Reviews

Our Latest 2006 Reviews!

Post-Brahms chamber music makes a welcome appearance on this disc

by Donald Rosenberg
Gramophone
September, 2006

The spirit of Brahms may hover over these works by his younger Viennese colleagues, Walter Rabl (1873–1940) and Josef Labor (1842–1924). But the striking appeal of their chamber pieces for clarinet and strings proves that obscurity was too harsh a verdict for both composers.

Rabl’s brief claim to creative fame occurred after Brahms tapped his Op.1 Quartet for clarinet, violin, cello and piano for top prize in a Viennese composition contest. Brahms’s influence brought Rabl a publisher, Simrock, though his impact ended there. Although the quartet has nods to Brahms’s style, it claims a personality all its own, with lilting thematic ideas, hints of darkness and bucolic exuberance more reminiscent of Dvorák than of the German master.

Labor, blind from the age of three, also moved in Brahms’s circle, and went on to teach Alma Schindler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Paul Wittgenstein (for whom he wrote the first left-hand piece after the pianist lost his right arm in the First World War). Labor’s Quintet for clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano is a warmly lyrical creation, with gracious interaction of instruments. The third movement shifts attention mostly to the piano, while the finale’s theme and variations present contrasting moods before tying things up neatly with the opening theme from the first movement.

Both pieces are worthy of performance, especially when taken up by musicians as sensitive and cohesive as those in the Chicago-based Orion Ensemble. Clarinettist Kathryne Pirtle plays with seamless elegance, telling nuances and spacious tonal resources, and her colleagues are keenly alert to one another’s every rhythmic and textural turn.

Twilight of the Romantics

by David Hurwitz
ClassicsToday.com
February, 2006

This excellent program features a pair of extremely tuneful, attractive, and unknown works for clarinet, piano, and strings by two contemporaries of Brahms. Walter Rabl (1873-1940) stopped composing in the early 1900s to devote himself to teaching, and his Clarinet Quartet of 1896 reveals a youthful composer full of promise. Sure the use of sonata form in the first movement is textbook-schematic, but the tunes are first rate (the exotic minor-key second subject is really special). The second-movement Adagio similarly shows a composer with a wider range of expression than you might at first expect, and the entire piece is extremely well-written for the four players (clarinet, violin, cello, and piano). It's quite a find.

Josef Labor (1842-1924) belongs to an older generation, and his quintet (he adds a viola to the above distribution of forces) adds a touch of Spohr's chromaticism to its basically Brahmsian cast. Actually, although the notes as usual use Brahms as their point of reference, he was by no means the model that we make of him today simply because most writers aren't interested in what people actually played and heard at the time in question (the same observation applies to Wagner). Rabl recalls Dvorák as much as Brahms, and Labor, as just mentioned, doesn't sound especially Brahmsian at all, despite the fact that the finale is a set of variations, much as in Brahms' own Clarinet Quintet. The nice thing about this piece is that despite the potential for chromatic sludge, it really does contain attractive thematic material, and the concluding variations, so often disappointing when the music seems to demand a more vigorous, less sectionalized finale, are particularly appealing.

The performances by the Orion Ensemble are extremely fine. Balances in mixed ensembles such as this, particularly with a piano involved, always are a bit tricky, but not here. Everything falls naturally into place, and the interpretations are unfailingly lively and stylish. The engineering is drop-dead fabulous, as natural and lifelike as you will find anywhere. If you love good Romantic chamber music, then you will surely find this release to be just about as good as it gets.

© 1999-2004 ClassicsToday.com
originally published at classicstoday.com

Twilight of the Romantics

by Aaron Green,
About.com
February, 2006

Guide Rating - rating

The Bottom Line

The world premier recording, Twilight of the Romantics, is delightfully fresh music by two extremely talented composers of the Late Viennese era. Although dwarfed by Brahms and Mahler, their music equally compares in style, texture, and melody. The Orion Ensemble performs flawlessly. It's an absolute treat to the ears.


Pros:
Cons:

On this album you'll find two works; Walter Rabl's Quartet in E-flat Major for Clarinet, Violin, Cello, and Piano, Op. 1 (1896) and Josef Labor's Quintet in D Major for Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano, Op. 11 (1900). The orchestration chosen by each composer is perfect; each instrument perfectly complements one another. Both pieces are very soothing and calming; don't expect to find abrasive fortissimos or distracting notations. The listening is smooth and easy, without lacking in melodic line and rhythmic texture.

