In sold-out concerts on Friday and Saturday, Guarneri Hall was the scene of a 90th birthday celebration for Bernard Rands, a Pulitzer Prize winning composer. Originally from Britain, Rands has lived in Chicago for many years with his wife, composer Augusta Read Thomas.
Several ensembles and solo musicians performed six pieces of chamber music by Rands that practically spanned his entire 70-year career. These pieces demonstrated the variety of styles he employs and illustrated his ability to make full use of the aural possibilities that each ensemble offers. The musicians would play seemingly disjointed melodies in distant tonalities that would magically come together in awesome chords and striking harmonies. There were many moments of musical magic on Friday and Saturday.
The setting was delightful. Occupying space on the third floor of a modern office building at 11 E. Adams, the relatively new Guarneri Hall has excellent acoustics. It is an open floor plan with no delineation between stage and seats, which can be set up anywhere. This venue allows interaction between performers and audience and seems to recreate the parlors and drawing rooms where chamber music was originally played 200 years ago.
All four living composers on the two programs were present, and they were able to educate the audience and offer detailed explanations of their works. Greatly helping things were talented performers who contributed to the discussion. They also brought their best playing.
Friday’s concert featured piano, strings, saxophones, and vocals. Composer/pianist Daniel Pesca started things with Rands’ Impromptu No. 3, which set the tone for the works to follow by opening with a single, sustained note, which was followed by quick chords. Pesca eventually filled in the notes with a careful, but deliberate style. While mostly atonal, the music also took on a jazz/blues edge in places.
Kathleen Ginther’s Psalm of Love and Sorrow started much the same way. Pesca returned to the piano with Stefan Hersh playing quiet harmonics and soft bowing techniques on violin. A violin dealer with an office in the building, Hersh is the leading inspiration for Guarneri Hall. At the start of the concert, Rands thanked Hersh for his work and insight behind this outstanding performance space. Ginther’s Psalm and Pesca’s Line for a Walk, which was performed later, gave Hersch an excellent opportunity to show off virtuosity with Pesca on piano.
Songs played a big part in Friday’s concert. Soprano Kristina Bachrach teamed with cellist Alexander Hersh, the son of Stefan Hersh, to perform three lovely poems by Derrick Walcott that Rands set to music. While the performance was great, I found the pieces a bit brusque for my taste.
Later in the program Bachrach paired with violist Chih-Ta Chen of the Terra String Quartet for a performance of Ginther’s adaptation of Épousailles (Wedding), a French poem by Guillaume Apollinaire. In setting this poem to music, Ginther interwove the vocals and viola into a fascinating sound, and the players captured this well.
The high points of the evening were two renditions of music that eventually became Prism (Memo 6b), a piece for saxophone quartet. It was performed by ~Nois, a Chicago-based ensemble. A bit earlier in the evening, ~Nois member Hunter Bockes performed Memo 6, the original version, which was written for solo alto saxophone.
Rands noted that a solo saxophone can only sound one note at a time, and Memo 6 allows the audience to imagine the harmonies. By adding three notes to create Prism, he could determine those harmonies. It was fascinating to hear this play out live, although it might have been better if Prism had followed Memo 6 directly in the program. ~Nois played it masterfully, capturing the wide variations in dynamics and aural color.
Saturday’s concert was devoted to strings, opening with the world premiere of Rands’ Memo No. 9, Fantasia for Solo Cello, a piece he wrote for Alexander Hersh. Rands and Hersh gave a lengthy explanation of how the work came about. Of particular note is that it was composed around Alexander’s name Alex, using the notes A, La (or A), E, and X, which, in recognition of the 10th note in the 12-tone scale, happens to be A. Sure enough, everything settled around an A and E. Hersh was able to articulate the wealth of sounds that Rands called for. It was a reminder that a 90-year-old Bernard Rands can still bring out wonder.
The remainder of the concert was performed by a recently formed ensemble from New York, the Terra String Quartet. If Saturday was any indication, violinists Harriet Langley and Amelia Dietrich, violist Chih-Ta Chen, and cellist Audrey Chen have a great future ahead of them.
This was immediately evident in the ethereal, dreamlike quality of their version of Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in g-minor, Op. 10. They were tight but wispy as they played the many transitions with delicate finesse. This was especially noticeable in the slow third movement, as they shifted from pizzicato, to bowed strings, on muted and unmuted instruments.
After intermission, we were treated to “Celebration” from Magic Gardens, a suite by Augusta Read Thomas. What struck me is how much it felt like a fanfare, with bright and loud sections followed by quieter contrapuntal passages that Terra Quartet played with precision. They shone bright on this piece.
The concert closed with Rands’ String Quartet No. 3, Islands of Repose. He discussed the work at length, explaining how its difficulty has led to few performances or recordings of it. He described how conductors and musicians can be intimidated by scores that are so filled in, they’re hard to interpret.
Terra certainly got through it well, illustrating another concept Rands discussed, how the quick chords were like punctuation notes separated by islands of repose. The only issue was an occasional lack of simultaneity when multiple players plucked the strings at the same time. Other than that, it was a great performance of this intense piece.
Guarneri Hall next hosts Cellist Luiz Fernando Venturelli and pianist Liang-Yu Wang performing works by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, J. S. Bach, César Franck, and others. Sunday, March 31, 2024, 6:30 pm. On the following Tuesday, April 2, Guarneri Hall will host George Crumb: Ancient Mysteries and the Universe of Dreams. 6:30 pm. For more information, click here.