable from the rest of the performance.

Sara Sitzer

In the concert finale, five dancers costumed in black worked through the perspectives of Rehberg's Transient Views, set to the unaccompanied cello music of J.S. Bach performed by Sara Sitzer. The dance juxtaposed vertical with horizontal, order with accident, and direction with rotation in a counterpoint of expressions that dared us to focus on any one thing.

The concert ended with Sitzer's dramatically lit solo performance of an excerpt by Bach, reminding us that there is no music without movement, and no movement without creative impulse.

Shifting their roles from arts administrators to artists, Rehberg and Sitzer are using their professional depth and personal gravitational force to produce first-rate performances deserving of much larger audiences, and leading the way for an emerging arts culture in downtown Elgin.

The Colorful Art Music of Chicago's Spektral Quartet

While we love to proclaim that art should not be imprisoned within galleries, concert halls, or other rooms of some particular formality, such surroundings are usually excellent places in which to watch and listen. Elgin's Side Street Studio Arts Gallery was an ideal setting for an autumn evening of pure art music performed by the Spektral Quartet.

But the macabre artworks of Side Street's "Something Wicked" exhibit — and the music itself — may have been the only formal elements of this gathering. The musicians blended in with the casual Tuesday night crowd, and friendly greetings were offered by Sara Sitzer, co-artistic director for "Chamber Music on the Fox," organizers of this, the first in a series of chamber music events planned for Elgin venues.

For the next two hours, the artists of Spektral Quartet delivered one amazing performance after another, challenging our notions of what to expect from a string quartet, and pushing the boundaries of what's musically possible.

Aptly named "The Sampler Pack" because of its variety, the nine-part program spanned almost 200 years of music history, and included works ranging in length from five seconds to more than ten minutes, punctuated by impromptu remarks from the musicians themselves. 

Violinists Clara Lyon and J. Austin Wulliman

In contemporary pieces from Philip Glass and Bernard Rands, the ensemble tightly synchronized their body language and breathing, displaying what violinist J. Austin Wulliman later described as a "group mind" that can only be formed after innumerable hours of rehearsal together. Violinist Clara Lyon, the newest member, meshed seamlessly in this, her first appearance with Spektral.

Verses from the late American poet Russell Edson served as lyrics for two parts of a suite by contemporary Chicago composer David Reminick, whose score calls for simultaneous singing, playing and, arguably, musical movement. There may be many great musicians in Chicago, but few are asked to sing and dance while playing passages of such rhythmic and melodic complexity.

For the Spektrals, Art meets Life in a project called "Mobile Miniatures," a commissioned collection of dozens of complete scores by different composers, of suitable length for cell phone ringtones. But the playful concept belies the sophistication of this music, and the skill and sensitivity with which it was played.

Violist Doyle Armbrust and cellist Russell Rolen

Taken from the classic end of the spectrum, selections from Beethoven, Dvorak and Stravinsky amply demonstrate the depth of talent and experience of this quartet. Passages played as expressively as any concert master by violist Doyle Armbrust and cellist Russell Rolen moved us inwardly with intimate phrasings that were never intended for a full orchestra.

Great art challenges us and changes us. Like something conceived by Edgar Allan Poe, whose portraits were displayed on the walls of the gallery, this concert took us to places where music has no pulse, where ugly noises and long silences are strangely beautiful, and our subconscious becomes conscious.

Evocative language and imagery are powerful objects, but it's live performances of such superb quality and authenticity that create a truly transcendent experience. And when this quartet plays, the specter is real.