February was a busy month for the performing arts scene in Salt Lake City. Among the top events were the following:
Christian McBride and Ursa Major: UtahPresents
A perfect end to UtahPresents’ inaugural jazz concert series for the 2024-25 season, Christian McBride and Ursa Major wowed the Kingsbury Hall crowd on Feb. 22, with plenty of virtuosic musicianship and a top-notch sample of jazz pieces from the newest generation of jazz composers.
An internationally respected jazz titan, McBride gave generous amounts of spotlight to the four musicians of Ursa Major, each a full generation younger than the multiple-Grammy-Award-winning upright bass master and composer. McBride relishes his role as a mentor and it is heartening to observe him opening the performing space for them to blossom. It is gratifying to see a group of musicians, who either were not yet born or were still infants when McBride started his career more than 35 years ago, put their imprint on evolving jazz traditions.
Leading off with his own composition, pianist Michael King, a Chicago native who graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, is already turning heads. He has excellent instincts in leveraging the malleable possibilities of jazz compositions, feeling just as comfortable in characteristics of classical, jazz and funk territories. King is in high demand, including touring internationally with another jazz superstar Deedee Bridgewater.
McBride and company offered a very memorable version of Herbie Hancock’s 1965 classic Dolphin Dance, which became a showcase for the younger musicians to groove and amaze. Among the youngest band members, guitarist Ely Perlman, who attended McBride’s jazz camp in Aspen just four years ago, showed off incredible solo skills that reminded listeners of the gold standard musicianship of legendary jazz and jazz fusion guitarist Pat Metheny.
The other two members have even more extensive portfolios. On saxophone, Nicole Glover, also a member of the Artemis supergroup, demonstrated her impressive facility as a composer and performer, underscoring once again the malleable opportunities in jazz composition. She is on the faculty at Princeton University, Manhattan School of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and has performed with Wynton Marsalis as well as with Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Drummer Savannah Harris’ composition was finely crafted with plentiful elements of global and folk music. With credits of collaborating with a diverse spectrum of contemporary composers along with recordings and performances, Harris is well known for expanding legacies and traditions in jazz to new cosmopolitan pathways. McBride announced during the concert that recordings of compositions by King and Harris would drop this month on his Brother Mister imprint, first on vinyl and then becoming available on digital streaming.
The encore was the perfect nightcap: Chick Corea’s La Fiesta. With the support of Gordon and Connie Hanks, among others, UtahPresents launched the jazz series a year after the JazzSLC series had been discontinued. Given the audience’s robust response this season, jazz on the performance level of McBride and Ursa Major will continue to thrive next season as well.
Fry Street Quartet Plays The Great Fugue: NOVA Chamber Music Series
For the second and final Gallery Series concert this season for NOVA Chamber Music Series at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), it was all Fry Street Quartet, with works by Haydn and Beethoven and the second Utah (world) premiere of Hitomi Oba’s Landing Steps, Grounded Landings.
This quartet is at its performing apex, making everything seem effortless but also intricate and translucent. In Haydn’s Quartet in D, Op.20, No.4, one of the earliest great examples of a chamber ensemble form that the composer mastered, the performance of the second movement (un poco adagio e effettuoso) was pristine, warm and contemplative in the finest expression of nostalgia. Likewise, the fifth movement — Cavatina — in Beethoven’s Quartet in B-flat, Op.130, achieved the same effect, before the ensemble launched into an astonishing reading of the double Great Fugue movement.
In between, they offered the newest addition to the string quartet literature by Oba, a work of six short movements that she composed as part of the Composing Earth initiative of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy. Each movement describes some aspect of human interaction in the natural environment, from land ownership to the lack of trees and natural shade in urban neighborhoods to concerns about extracting natural resources and to the ideals of maintaining healthy soil for organic agriculture. The piece requires a good bit of improvisation, not surprising considering that Oba is a jazz saxophonist and composer who is on the faculty at University of California-Los Angeles.
The Fry Street Quartet delighted in the improvisatory gaming atmosphere in the piece, with each member responding to each other through widespread use of extra effects for stringed instruments.These included natural harmonics, glissandos, sul tasto, scraping effects, percussive effects and tapping and snap and nail pizzicatos.
