Chicago's Third Coast Baroque Will Launch 'Beyond Baroque' Festival Next Month

In its most ambitious undertaking to date, Chicago’s enterprising early-music ensemble Third Coast Baroque will present Beyond Baroque, a four-day music festival August 31¬-September 3, 2023, featuring a multi-genre lineup of artists and ensembles.

"For our inaugural annual festival, we're placing European Baroque music in a global context by charting its African and Latin American sources, while connecting its spiritual and contemplative expressions with African American folk songs and contemporary music," according to mezzo-soprano Angela Young Smucker, Third Coast Baroque's co-founder and executive director. "This goes to the heart of our mission, which is to reframe early music in a way that reveals how everyone can find a personal connection to this global musical heritage."

All events will take place at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland Avenue, Chicago.

Third Coast Baroque will headline the festival's opening and closing concerts, both led by Rubén Dubrovsky, the ensemble's Argentina-born, Vienna-based artistic director and co-founder.

On opening night, the ensemble will reprise its critically acclaimed 2016 debut program, "¡Sarabanda!" which traces the African and Latin American origins of the sarabande, a dance that found its way into secular and sacred music across Baroque Europe.

The Afro-Cuban Gavilán Brothers, Havana-born virtuosos Ilmar Gavilán, violin, and Aldo Lopez-Gavilán, composer and pianist, will make their Chicago debut performing original music from their album "Brothers" and the documentary feature film "Los Hemanos/The Brothers." The film, released theatrically in 2021 and seen on PBS TV stations nationwide, centers on the brothers' heartfelt reunion and joint performances after a long, painful separation due to geopolitics.

"Their approach to music aligns with TCB's philosophy in that both ensembles recognize and highlight the entangled music history of sacred and secular, folk and classical music," Smucker says.

Third Coast Percussion, Chicago's Grammy Award-winning, classical trained percussion quartet, will perform all the tracks from its forthcoming album, "Between Breaths." The new recording showcases music written for the quartet by Tyondai Braxton, Missy Mazzoli, Gemma Peacocke, Ayanna Woods, and Third Coast Percussion themselves.

"This program," Smucker says, "also highlights the relationship of the sacred and secular by focusing on the practices of meditation and rituals in their many forms."

Third Coast Baroque will return to the spotlight for the festival finale: the world-premiere performance of a groundbreaking period-instrument presentation of J. S. Bach's monumental Mass in B Minor, with traditional Spirituals sung between sections of the mass by Chicago mezzo-soprano and actress Tierra Whetstone-Christian. The program, conducted by Dubrovsky, is titled "Bach & Beyond: A Pilgrimage of Faith Through Spirituals and the B-Minor Mass."

"Musical dialogue between cultures is one of the main topics in our programming," Dubrovsky says. "The influence of African music in European religious music can't be overlooked and is very clear in musical dance forms heard in the B-Minor Mass."

In addition to its mainstage concerts, the festival will host casual "Nightcap" performances by festival artists, playing music of their choice, in an intimate, cabaret setting at 10 p.m. September 1 and 2.

Dubrovsky will conduct a public masterclass with four selected young musicians at 4:30 p.m. September 2.

Festivalgoers can avail themselves of the Epiphany Center's Golden Hour food and beverage specials and free live music on the center's terrace from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.

"¡Sarabanda!": Music of Monteverdi and Fernández August 31

Third Coast Baroque's remounting of its "¡Sarabanda!" program at 7:30 p.m. on August 31 will unveil "the fascinating back-and-forth dialogue between the indigenous and neo-African worlds of the Americas and the musical world of Europe," according to the program notes.

The program juxtaposes music from illustrious early Italian Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi's collection of sacred works, "Selve morale e spirituale," and pieces by his far lesser-known contemporary Gaspar Fernández, a Portuguese-born composer working in Mexico and Central America.

Fernández lived in a racially complex culture, where he absorbed the music and language of the Spanish colonial empire's enslaved Africans and native Central and South Americans. The concert charts the path of those rhythms and dances from the New World to the studios of European composers.

Dubrovsky will lead the ensemble while playing the colascione, a plucked string instrument from the late Renaissance. Also on the roster are company mainstays sopranos Kaitlin Foley and Nathalie Colas, mezzo-soprano Angela Young Smucker, tenors Gregório Taniguchi and David Kurtenbach Rivera, bass-baritone Paul Max Tipton, violinists Martin Davids (concertmaster) and Emi Tanabe, cellist Anna Steinhoff, violone player Jerry Fuller, harpsichordist Elliot Figg, and theorbo player Brandon Acker.