Walter Rabl's Quartet in E-flat Major caught the attention of Brahms, who often judged many beloved music competitions hosted in Vienna, and was awarded first prize. Brahms liked the piece so much, he had it published along with three other Rabl works. Josef Labor, 9 years younger than Brahms, was in frequent contact with Brahms in the many social and artistic circles of Vienna and kept true to the musical values held by Brahms.

The Orion Ensemble is considered one of Chicago's finest chamber ensembles. After listening to the album it's not hard to hear why. Each musician is uniquely talented and all have performed in a number of top-notched orchestral ensembles and venues. They have set the bar for anyone wanting to masterfully perform either of these two works.

©2006 About, Inc.,
originally published at about.com

Twilight of the Romantics

Peter Grahame Woolf
Musicalpointers.co.uk
February, 2006

A recommendable CD which also provides a lesson in how to make a mark in the music business.

The Orion Ensemble, five accomplished young professional musicians with flourishing independent careers in Chicago, brings a fresh approach to programming, abetted by a silent sixth honorary member, violist Sally Didrickson, who researches and edits obscure chamber music for them. One of Sally’s "finds" was Labor's Quintet, scored for the core Orion Ensemble, clarinet and piano quartet, a rare combination.

Walter Rabl was admired by Brahms, and his clarinet quartet won (anonymously) a competition for which the great composer headed the adjudicators and had donated prize money. He turned to opera conducting in the early 20 C and his own music is virtually unknown. The Clarinet Quartet is the ony 19 C work for that rewarding combination and Rabl manipulates the sonorities in an atractively varied manner. Played with conviction of its worth, as here, it would find a welcome in any chamber concert for an ad hoc group of friends, say in Sunday Morning concerts in London's Wigmore and Blackheath Halls.

Josef Labor, another Brahms disciple, had a distinguished roster of pupils including Alma Schindler (later Alma Mahler) pianist Paul Wittgenstein (who commisioned left-handed piano music after losing his right arm) and Arnold Schönberg. As a member of the Wittgenstein circle he interacted also with Brahms, Clara Schumann, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The philospher Ludwig Wittgenstein played Brahms clarinet sonatas with Labor, counting him amongst the top greats amongst composers.

Both these works, which eschew progressive trends at the time of the dawn of musical modernism, prove viable well beyond their historical interest. The quintet is a major structure which develops its key sequences with 'slippery chromatic relationships' and the quintets of Franz Schmidt came to mind whilst listening.

This CD is (one) good exemplar for how younger musicians in college and afterwards may achieve a significant presence on the musical firmanent, instead of trying to win attention with the nth recording of canonic master works.

Orion Ensemble is soundly backed administratively and this Cedille debut is recorded and produced with every care. Bonnie Campbell's notes tell all you could want to know about these obscure composers, and a visit to Orion Ensemble's website is recommended to put this CD into context.

Now pianist Diana Schmück must take the opportunity to persuade her colleagues to follow up the Wittgenstein connection by venturing the first recording of Franz Schmidt's delectable clarinet quintet in its original left-hand piano form.

© Peter Grahame Woolf
originally published at musicalpointers.co.uk

Orion continues to set a high bar for ensembles


By John von Rhein
Tribune music critic
Published May 28, 2004

Local chamber music ensembles come in all shapes, sizes and functions, each with its own public, each searching for an adequate venue in an area with many inadequate venues. Two such stalwarts, the Orion Ensemble and the Chicago Ensemble, gave programs this week that reflected their different artistic levels and ambitions.

Pride of place must go to the Orion, resident ensemble of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, which closed its 11th season Wednesday at Ganz Hall.

With a piano quartet and clarinet as its unusual instrumentation, the five women instrumentalists produce stimulating programs that cover a wide repertory and are played with abundant polish and esprit de corps.

Indeed, every time I hear them I am struck by how much sheer personality there is behind their performances. The Orion is a tight-knit musical family, as violinist Florentina Ramniceanu observed, and it's sad that it is losing one of its members, violist Marlise Klein, at the end of the concert year.

James Berkenstock, longtime principal bassoon of the Lyric Opera Orchestra, joined them for Glinka's "Trio Pathetique" for bassoon, clarinet and piano, and Danzi's Quartet in D Major for bassoon and strings.

