Under New Leaders, Present Music Opens on High Note

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Photo credit: Troy Freund

Present Music kicked off its 2019-2020 season with a program titled “Re:re:rewrite.”

The Milwaukee classical season kicked off with a classy, interesting and very successful concert by Present Music at the Zelazo Center, the first under the new leadership of co-artistic directors David Bloom and Eric Segnitz. We’ve had a preview in the past two seasons of Bloom’s refined tastes, and Segnitz’s decades-long presence at PM is well-known as an asset. The program was titled “Re:re:rewrite,” referencing the influences of one composer to another.

Ilana Setapen was a stylish violin soloist in “Material in E-flat” from Nico Muhly’s Drones for Violin, music about noticing the background noise of the constant humming of modern life. This was followed by young San Francisco area composer Gabriella Smith’s Brandenberg Interstices, which features another contemplation of drones, then cleverly spills into a bubbling take on Johann Sebastian Bach, turning bluegrass-like before gently fading away.

Rhiannon Giddens’ At the Purchaser’s Option is a setting of text about a young American slave’s dilemma of being advertised for sale, with her baby offered as an option, and her angst about the possibility of being separated from the child. Donna Woodall’s buttery singing movingly told the story.

György Ligeti’s lively Car Horn Prelude, with six players playing two racks of car horns, was good fun. The sudden contrast of moving directly into Arvo Pärt’s quiet and contemplative Hymn to a Great City for two pianos was breathtaking and inspired programming.

Janesville native Caleb Burhans’s effectively nervous Escape Wisconsin (rather than the classic marketing slogan Escape to Wisconsin) showed the frustrated ambitions of a young Midwestern mind. Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite, the longest and most substantial music of the evening, is a five-movement reaction to two songs by Radiohead, requiring absolute precision of the players, admiringly accomplished. Pianist Michael Mizrahi was a wonder in launching the complex final movement.

After the Reich piece, a logical follow up was a brilliant arrangement by John Tanner and Eric Segnitz of the Radiohead song “Everything in its Right Place” by Thom Yorke, culminating in beaten drums―tires wrapped tightly in plastic―rolling down the aisle, and the Extra Crispy Brass Band jubilantly marching in.