Water, Water Everywhere
Present Music Celebrates Its 30th Anniversary with a Splash
by: Paul Kosidowski | Monday 8/29/2011

0

Comments

For all the pomp of Present Music’s season opening extravaganza Saturday night, it really just came down to a solitary voice, a child, intoning the familiar melody of an old gospel tune: “Shall we gather at the river….”

It was a simple and beautiful climax to the nearly three-hour evening, which began on the banks of the Milwaukee River just outside the Marcus Center. PM’s Music Director, Kevin Stalheim, acted as emcee as a variety of boats paraded past the crowd. Some seemed to accidentally have wandered into the event, river partiers who enjoyed having an unexpected shore audience. Others were part of a flotilla that celebrated “Water,” the theme of the evening. There was a police boat and a fire boat (which never delivered on the promised water cannon demonstration), a cement canoe, sleek rowing shells, and even arcane-looking Irish currachs. “Key water figures” (people active in water research and planning in the community) arrived in speedboats, and, finally, the PM musicians, playing variations on “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” that got increasingly playful and crazed.

Despite the long introduction – which really could have used a stage manager – the evening was really about music. And once the audience settled into Uihlein Hall – filling it – the real event began. And that's where PM’s Kevin Stalheim stepped up with his true talents.

It’s one thing to find “water-related” programming for a contemporary music concert. It’s quite another to weave several pieces – along with video (by UWM grad-students Yoko Hattori and Joe Grennier) and dance (Dani Kuepper setting work on her Danceworks Performance Company) – into a theatrical tone poem that has dramatic and musical coherence. Stalheim did just that, so much so that it was sometimes hard to tell when one piece ended and the other began.

It ebbed and flowed beautifully. Ingram Marshall’s "Sea Tropes" starts with the recording of ocean waves, and eventually frames it with sharp rhythmic punctuations by various instruments. The Danceworks company slips onto the stage with a Zen-like calm. David Lang’s vocal music repeats phrases to coalesce like a pool of sound, shifting with microtones and overlapping language. The intensity continues to build with Michael Gordon’s “Heavy Water.” And then gains more momentum with Timothy Andres’ “Fast Flows the River,” featuring a gorgeous cello melody (played by Adrien Zitoun) over rolling, Philip Glass-style organ arpeggios.

Kamran Ince’s “Still, Flow, Surge” was commissioned for this concert, and featured a collection of sonic events – amplified water sloshes by a soloist moving his hands through a tub of water, and a children’s chorus with jars of gravel that he stirred on cue – in addition to 20 instrumentalists. It’s an inventive, but somewhat sprawling piece with some dazzling individual sections, including spare and pointillistic ensemble work pierced by modal fiddle outbursts. But elsewhere, it offered movie-music clichés. And the water and gravel sounds seemed to be breaks from the composition rather than an integral part of it.

Stalheim ended with another celebratory vocal number by David Lang, a playful and incessant cry by seven men (with Bill Lavonis leading the way) to “give me an ice cold glass of water.” And he followed it by each of the guest groups – some scattered around the auditorium – singing overlapping water music: “Row, row, row,” “The Water Is Wide,” and some Handel, too. And then, the crowd gathered at the river outside, for music and merriment in the usual  PM fashion.

Photo by Robert Bundy.