Graffiti
Present Music, Milwaukee’s all-star chamber ensemble, has inspired a huge and devoted fan base for its fearless embrace of new and unusual music: they have won ASCAP/Chamber Music America’s Adventurous Programming Award an unprecedented five times in the past dozen years. And it’s no wonder, when the group led by Kevin Stahlheim has given birth to so many cool projects and pleasant musical discoveries over the years. Graffiti, this collection of three commissioned works from around the world, represents a few choice plums from their 25th anniversary season in 2006-07.
Each of the works deals with roots, mental states, and memory in one way or another. Elena Kats-Chernin, born in Tashkent and living in Australia, wrote “Village Idiot” for an exhibition of paintings by schizophrenic artists, including her son. The chaotic thought patterns, hyper energy and flashes of profundity can be heard in the opening salvo: pure electricity of harpsichord and strings joined by electric guitar and driving horns that lapse into strains of tango.
Randall Woolf grew up in Detroit in the ‘60s, his memories of its happy neighborhoods forever shattered by the 1967 riots. In “Motor City Requiem” he looks back wistfully at the spray-painted wreckage: fragments of distorted Motown songs echoing through the world of piano and strings: an urban elegy for childhood.
Mexican Armando Luna’s “Graffiti” comes at you with a nod and a wink as he uses the styles of Bach, Bartok, Benny Goodman and others as the starting off point for his own gleefully raucous and busy idiom. This graffiti is not so much a blight as a sly and joyful adding of a mustache to our beloved musical icons.
