Photo by Angela Morgan
Present Music gave the first concert of their 2015-’16 classical season Sept. 5 at UW-Milwaukee’s Zelazo Center. Despite being Labor Day weekend, a large and attentive audience turned out. It was an inspiring beginning to a new season.
Artistic Director Kevin Stalheim started relating older and newer music in a very interesting program last February. That theme continued with this concert. It was almost startling to hear Wolfgang Mozart’s Gran Partita, K. 361 at a Present Music concert. Its wind instrumentation is encompassed by another piece on the program, Grand Pianola Music, by John Adams, thus its connection. This wasn’t the most refined account of Mozart one could imagine, but it was successful and earnest. Katharine Young Steele (or Katie Steele, as she was billed in this event) shone with the kind of sensitive phrasing and beautiful sound we’ve come to expect from her.
Not all avant-garde music from the 1970s holds up today. Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII from 1976, an homage to J.S. Bach’s Ciaccona from the Partita in D minor, remains substantial and persuasive—a free-flowing exploration of traditional violin techniques. Eric Segnitz gave it gravity and dignity.
John Adams (b. 1947) is arguably our greatest living American composer. His Hallelujah Junction, named after a truck stop on the California-Nevada border, explores a different kind of connection: between two pianos and the rhythmic motifs passed from one player to another. Composed in 1996, it has become a modern classic and one of the great challenges in piano literature. It was gamely played with flashes of brilliance by Cory Smythe and Yegor Shevtsov.
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Grand Pianola Music featured one of the largest ensembles ever on the PM stage with 23 musicians, including two pianos (connecting it to Hallelujah Junction) and three voices. Adams described it thus: “Beethoven and Rachmaninoff soak in the same warm bath with Liberace, Wagner, The Supremes, Charles Ives and John Philip Sousa.” This is lush, almost epic music with mysterious power. Though the balance might have been better with the voices slightly more amplified, this stirring performance set a high standard for the coming season.