Berkenstock is a superb player, blending tone colors seamlessly with clarinetist Kathryne Pirtle and pianist Diana Schmuck in the Italianate lyricism of the Glinka. They dispatched the modest bravura of the Danzi quartet just as stylishly. The music is ingratiating and melodic, suggesting a Mediterranean Mozart. With Klein on viola, the four colleagues approached it in that blithe spirit.

Also setting this ensemble apart is its firm commitment to the music of our time. The program paired works by two living composers--John Harbison's tart little Trio Sonata for strings (1995) and Paul Schoenfield's fun and frisky "Cafe Music" for violin, cello and piano (1986).

The latter piece is, in the composer's words, "high-class dinner music." Ramniceanu, Schmuck and cellist Judy Stone made you want to get up and boogie to its honky-tonk rhythms.

Forward-Thinking Orion 
Not to be Missed

By Wynne Delacoma, Classical Music Critic, Chicago Sun-Times
October 17, 2003

The grim joke at Symphony Center ran something like this: Patrons who decided to come to Tuesday night's Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert had an infinitely better time listening to Mahler's Ninth (Symphony) than ticket holders who stayed home to watch the Cubs' eighth (inning).

So it was, too, on Wednesday night for the small audience at the Orion Ensemble's chamber recital in Ganz Hall. Orion's inventive, elegantly played program of early Mahler, a new work by Chicago composer Robert Kritz and Brahms' passionate C Minor piano quartet would have been worth hearing any time. As the Cubs' pennant hopes crashed a few miles north in Wrigley Field, the evening with Orion in the luxuriously restored, gilded Ganz Hall in Roosevelt University was balm to the soul.

Opening its 11th season, Orion is one of those outstanding chamber ensembles, plentiful in Chicago despite fearsome financial hurdles, that bring so much vitality to the city's musical scene. From their first seasons, Orion founders -- clarinetist Kathryne Pirtle, violinist Florentina Ramniceanu and pianist Diana Schmück -- made it clear that they weren't interested in simply revisiting great chamber music of the past. In 2000 they were part of a stimulating weekend organized by Mostly Music that brought composers William Bolcom, Peter Schickle, Augusta Read Thomas and James Wintle to Chicago for performances and discussions.

Wednesday night's program, first given Oct. 12 in Batavia and scheduled to be repeated on Sunday in Winnetka, turned the spotlight on the ensemble's multiple strengths. With violist Marlise Klein and cellist Judy Stone, who joined in 1995, Orion clearly values its individual voices, and at various times Stone's dark, velvety cello or Schmück's fluid, sparkling piano captured the ear. But especially in the lush one-movement quartet for violin, viola, cello and piano that Mahler composed when he was 16, the ensemble's strongly textured unison voice held sway. The final work, Brahms' C Minor Quartet for piano, violin, viola and cello, had the intensity of formidably talented players who know the value of really listening to one another.

Kritz's "Connections'' for clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano, written for the Orion in 2001, was a delightful bridge between the 19th century Romanticism of Mahler and Brahms and the 21st century's more prickly mood. Kritz's short melodic theme crackled through the three movements like an electric current, and at times the work took on the breathless, rapid-fire staccato of telegraph operators sending out urgent messages. Pirtle's clarinet was breezy and insouciant, and Schmück played some mean snatches of honky-tonk piano in the final movement.

Orion Ensemble's season continues with three more sets of concerts through May, each presented in Batavia, Ganz Hall and Winnetka. Treat yourself, buy a ticket and go.

A Celebration of American Chamber Music

by John von Rhein, Music Critic
Chicago Tribune
October 12, 2003

Works by Peter Schickele, Augusta Read Thomas, Jackson Berkey and Robert Kritz

It seems like only yesterday that a remarkable chamber group of musicians calling itself the Orion Ensemble was born. The Orions -- Kathryne Pirtle, clarinet; Diana Schmueck, piano; Florentina Ramniceanu, violin; Marlise Klein, viola; Judy Stone, cello -- quickly established themselves as one of the Chicago area's most vibrant, versatile and distinctive ensembles, at home in every period but especially committed to enlarging the repertory of its unusual combination of piano quartet and clarinet. Here they are with a 10th anniversary recording of four recent American works they have commissioned and/or championed.

