Last spring at Present Music’s first Equinox concert, the performance began with a single candle lit in the darkness of Turner Hall Ballroom. “Gradually, over time, we went to the light—we ended the concert with The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ This year, it will be more of a back and forth between darkness and light,” promises Present Music’s artistic director Kevin Stalheim.
The change of seasons with its transition from the dark nights of winter to the brighter days of spring is the conceptual backdrop for Present Music’s upcoming concert, “Equinox: light and dark.” The program will include the Milwaukee ensemble’s usual emphasis on work by living composers, anchored with a piece by a 20th-century master and recent music that makes reference to classics from past centuries.
Robert Honstein’s Ospedale is exemplary of history woven through contemporary music. As Stalheim explains it, the work’s title refers to a girls’ orphanage in Italy for which Vivaldi wrote much of his music. “Honstein explores the feelings and sounds the girls heard there, especially the night sounds—the creaking floorboards, the waves from the ocean below,” he says. “It’s nocturnal, eerie, haunting—it’s what the girls were experiencing when they weren’t playing Vivaldi’s happy daytime music.”
Present Music’s Grammy-winning Corey Smythe will play harpsichord on Ospedale and solo on the instrument for György Ligeti’s “Hungarian Rock.” “That one kicks ass but it’s still a harpsichord!” Stalheim says. He describes Andrew Norman’s Music in Circles as “six instrumentalists coming in one by one, expanding their music, going in a circle that comes back to the beginning—but at some point they begin to share melodies in common.” The circularity underlies the evening’s cosmic theme. The Equinox program also includes a meditation on Bach by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina and Judd Greenstein’s cheerful Clearing, Dawn, Dance.
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“Turner Hall works well as the setting,” Stalheim says. “The Ballroom lends itself to feeling old and nocturnal—until you turn up the lights! And talk about those creaking floor boards!”
Present Music’s “Equinox: light and dark” begins at 7 p.m., March 20 at Turner Hall Ballroom, 1040 N. Fourth St. For tickets visit presentmusic.org
