Music Review: Sunday concerts
Sunday triple header a rich Bloomington experience

Where else but in Bloomington? The question became manifest again on Sunday, when a music devotee could experience three outstanding events, all in one venue — Auer Hall — and everything was free.

Choral beauty

The IU Pro Arte Singers and Classical Orchestra offered stunning interpretations of Mozart’s deeply moving Kyrie in D Minor, calling for intense four-part choral singing, and music of Haydn, including the magnificent Missa Solemnis in B-flat Major, “Harmoniemesse.”

In the Mass, the last major work the composer would write, choral ensemble and orchestra, under the most sensitive and precise conducting of John Poole, produced both glowing serenity and majestic brightness, leaving a listener the beneficiary of a reading that would have been hard to improve upon anywhere. The singing was gloriously resonant, from the ensemble and the soloists selected from Pro Arte ranks. The orchestra had the obvious benefit also of preparatory training from its director, Stanley Ritchie.

A brief secular piece by Haydn, “The Storm,” gave all the participants a chance to approximate Mother Nature, full of sound and fury.

Quartet fusion

What better follow-up could there be on a Sunday afternoon than some Beethoven from the returning Orion String Quartet, which opened its program with the Opus 18, No. 6, B-Flat Major Quartet, “La Malinconia,” stressing the work’s buoyancy in the fast movements and sense of dolor in the haunting Adagio that gives the quartet its name.

Electronically generated sounds joined the Orion foursome in Leon Kirchner’s Quartet No. 3, which won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Taped and live elements are meant to be smoothly integrated in performance, and they certainly were on this occasion.

The keyboard assignment in Schumann’s popular E-Flat Major Piano Quintet went to IU’s Evelyne Brancart. Since she favors the same sort of give-it-all approach preferred by the Orion, their implementation of this lushly romantic score was winningly virile and exultant.

African-American flavor

The annual “Extensions of the Tradition” concert, presented Sunday evening, was meant to show how African-American composers enrich classical music with infusion of their own ethos. Once again, the point was well made as faculty and student talents performed a half-dozen works by four IU-related composers.

Among the highlights, in a program of considerable variety, were “Songs of Living and Dying,” David Baker’s setting of six pointed and poignant poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, sung expressively by mezzo Patricia Stiles; and Marian Harrison’s “Interpretive Sketches,” five demanding, often playful piano pieces built on thoughts of Bach, Debussy and the composer’s own fertile imagination, performed skillfully by David Lyons.

Tremendously moving were Tyron Cooper’s “Songs of the Past … for the Future,” a creatively conceived combination of spirituals for voice and chamber ensemble, given added power through mezzo Marietta Simpson’s heartrending and illumined interpretation.

The founder of the “Extensions” series, William Banfield, this year’s composer-in-residence at IU’s African American Arts Institute, was on hand, too. His “Joes Chose Slows Woes Blues” closed the concert with a galvanic exhibition by 10 jazz performers.

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The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.