Contempo: Contemporary Chamber Players

By Alan Artner

“The Young and the Brilliant,” Friday night’s exceptional concert at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, brought the New York-based Talea Ensemble to do what it does best, expose an audience to European music that is rarely surveyed on the American scene.

The program, which opened the 53rd season of the University of Chicago’s new music collective Contempo, was conceived in collaboration with Contempo’s adventurous Artistic Director Marta Ptaszynska and presented U.S. or Chicago premieres of very different works by five composers under age 40. Their countries of origin were Denmark, Poland, Slovenia, England and Czechoslovakia.

The result was engaging without descending to the easy-to-take entertainment spun out by many popular young American composers. It wholeheartedly opposed isolationism and cheered with its diversity.

The pieces were between four and 18 minutes in length. Those at the outer temporal limits — by, respectively, Nicolai Worsaae and Ondrej Adamek — included fragments of text and, in the case of the latter, supertitles resembling animated concrete poetry. All involved special playing techniques that extended the expressive range of the instruments. Sound was further transformed through the two great cliches of new music, amplification and the addition of electronic components.

The leanest, most desolate essays were excerpts, miniatures sparely daubed, from larger Worsaae pieces, with brief texts purely sung by soprano Alice Teyssier. “A Light Exists in Spring,” by Justyna Kowalska-Lason, brought such contained mournfulness into the open, closer to lyrical tragedy by means of an amplified string quartet relentlessly bending pitches to wail.

Vito Zuraj’s “Framed” took the prize for the most unexpected source of inspiration, tennis, creating an agitated bounciness that gained the force of threat through implacability. Christian Mason’s “Noctilucence” sought to evoke a rare type of cloud through widely spaced sonorities that quietly glistened until eventually erupting to grind forward with some vehemence.

The largest performing forces, numbering 11 players, came in Adamek’s concluding “Ca tourne ca bloque,” which first had a malfunctioning sound monitor that several minutes in caused conductor James Baker to stop, call for a technician and begin again. So much theatrical happens in the piece, verging on aural cartooning, that some in the audience took Baker’s announcement as part of the composition, reacting with chuckles. The work, particularly in contrast with the others, came across as overloaded, though its performance in the complete run-through was equally, head-spinningly virtuosic.

Read on the Chicago Tribune website

By Tim Sawyier

The University of Chicago’s Contempo ensemble launched its 53rd season Friday night at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts in Hyde Park. Formerly the Contemporary Chamber Players, Contempo changed course 13 years ago under then-director Shulamit Ran to become a “new music collective”–one showcasing the talents of the university’s composers and resident ensembles as well as guest performers.

Contempo hosted the New York-based Talea Ensemble as one of the latter. Talea’s program, somewhat grandiosely dubbed “The Young and Brilliant,” was devoted to music of five European composers in their 30s.

In her brief opening remarks Contempo artistic director Marta Ptaszyńska said she sought “variety” above all in selecting the repertoire for this program. This she certainly achieved, assembling five works in a wide range of compositional idioms that made for an engrossing evening. Four of the five selections were being heard in their U.S. premieres, the closing Ondřej Amámek work in its Chicago premiere.

Read more on the Chicago Classical Review website

The Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago is a dynamic, collaborative, and interdisciplinary environment for the creation, performance and study of new music and for the advancement of the careers of emerging and established composers, performers, and scholars.

Distinguished by its formation within an uncompromising, relentlessly searching, and ceaselessly innovative scholarly environment that celebrates excellence and presents new possibilities for intellectual dialogue, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition is comprised of ten integrated entities: Contempo, CHIME, resident and visiting ensembles, distinguished guest composers, performances, recordings, research, graduate student-led projects, workshops, and postdoctoral fellowships.

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By Howard Reich

The Frederic Chopin bicentennial inspired major concerts around the world in 2010, but none like the one Chicago jazz singer Grazyna Auguscik offered that July at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.

Performing before an enthusiastic audience of 8,500 and sharing the stage with world-class Polish and Chicago musicians, Auguscik applied her distinctly fluid vocal style to some of the most sublimely expressive music ever penned. Yes, everyone knows that Chopin stands as one of the greatest composers to have written for the piano, but Auguscik and friends proved that Chopin’s miniatures can flourish in a jazz environment, as well.

And though Auguscik hardly was the first jazz musician to make that point, she did so with such elegance and authenticity that one hoped she would return to this repertoire.

She will do precisely that Saturday evening, when she appears on the Contempo-Jazz Double Bill, an annual concert that pairs contemporary classical music with jazz performance of comparable stature, at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts. Considering how effective Auguscik sounded in 2010, one can only imagine where she has taken this concept.

By John Von Rhein

It’s been a rewarding couple of days for local followers of new and relatively new Polish music.

At Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concerts this week and last, audiences were reminded of Witold Lutoslawski’s CSO-commissioned Third Symphony ranking as one of the landmark orchestral scores of the late 20th century.

Monday night in the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts’ Performance Hall at the University of Chicago, two of Poland’s most prominent composer-performers, vocalist Agata Zubel and double bassist Tadeusz Wielecki, were the focus of a Contempo series exploration of their music and that of other European composers.

Polish-born composer and U. of C. music professor Marta Ptaszynska, the series’ new artistic director and curator of Monday’s program, included a piece of her own in the mix, which leapt across European borders to present scores by the late Russian avant-gardist Alfred Schnittke and the late French composer Christophe Bertrand. Members of the university-resident ensemble eighth blackbird did most of the heavy lifting, performance-wise, with the Pacifica Quartet anchoring the opening and closing portions of the concert.

By Tim Sawyier

On Sunday afternoon the new-music collective Contempo performed the second installment of its 50th anniversary season at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Two Contempo-commissioned world premieres by Sofia Gubaidulina and Gunther Schuller were the main events on the program. Yet the musicians—drawn from ensembles-in-residence eighth blackbird and the Pacifica Quartet (and filled out with guest artists)—offered thoughtful, incisive readings of several works from a wide stylistic spectrum. More »