The program obviously was chosen for its stylistic variety, and there isn't a weak work in the bunch. Of the commissioned pieces, Augusta Read Thomas' "Angel Musings" (1998) and Robert Kritz's "Connections in Three Movements" (2001), pride of place must go to the former; its two movements trace a striving from darkness into light through highly charged rhythmic activity and textures that shimmer even at their most dense. At 21 minutes the longest work on the disc, Kritz's piece takes a Ravel-like theme through various moods ranging from capricious to pensive to jaunty and jazzy, exploiting the virtuosity and complementary personalities of the performers.

Copyright © 2003,  Chicago Tribune

Orion Ascending

By Joe O'Brien
CityTalk, Network Chicago
December, 2002

When you shell out for tickets to a live performance, it’s assumed that the musicians have invested the time and energy required to do justice to the material. Yet even the most demanding concertgoer would have to raise an eyebrow if told that the musicians were actually paying more to perform than he had for his seat.

Such was the case in the early days of the Orion Ensemble, a critically acclaimed Chicago chamber music quintet that is now celebrating its 10th season.

In the early ’90s, Kathryne Pirtle, who plays clarinet and serves as executive director of the group, was touring in the orchestra for the Bugs Bunny on Broadway show. It was a paying gig, but her musical passion lay elsewhere. Seated together on a flight between shows, she and Florentina Ramniceanu, a violinist who was conducting the orchestra, had the kind of conversation that stands out in hindsight as a watershed moment.

“It was clear to me she was as in love with chamber music as I was,” Pirtle says. “We thought, let’s do a concert together.”

Pirtle recruited Diana Schmück, a pianist friend and fellow devotee of chamber music, and the three gave a performance at DePaul University that cemented the idea in their heads: This is what we were meant to do.

“In my mind, I envisioned a group that would be permanent,” Pirtle says, “that would last hopefully for the rest of my life.”

Her vision was strong, but the reality of what it would take to achieve it caught Pirtle off guard. “I thought you just had to play the concerts and go,” she says. The concerts were a joy, but the nuts and bolts of getting an arts organization off the ground proved rather complex. Hiring a board of directors and a publicist, holding meetings and raising funds were all part of the learning curve. At one point, Pirtle was going door-to-door to businesses in Batavia trying to sell ads in the ensemble’s program.

“I felt like a nobody,” she says.

The work was taxing, but the financial situation looked downright bleak. The women had recruited two players to round out the quintet, and the music-making was going great, but the Orion Ensemble players found themselves losing money each time they performed. Knowing neither she nor her colleagues could afford to pay $200 each time they gave a concert, Pirtle found the motivation to become a successful administrator as well as a successful artist.

She learned the ins and outs of fund raising, and her sales efforts started to bear fruit. “I started to catch on to the fact that it was possible to raise money.” Local businesses in Batavia (the ensemble’s first series was at the town’s Fox Valley Unity Church) were supportive, and audiences were growing. But Pirtle gives a great deal of the credit for the ensemble’s survival and ultimate success to the volunteers who assist Orion in capacities ranging from business advice to ushering at shows.

“We now have a lot of people who really help a lot behind the scenes,” she says. “It’s not just the music that happens to make it work – it has to be the organization behind the whole thing.”

With the organization on stable footing, the players have been free to focus on the music. In the mid ’90s, two new faces joined the ensemble, replacing the pair that was brought on by the original core of Pirtle, Ramniceanu and Schmück. With Marlise Klein on the viola and Judy Stone on cello, the Orion Ensemble has won praise from Chicago Tribune critic John von Rhein and composer Peter Schickele, aka PDQ Bach, who has been a source of both friendship and material for the group since appearing in a symposium during Orion’s Millennium Project two years ago.

A great deal of thought, research and debate goes into selecting the pieces that the group presents in concert. The goal is to create music that has an impact on the audience, drawing from the full range of the chamber-music repertoire, both old and new. This season alone, the ensemble has performed premieres of pieces by Chicago-based composers Sebastian Huydts and Robert Kritz.

In addition to the Fox Valley Church in Batavia, Orion also performs series at the Winnetka Presbyterian Church and Roosevelt University in the Loop, where the quintet is the ensemble in residence, as well as giving concerts around the country (including one bizarre evening at a federal prison in Arizona several years ago). A big step comes this spring, when the first Orion Ensemble CD will be released. A selection of pieces by American composers, many written specifically for the group, the disc is due out by March, according to Pirtle.

