June 20--Presenting just about any piece of symphonic music outdoors at Millennium Park, where concerts are thrown to the mercy of Chicago's capricious weather gods, can pose a formidable challenge for the Grant Park Orchestra.
It's particularly true when that music is new and unfamiliar, and as subtle of expression, as Kenji Bunch's song cycle for chorus and orchestra, "Symphony No. 3: Dream Songs," which had its world premiere at the Grant Park Music Festival under Carlos Kalmar's direction on Friday night. A second performance was scheduled for Saturday evening.
If the cold winds that swept across the city's lakefront helped dampen attendance in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion and out on the lawn, they uncannily mirrored certain of the Native American texts on which Bunch based his eight-part song cycle, a 2015 commission by the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus.
Life did indeed imitate art in the opening strains of the second section, "Dream Song," which derives from an Ojibwa ceremonial chant that begins with the lines, "It is I who travel in the winds, It is I who whisper in the breeze." Pounding drums and swelling brass usher in the poem's concluding portion: "I shake the trees, I shake the earth, I trouble the waters on every land." (Most of the translations are by Frances Densmore.)
While such passing correspondences lent a certain frisson to the premiere, they weren't enough to rescue the half-hour symphony from blandness, for all the fine sensitivity and craftsmanship the American composer, a native of Portland, Ore., brought to his choral and orchestral writing.
Bunch groups the eight sections (which include texts of Sioux, Pawnee, Arapaho, Chippewa and Navajo origin) into three parts: songs of anxiety and unrest, songs of war and its aftermath, and a concluding prayer of healing. The stark, simple repetitiveness of the poems carries expressive resonances the music only partially fulfills -- or at least fulfilled at a performance plagued by numbing temperatures and construction noises from nearby Columbus Drive.
The diatonic tonal harmonies of Bunch's conservative choral writing palely echo those of Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen, with standard-issue orchestral illustration such as martial drums for the war texts, elegiac strings for war's aftermath. Almost every section is brief -- too brief, perhaps, to make much impact in itself.
Only in the final section, a setting of a Navajo prayer where chorus and orchestra rise to their most exultant utterances, do music and text fuse into a gripping dramatic whole. Here men's and women's voices trade prayerful whispers ("Restore my feet for me, Restore my legs for me, Restore my body for me, Restore my mind for me"). Female choristers suffuse the quiet closing pages with luminous sonic beauty.
I went away from the premiere wishing I could have heard the work indoors, where its many quiet nuances would not have been subject to so many distractions to proper appreciation.
That said, one could not fault the dedicated stewardship of Kalmar or the capable contributions of his musicians and the splendid Grant Park Chorus as prepared by its director, Christopher Bell. The composer joined the conductor and chorus master on stage to acknowledge the polite applause.
The concert began with a trim account of Mozart's "Magic Flute" Overture and ended with a Shostakovich Symphony No. 6 that delivered some, but not all, of the brooding intensity of the tragic opening Largo section. Perhaps because they are far lighter in tone, the briefer ensuing movements -- a breezy scherzo and a galloping presto -- came off more convincingly.
jvonrhein@tribpub.com
