By Laura Kennelly
New Music isn’t always instantly loveable, but the Cleveland Chamber Symphony gets props for last night’s concert because it showed off four new works that (at the very least) stimulated thought and (at the best) inspired dreams.
Conductor and artistic director Steven Smith spoke from the Gamble Auditorium stage at Baldwin Wallace University to introduce pieces and composers and to let everyone know that after taking a year off, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony was back.
And this time they brought Verb Ballets dancers with them. The dancers moved in abstract birdlike wave patterns to Smith’s “String Quartet,” an equally abstract and stark combination. A larger ensemble of dancers generated more story (and hence, more interest) as they performed to Clint Needham’s often deliberately humorous and always musically accessible “Urban Sprawl” (who doesn’t know quirky neighbors when they see them?).
Other works included the premiere of James A. Hirt’s sonically unsettling “Chromatophores” and a touching performance of the late Michael Leese’s beautiful “Music for Harp, Percussion, and Strings” that reminded us how much he and his late wife Jocelyn Chang are missed by the Cleveland music community.
Bottom line: Adding dance to the new music mix seems like a very winning combination: Bravo!
http://ClevelandChamberSymphony.org