As for the upcoming broadcast on WFMT, the ensemble is reaching back into its own past for a special piece of music. Along with selections from Beethoven and Wanhal, the group will perform Bela Bartok’s Contrasts, the same work they performed in that first concert at DePaul more than 10 years ago.

“It just brings a lot of memories and a lot of joy to play that music,” Pirtle says. “It’s something that will always be really powerful for all of us."

Copyright © 2002 CityTalk, Network Chicago

Huydts' Premiere Sparkles in Orion Hands

by Ted Shen,Special Reviewer
The Chicago Tribune
September 20, 2002

After a decade together, the all-women Orion Ensemble has matured into a committed, fairly cohesive group that revels in its unusual instrumental mix. Though works for violin, viola, cello, clarinet and piano are scarce, those for any of the subsets take up a chunk of the chamber repertoire, which means Orion can field eclectic, often venturesome programs.

This week two Orion commissions are being debuted in separate concerts: Sebastian Huydts' Clarinet Quintet and Robert Kritz's "Lamentations for the 21st Century." Both local composers, Huydts is an emerging voice who imaginatively harks back to modernism and Kritz returned to music after a half-century hiatus. Huydts was up first in the Orion's concert Wednesday night at Roosevelt University.

Trained as a pianist in his native Amsterdam, Huydts in the early 1990s enrolled as a doctorate student in composition at the University of Chicago, where his teachers included John Eaton and Shulamit Ran, expressionists fond of dissonance and abstraction. While retaining some U. of C. influences, Huydts' music seems more indebted to Hindemith and Prokofiev, particularly in its piquant lyricism and rhythmic drive.

Huydts' quintet for the Orion opens with suspense, sustained by slow string chords building up to clarinet's tiny whoops. The ambiance evoked is nocturnal and creepy--heightened by loops of pizzicatos--as if something is about to happen. The second movement, driven by piano, is propulsive and agitated, though the outburst runs out of steam rather abruptly.

The last two movements are riveting, partly because they seem autobiographical. In remarks to the audience, Huydts said he'd put some bluesy chords in the third movement for his father, a jazz musician, and that the finale was written last summer when he was in Barcelona surrounded by flamenco tunes.

Indeed, one movement is solemn, elegiac. The music surges into the tolling bells (piano) only to recede into a stretch of testy ethereality. Suddenly, ferocious piano chords put an end to the reverie, and riotous passion takes over, with the clarinet playing klezmer-like Andalusian melodies in a flirtation with the other instruments.

A few simplistic and familiar gestures aside, the quintet thrives on the sharp, felicitous turns in mood and rhythm. The Orion members--especially clarinetist Kathryne Pirtle and pianist Diana Schmuck--performed it with flair and gusto. They should be pleased to have this attractive showcase as a calling card.

The Orion's strings--violinist Florentina Ramniceanu, violist Marlise Klein and cellist Judy Stone--had shining movements in the program's other two works, Mozart's Clarinet Quartet in B-flat Major and Schumann's Piano Quintet in E-flat Major. All five players showed that teamwork sets them apart.

The Orion will reprise this program at 3 p.m. Sunday in Winnetka Presbyterian Church, 1255 Willow Rd., and offer the same program but with Kritz's "Lamentations" instead of Huydts' Quintet at 8 p.m. Friday at Northeastern University, , 5500 N. St. Louis Ave. Phone 630-628-9591

Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune

The following review appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times Showcase:

The Orion Ensemble

By Andrew Patner, Music Critic
Chicago Sun-Times
March 3, 2001

It's not just Chicago area audiences and critics who admire the repertoire choices of the Orion Ensemble, which snared first prize for adventurous programming last year from Chamber Music America and ASCAP.

The Orion shared that award with Chicago's Mostly Music for its millennium contemporary music project. But the Orion's own performances are equally daring and rewarding. Wednesday night in Roosevelt University's Rudolph Ganz Memorial Hall, the ensemble and guest artist, mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley, presented a program that ranged from Estonia to Great Britain, and from North to South America, as it covered an engaging array of music from two centuries.