The concert was also an opportunity for audiences to see the new installation Stone on Boundary by Onishi Yasuaki, featuring 5,000 copper foils molded from river rocks in Osaka and Salt Lake City. The UMFA installation reflects Utah’s vast and varied landscape – from river stones in deep canyons to the towering peaks of the Wasatch and Oquirrh Mountains and the dynamic red rock formations in southern parts of the state. If anything, its presence accentuated the dynamic clarity of the quartet’s sound in the museum space.
Hear & Now: Westminster Concert Series
Two world premieres, including a commissioning prize for composer Droki Ouro by Westminster University’s School of Music, highlighted Hear and Now, a concert of four works, either for piano or electronics or for both.
Presented in the intimate scale of Jones Recital Hall, the concert offered plenty of evidence of its acoustic strengths, especially for music featuring electronics. The prime example was Ouro’s in the eye of a needle for piano and electronics, with Kimi Kawashima on the keyboard and Devin Maxwell on electronics. Prior to its performance, Ouro explained its inspiration: the images of artist Willard Wigan’s microscopic sculptures, including those as small as 0.0002 inches. Wigan, whose autism and dyslexia was undiagnosed during his youth, said the concept of the ‘significance of nothing’ articulates the theme that propels his work.
Ouro effectively captures the relevant theme inherent in Wigan’s works by creating a soundscape built from imperceptible acoustic phenomena woven through with snippets of text from the composer, the artist and the autistic community. It was a compelling listening experience that played extremely well in the Jones Recital Hall, particularly as it demanded an intense concentrated reaction to appreciating the tiniest imperceptible stimuli in our surroundings.
The other world premiere was Nicolas Chuaqui’s Lake Flight, a solo piano work performed by Jason Hardink. Created in response first to news about the Great Salt Lake’s low water levels and then about the experiences of viewing the Atlantic Ocean from Chuaqui’s New Jersey neighborhood where he previously lived, the piece’s three movements vividly translate to sound the images of rippling waters and the sensory experiences of looking into the horizon or flying above the bodies of water. Chuaqui does not merely sketch these images but instead allows the pianist to paint a full masterpiece that makes the listener feel, hear and visualize these bodies of water.
The remaining works showcased electronics, both achieving compelling and readily accessible imagistic and sensory impacts. Part of his ongoing series, Maxwell performed Cloudseeding 14 (Fallstreak Holes), which included samples of natural harmonics performed by Nicole Kuester on French horn. Maxwell is gifted in translating scientific phenomena into music, which in this case involves gaps that occur in clouds when an aircraft passes through them. The other was Gretchen Jude’s Spiral Labyrinth, which incorporated a poem by Laurel Nakanishi, based on the experience of abruptly losing her hearing in her left ear. Adapting a granular synthesis technique associated with the composer Iannis Xenakis, Jude expands the sonic opportunities with advanced digital technologies that enhance the granular technique, especially in recreating the disorienting sensory effects one could expect if they suddenly lost their senses of hearing in one ear.
Stephen Beus’ Nocturnes and Nightmares: Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation
When a soloist comes to the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation’s concert series who not only captivates the audience with superior technique but also intricately placed emotional sensitivity and respect for works that deserve to be heard more regularly, the memorable experience is a gift.
In Nocturnes and Nightmares, Stephen Beus proved his mettle not only at the keyboard but also in conceiving a fully integrated manifestation of his concert theme. The Feb. 28 concert at the Jeanné Wagner Theatre in the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts was packed for Beus, who is on the piano faculty at Brigham Young University. He won Bachauer’s International Artists Competition in 2006, as well as Bachauer’s international junior competition, at the age of 14, in 1996. In the last two decades, the Juilliard graduate has cultivated an impressive international portfolio.
As noted in The Utah Review preview, in curating selections of music about good and bad dreams, Beus included two short works by contemporary composers, a relatively unknown piece by the first female American composer who enjoyed wide success, one of the greatest 20th century piano sonatas by a Russian contemporary of Rachmaninov and a Liszt warhorse that is always good for a pyrotechnic exhibition at the keyboard.
A sampler of nocturnes and nightmare documented the first half. Beus opened with two short selections from Lera Auerbach’s Ten Dreams, Op. 45, (1999), a relatively early work in the Russian-American composer’s oeuvre. Beus opened with one suggesting a nightmare before switching course to a placid piece and this sequence popped with crystal-clear keyboard work and appropriate emotional underpinnings. The impeccable evidence of his artistry was even sharper in his sumptuous performance of Dreaming, the third of Amy Beach’s Four Sketches, Op. 15 (1892). Likewise, his emotional connection to the two selections from Aaron Jay Kernis’ solo piano suite, Before Sleep and Dreams (1990) was just as evident. Beus, a father of six children, remarked on how the music captures the experience of trying to put kids to bed, who still want to have a bit more playtime.
