Corey Dargel - photo by Luke Batten & Jonathan Sadler
The first Chicago appearances of both Corey Dargel and John Luther Adams fall in the next week, and I encourage everyone to get to both. Dargel has re-written what an art-song can be in our era, and beyond that dry description, his electronic art-songs are invariably touching and humane. Dargel is singing his one-year-old song cycle Thirteen Near-Death Experiences with ICE Saturday at the Velvet Lounge. There is a podcast. It’s $10 (the concert, not the podcast), and I scribbled about its premiere last year.
Before that, though, the Chicago Symphony runs down one of Osvaldo
Jessica Rivera
Golijov’s most beautiful works with soprano Jessica Rivera, How Slow the Wind from the Three Songs, and she also sings his settings of Schubert songs. Robert Spano conducts the rest of the American/Copland evening. How Slow the Wind is the only piece that’s ever made me wish I played clarinet. I think that Rivera’s performances can be part of the movement to reclaim the songs from Dawn Upshaw. Tickets are what they are.
John Luther Adams, by contrast, writes these gigantic slow-moving pieces which are, likewise, invariably touching and humane. CSO musicians and others are playing his Qilyuan at MusicNOW on Monday March 15, which I praised here. Another percussion work and one for brass, and a few Golijov pieces appear. Qilyuan, for four bass drums, remains one of those pieces, at least, to me, where you remember where you were the first time you heard it, so bizarre it sounded and how raptly it held your attention. I was sitting at my Time Out desk. Tickets are $20. (Farther down the line, Jaap van Zweden conducts Adams’s Dark Waves with the full CSO in October.)
And while it’s not related to live music, ICE’s pianist Jacob Greenberg released an exquisite and wide-ranging disc of Mozart, Schoenberg, Kurtág, Schumann, and his own Lied ohne Worte nach Rilke. Mozart’s Rondo in A minor, K. 511, is especially expressive, and follows nicely, and surprisingly, out of a selection of Kurtág’s Játékok.