Home > Editorial Review > Chicago's Fulcrum Point enters 10th season with a performance full of 'essential elements'

The Fulcrum Point New Music Project is devoting the fifth and final season of its multi-year exploration, "Essential Art: Essential Elements," to a condensed recap of all the elements. Indeed, the concert that began the group's 10th anniversary season Tuesday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance vaulted through time and space before reaching for the cosmic light.

Like another of Chicago's splendid contemporary groups, eighth blackbird, artistic director Stephen Burns' ensemble has hitched its star to the Harris Theater in hopes of attracting larger audiences and greater funding. The sizable, attentive crowd that turned out for Tuesday's event suggested it is well on its way toward realizing the first objective.

The world premiere of Geoffrey Gordon's "Lux Solis Aeterna" (2007) shared the bill with the Midwest premieres of Sebastian Currier's "Nightmaze" (2005) and Richard Danielpour's "River of Light" (2007). Duke Ellington's "The River" added a symphonic jazz classic to this bracing and brainy mix of new music.

Gordon's opus for 13 players -- the Latin title means "Eternal Light of the Sun" -- tries, and succeeds, to evoke cosmic beauty in a dozen minutes of acutely crafted music. The sun rises in iridescent shimmers and sprays of instrumental color, now quiet and glowing, now fierce and eruptive. There is a sacred subtext but the sonic evolution may be enjoyed as pure music, complete with a bebop interlude led by two saxophones.

The multimedia "Nightmaze" lasts three times as long and packs half the impact. Currier's pulsing, nervous rhythms for nine-member chamber ensemble undergird a hallucinatory road trip based on a scenario by novelist Thomas Bolt.

The text, read by Sandra Binion, has a sleep-deprived college student dreaming of speeding along a blackened highway that has road signs indicating psychic forks and turnoffs -- terror, death, ego, id, infinity and so forth.

I had a couple of problems with the piece. Sage Marie Carter's stark video conspired with the surreal text to reduce Currier's often inventive score to mere accompaniment. Also, entire chunks of narration were drowned out by the musicians or rendered unintelligible by the amplification.

Danielpour's elegiac violin ruminations, framed by the piano's tart and muscular chords, were sensitively taken by violinist Sharon Polifrone and pianist Kuang-Hao Huang. Lovely piece.

Burns' lush, 44-piece orchestra had a ball with the Ellington suite, and so did the audience. All four performances, for that matter, represented Fulcrum Point at its considerable best.

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jvonrhein@tribune.com

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