Beus rounded out the first half with a barn-burning performance of the Vladimir Horowitz version of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Humongous, insane and jaw-dropping are not exaggerated adjectives, in this case. This piece was so embarrassingly popular during Liszt’s lifetime that it irked him relentlessly. Coming from Magyar blood, this writer can only say, “Ugorjunk!” (Let’s jump up and dance).
Beus devoted the second half to Nikolai Medtner’s Sonata in E minor, Op. 25, no. 2. Known as the Night Wind Sonata, this Medtner work for solo piano is the longest in his oeuvre (running more than 30 minutes) and the most technically demanding he produced for the instrument. It is inspired by a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, which includes the verse, Night wind, night wind, why do you howl? As previously noted in The Utah Review, Medtner, a contemporary of Rachmaninov, did not enjoy the same level of visibility during his life that Rachmaninov had. However, both composers were long-time friends. In fact, Medtner dedicated this work as well as his second piano concerto to Rachmaninov, who reciprocated by dedicating his Fourth Piano Concerto to Medtner.
Beus introduced his performance with a few brief and very helpful notes that outlined the motivic development in the two sections of the sonata. Indeed, the half-hour performance of this single-movement sonata flew by quickly. No question, Beus is in awe of this extraordinary piece and his performance was like an epic poem — at once, capturing transitory passages of lyricism in gossamer-like textures while delivering the brutishness in tempestuous instances. This music is not immediately accessible, but in Beus’ hands, the Bachauer audience could readily understand why this 20th century piano sonata is heralded as a crown jewel in the piano repertoire.
Re-Mix: Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company
The ideas of reconstruction, reinvention and reenactment in dance compositions are not new when choreographers contemplate restaging one of their own works. But, in the instance of three choreographers who decided to do so, the process was more effectively characterized as a Re-Mix, a term that the six dancers of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company proved in performing works that are just as vital and fresh now as in their relatively recent premieres.
About restaging a work as a litmus test of its ongoing relevance, Amy Seiwert, formerly of Smuin Ballet who founded and directs the Imagery contemporary ballet company in San Francisco, said in an interview published elsewhere, “You won’t actually rediscover that first intention; you’ll discover a new one.”
This was apparent in all three works for Re-Mix. Among the remixed works was Raja Feather Kelly’s Scenes for an Ending (2023), which originally was presented in the Jeanne Wagner Theatre at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts but was presented this time in the center’s Black Box Theatre. The poetic intimacy of this latest performance was definitely sharper, rising and smoothing out with emotional underpinnings of the recorded music by Emily Wells.
The title emphasizes the essential remix potential of how in a specific moment we respond to the realities, memories and hopes in our relationships and how we might communicate them. Kelly opens the space generously for the dancers to bring their own emotional personae into the work. One of the standout partnered sections featured Luke Dakota Zender and Fausto Rivera.
Premiering the fourth iteration of his work, jo Blake’s coincidental coincidences, was set on all six Ririe-Woodbury dancers, as opposed to its original form as a trio. It also became a multimedia piece with film and photography, while retaining the original score by Utah composer Trevor Price. Its latest iteration sharpens the themes of isolation and healing from the experiences and impacts that arise when we face doubt, microaggressions and impostor syndromes particularly in places such as Utah where a specific religion, political landscape and White identities predominate. This piece is an outstanding example of chamber dance theater, flexed to reflect and represent emotions that are acutely relevant in the moment of performance. A striking example came in Nick Elizondo’s solo section.
The program closed with a perfect counterpoint to the intense emotional character of the Kelly and Blake works: the exhilaratingly athletic and keenly original The Rate We Change by local artist Kellie St. Pierre, which the choreographer created as part of her master’s degree thesis at the University of Utah. The work features the company’s six dancers performing on a human-powered rotating platform, accompanied by a well-sculpted minimalistic score by local musician Daniel Clifton.
The audience response indicated how well the piece resonated with them. Relishing the high-spirited showcase of their collective artistic strengths, Nick Elizondo, Megan McCarthy, Fausto Rivera, Sasha Rydlizky, Miche’ Smith and Luke Dakota Zender transformed the stage into a choreographic playground that one might not want to leave and go home, even after the sun has set.