Photo Credit: Troy Freund
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The new co-artistic directors of Present Music, David Bloom and Eric Segnitz, continued the tradition of a Thanksgiving concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist on Sunday. The capacity audience was proof that the Milwaukee community has long embraced this event.
The theme was music composed by women. The longest and most substantial offering was This Might Be a Form of Dreaming by Caroline Shaw (b. 1982). Bloom conducted the eight excellent singers of the Hearing Voices Ensemble, along with the equally excellent instrumental ensemble. Shaw is one of the most interesting of younger American composers, especially in her ability to set words colorfully and write astutely for voices. The texts were drawn from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, a collection of prose poems by Claudia Rankine. Some of the music is a modern take on Anglican chant, with results that keep the ear expectantly leaning in. Bloom led a fully convincing performance of this beautiful music.
Other composers included Pauline Oliveros (The Heart Chant), Shelley Washington (A Kind of Lung) and Reena Esmail (TaReKiTa). Reagan High School graduate Lauren Barta’s Dreamily, for a cappella chorus, paints the sweet stillness of the twilight hour, nicely performed by the chamber choir of its composer’s alma mater. Bloom’s arrangement of Eve Beglarian’s The Continuous Life showed imaginative invention, though it might have gone on a bit too long.
The Bucks Native American Singing and Drumming Group again returned to raise the rafters to both open and close the program. Along the way was the friendly audience sing-along of Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music.”
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Earlier in the week, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Frankly Music presented what may have been the American premiere of the recently discovered Piano Trio by Amanda Maier-Röntgen (1853-’94), composed in 1873. The style is along the lines of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, but Maier-Röntgen found an easy, graceful fluency in her own individual voice. The perfectly matched ensemble of violinist Frank Almond, pianist Adam Nieman and cellist Nicholas Canellakis made a strong case for the piece with well-sculpted, sensitive, sophisticated playing.