Bentley is the genuine article. A classically trained singer and alumna of the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, she has chosen to focus on the much less lucrative field of modern and contemporary music, and performs regularly with the Contemporary Chamber Players and for Chicago Chamber Musicians' new music projects. However, Bentley was equally at home Wednesday in dark settings of French poetry by Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935) and in light-hearted British romps by Arthur Bliss (1892-1975).

Songs from 1984 by both the Estonian cult composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) and the Chilean Juan Orrego-Salas (b. 1919) were especially exciting, the Pärt due to its unusual scoring for voice violin and viola, the Orrego-Salas cycle because of the composer's innate understanding of the crisp existential Spanish poetry of his texts.

In all cases, the individual Orion members--clarinetist Kathryne Pirtle, violinist Florentina Ramniceanu, violist Marlise Klein, cellist Judy Stone and pianist Diana Schmück--excelled separately and as partners with Bentley.

This fine collegiality was underscored in the two non-vocal works on the program--a 1993 quintet arrangement of George Gershwin's "Summertime" by jazz pianist and composer Michael Kocour, and Anton Arensky's lush Russian D Minor Piano Trio, Op. 32. Throughout the program, Schmück showed herself to be one of the finest chamber pianists on the scene, propelling her colleagues and yet never overpowering them, playing with her ears as much as her gifted hands.

The Orion's next delightfully varied program, featuring Mozart, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Chausson and Peter ("P.D.Q. Bach") Schickele, is scheduled for May 6 at Fox Valley Unity Church in Batavia and May 9 in Ganz Hall.

Composers, Orion Take Audience Beyond the Notes

by John Von Rhein, Music Critic
The Chicago Tribune
February 1, 2000

Mostly Music, which performs extensive advocate service on behalf of local musicians, turned its attention to matters of wider scope over the weekend at Roosevelt University and the Chicago Cultural Center, where it presented two days of concerts, rehearsals and a symposium, "An Inside Look at Contemporary Music."

The organization brought in four composers, William Bolcom, Peter Schickele, Augusta Read Thomas and James Wintle, to discuss their works and the state of the musical union. The Orion Ensemble prepared a work by each composer in his or her presence, culminating in performances Friday and Saturday nights.

To extrapolate any sweeping aesthetic conclusions from the multiplicity of styles and postures the late 20th Century has bequeathed us is impossible. The safest conclusion one could draw from the weekend event is that for many composers and audiences, school's out and accessibility is back: Liberated from rigid modernist-academic orthodoxy, composers have rediscovered the pleasures of communicating with listeners. Critic and composer Dan Tucker voiced the new composers' credo in his introduction to Saturday's concert in Roosevelt University's Ganz Hall: "Write anything you please, just give the audience a chance to like it."

There was much to like in the four chamber works heard at Saturday's Orion concert.

If any piece was emblematic of the peculiar dichotomy that still exists between the learned and the popular in postmodern art music, it is Bolcom's 1976 Piano Quartet. Rather than attempt to reconcile these oppositions, Bolcom puts them side by side and lets them duke it out, a musical metaphor for what he considers "a tragic flaw in the American psyche." The basic idiom is considerably harsher than that of his opera, "A View from the Bridge." And when the increasingly violent atonal gestures suddenly give way to a catchy blues-waltz, the effect is startling.

The Orions—Diana Schmück, piano; Florentina Ramniceanu, violin; Marlise Klein, viola; and Judy Stone, cello—did a wondrous job of rousing the passions of this music to life and making us accept Bolcom's deliberate disunities of style for what they tell us about us.

Bolcom the unabashed populist was also on view, with four of his Cabaret Songs to wry texts by longtime collaborator and "Bridge" librettist, Arnold Weinstein. They were sung by Bolcom's wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris. Her voice is more fragile than it once was, but her acute response to words and music, combined with Bolcom's lusty, barroom-style piano, was dead on the mark, especially in the bitterly funny "At the Last Lousy Moment of Love."

Schickele's 1982 Quartet for clarinet, violin, cello and piano is described in a program note as "listener-friendly." Certainly the music, with its hints of blues and jazz and even the composer's alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach, gives the performers, including the splendid clarinetist Kathryne Pirtle, plenty of worthwhile things to do, and the audience much to enjoy.

The program also included James Wintle's programmatic and well-crafted "The Pontoon-Bridge Miracle" (based on a Vachel Lindsay poem about Chicago) and Thomas' tightly argued, compelling "Angel Musings."

Return to History