Frankly Music at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music

Music has held concerts at Windhover Hall at the Milwaukee Art Museum for a few years. For the first time the ensemble moved music into the galleries of the museum last Saturday evening in an exploration of the relationships between art, architecture and music.

The audience of perhaps 800 was divided into three groups, with music performed at three gallery stations. Though there were logistical concerns (sound bleed between galleries; the time-consuming moving around of people), it was an intriguing concept.

Steve Reich’s Clapping, performed by Terry Smirl and Linda Siegel, gained something in front of a large installation of rapidly changing video screens. The same performers were stunning in Reich’s Nagoya Marimbas, surrounded by the expansive, busy, number-themed canvases of Alfred Jensen’s Opposites are Complimentary. A 1963 piano piece by Morton Feldman, played by Phillip Bush, resonated in a room of mid- 20th-century abstracts. Other pieces were less directly provocative in visual contexts.

Three pieces were heard in concert before the gallery tour. Kamran Ince’s colorful and ponderous In White featured effective playing by violinist Eric Segnitz. Alex Mincek’s 

Portraits and Repetitions was premiered, a post-minimalist, gnarly sonic reaction to the work of five visual artists. Women at an Exhibition, a Randall Woolf score to video of female images from the Akron Art Museum, was weak and inchoate, backfiring with implications of objectification.

It was more than interesting to hear a completely different taste in contemporary American scores at Frankly Music last Thursday at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. Violinist Frank Almond and pianist Brian Zeger performed challenging works that stressed lyricism and a strong relationship with classical music traditions, allowing the musicians room for their cultivated and elegant tone. Most of the pieces were in shades of contemplative melancholy. Peter Lieberson’s Elegy (1990) is deeply evocative, with warm harmonies and a mood of grief. Philip Lasser’s love of French music was apparent in Berceuse Fantastique and Vocalise. Almond and Zeger played five lovely, brief movements from Ned Rorem’s Day Music and Night Music. Two movements from Russell Platt’s sonata Autumn Music were a surprising journey of eclectic styles.