Tired of being the proverbial prophet without honor in its adopted hometown, the Chicago-based new music ensemble eighth blackbird this season is making its boldest bid yet for mainstream attention.
The dynamic contemporary sextet launched its first full concert series Tuesday night at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance at Millennium Park, co-sponsored by the theater and the Contempo series.
The only real disappointment was the smallish audience turnout. But attendance should improve once the word gets around how terrific eighth blackbird is, and how bracing, accessible and free of academic sterility its programs are.
The central work on the series’ inaugural was a new mixed-media piece, “Mirrors,” by the husband-and-wife team of composer Tamar Muskal and interactive digital video artist Danny Rozin, assisted by director Amitay Yaish.
While the musicians moved about the stage, their images were caught on video, “interpreted” by a computer and projected onto a screen that became, in effect, the seventh performer. The ripples and shimmers that filled Muskal’s post-minimalist score were as evanescent as the swirling, digitized visuals — dissolving into one another with kaleidoscopic beauty. “Mirrors” is high-tech music theater at its most inventive and fascinating.
Martin Bresnick’s “My Twentieth Century” also used a video screen to project “normal” images of the performers as they took turns speaking the lines of a surrealist poem by Tom Andrews. (“My brother died in the 20th Century” was the refrain.) The music typically chugged along in off-the-beat, Coplandesque rhythms over a recurrent “pulse of time” figure introduced by the piano.
Half the fun of Frederic Rzewski’s “Pocket Symphony” was visual, as the players formed different configurations to match the percolating, fluttering, delicate, dancing score. Rzewski’s agreeably quirky music captures the bracing virtuosity of eighth blackbird beautifully.
Thierry de Mey’s “Musique de Tables” (“Table Music”) had three musicians rapping out intricate rhythms with knuckles and palms on amplified wooden boards. Steve Reich was there first with his minimalist “Clapping Music” and “Drumming.”
The wonderfully adept musicians were Tim Munro, flutes; Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets; Matt Albert, violin; Nicholas Photinos, cello; Matthew Duvall, percussion; and Lisa Kaplan, piano.
The eighth blackbird series will continue Jan. 26 and May 29. It’s a must-hear.
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jvonrhein@tribune.com
