On February 25, 2025, the 18-member chamber music ensemble Sphinx Virtuosi, guest percussionist Josh Jones, guest pianist Awadagin Pratt, along with special guest concertmaster, violinist and composer Jessie Montgomery, gave a superior concert entitled American Form/s at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago.
The Virtuosi, embodying and celebrating works by accomplished musicians of diverse ethnicity, Black and Latinx, are self-conducted. Most of them perform standing, and they use electronic scores embedded in I Pads, with electronic page-turners at their feet. This is a classically trained, highly skilled and thoroughly cohesive company, in youthful formal attire, with exuberance and chops to spare. They took turns introducing the pieces, an extraordinarily well-curated program firmly rooted in American musical types, primarily jazz infused.
Scott Joplin’s “ragtime opera”, Treemonisha, 1911, won its composer a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in music in 1976. The short but immediately compelling Overture opens with a burst of strong sound. Rapid and then slower complicated themes then weave their way back and forth between the sections. This 7-minute piece, arranged by Jannina Norpath and Jessie Montgomery, rich with harmony, rhythmically catchy, rife with the sound of strings, woodwinds and percussion, ends in a playful finale.
Venezuelan composer Teresa Carreño’s Serenade for Strings, 1895, was represented here with its ultimate segment, Tempo di marcia, another clever finale. A lush evocation of pristine nature, traversing stormy moods, after wending through a scherzo and a march, closes with a sense of fun.
Derrick Skye’s American Mirror for String Quartet, part 1, 2018, held an earthy, bebop jazzy quality throughout, segueing into a complex bluegrass-infused melee, culminating in strong chords. The rhythms and melodic foundations are universally rooted, yet distinctly modern.
Levi Taylor’s Daydreaming for String Orchestra (A Fantasy on Scott Joplin), 2024, premiered in January at the Sphinx Competition. Like the works of Joplin for whom it was composed as an homage, and like the other pieces on the program, it was filled with percussive strikes, climbing tones and colors, and drew to a memorable finale.
Curtis Stewart’s Drill Concerto for Prepared Drum Set and Strings, 2024, is reminiscent of Gershwin and other 20th Century American greats -even Shostakovich used the sounds of the events of the surrounding world- incorporating muscularity with jocularity. Ending a la Schoenberg with an atonal rise, it portrayed a natural force. The superb percussionist Josh Jones, a Chicago native, advised the audience that there were 32 separate surfaces he would use to emanate the beat, and then he wailed in extended, thrilling syncopation.
Navajo composer Juantio Becenti’s Hané (Story) for String Quartet, 2022, opened with a discussion of natural beauty and then demonstrated the same, in a unique compositional style, and with a spare, purposeful call and response of strings.
Lastly, former Chicago Symphony Orchestra Mead Composer In Residence, New-York based Jessie Montgomery, a vibrant presence in the international world of music, and personally captivating, introduced, led and performed her Rounds for Piano and String Orchestra, 2022, commissioned for and played this night by stellar pianist Awadagin Pratt. The gorgeous 15-minute piece was inspired by a T.S. Elliot poem, the circular pattern of migratory birds, and Montgomery’s own genius. There are moments of precise delicate fingering, moments of thunderous discordance, and an overall utterly unique sense of lyrical melody. Pratt shone throughout, particularly in a long piano cadenza, which he is said to have partly improvised.
All photos by Elliott Mandel
For information and tickets to all the fine programming of The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, go to www.cso.org
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