Chicago Classical Review applauded the original 2016 program as "a faultless blend of accomplished performance and adroit scholarship that was emotionally compelling and educationally edifying" and commended Dubrovsky for his "incisive and engaging" conducting and commentary from the stage.

Gavilán Brothers make Chicago debut September 1

For their Chicago debut program, "Brothers," violinist Ilmar Gavilán and pianist-composer Aldo López-Gavilán will perform the local premieres of 10 original works written by Aldo and edited for violin and piano by Ilmar.

Aldo's music has a sound rooted in European classical traditions, Latin jazz, and Afro-Cuban rhythms and draws from a range of colors associated with Robert Schumann and Maurice Ravel.

The duo will play "Eclipse," "Caipiriñame," "Hermanos," "Momo's Tale," "Epilogue," "Arboles en el aire," "Waltz," "Quick Tune," "Viernes de Ciudad," and "Pan con Timba."

"Epilogue" received its US premiere by violinist Joshua Bell in 2016 at New York's Lincoln Center in 2016, with the composer at the piano.

"Eclipse" was written for Aldo's brother Ilmar. According to the duo, "It addresses vulnerability and the emotional toll taken by the two brothers' involuntary separation due to outside political circumstances as Ilmar went to the United States while Aldo remained in Cuba."

"Caipiriñame" mixes Cuban musical traditions with the flavor of Brazilian samba, embracing the African and European influences heard in both countries.

Joyful and optimistic, "Pan con Timba," is said to reflect the sense of humor of Cuba's younger generation, which helps them cope with economic hardship. The piece employs an insistent, repeated Cuban rhythmic pattern known as "tumbao" and also intertwines elements of dance styles popular in contemporary Cuba.

Third Coast Percussion previews 'Between Breaths' album September 2

Third Coast Percussion will perform music from its forthcoming album, "Between Breaths," at 7:30 p.m. September 2.

The program of works written for the quartet includes Tyondai Braxton's "Sunny X," which the ensemble describes as "a meditation on small phrases of non-pitched percussion and electronics that takes the audience on a riveting sonic journey." Missy Mazzoli's "Millennium Canticles" "imagines the musicians as a post-apocalyptic group of survivors who struggle to remember the rituals and stories that once made them human."

Third Coast Percussion's collaborative composition "In Practice" "brings the focus inward, exploring the ritual of meditation through sound." Ayanna Woods says her "Triple Point" aims for "a sound world being meditative and groovy at the same time." Gemma Peacocke's "Death Wish" contemplates, she says, "the spooling and unspooling of energy and how we are all bound and driven by forces both within and beyond ourselves."

"Between Breaths" will be released worldwide September 8 on Chicago's Cedille Records label.

'Bach & Beyond' with the B-Minor Mass and Spirituals September 3

Third Coast Baroque's "Bach & Beyond" presentation of J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor, BWV 232, at 3 p.m. September 3 will be the largest production in the organization's history, with a roster of 20 singers and 25 instrumentalists in the Third Coast Baroque Voices and Orchestra.

Bach's B-Minor Mass has been hailed as a cathedral of sound, a myriad of musical miracles, and a crowning achievement of Western music.

Third Coast Baroque is going beyond Bach by collaborating with Chicago mezzo-soprano Tierra Whetstone-Christian, who has curated and will sing four Spirituals.

"The first piece will act as a prelude to the Mass, while the others are presented as 'meditations' between movements, similar to how Bach treated arias in his Passions," Smucker says.

Whetstone-Christian will solo in "Over my head I hear music in the air" and "Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world." She will sing "Ain't-a that good news" with ensemble soprano Kaitlin Foley and will be joined by the chorus for "Give me Jesus."

Whetstone-Christian is assistant music director of the North Shore Choral Society. She has performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Evanston Symphony Orchestra, Savannah Philharmonic, Chicago Fringe Opera, Chicago Opera Theater, and the Elgin Symphony Orchestra. She is also a member of the critically acclaimed Adrian Dunn Singers, a Chicago-based all-Black ensemble. She recently sang backup for Grammy-winning pop singer Michael Bublé during his Chicago tour stop at Allstate Arena.

This will be the first live performance of Bach's B-Minor Mass in Chicago since 2019.

All audience members are welcome to attend the post-concert reception.

Tickets and Information

Full festival passes are $245 and include premium seating at all four mainstage shows in the center's Epiphany Hall, both Nightcaps, the masterclass, and any other ancillary events added to the schedule.

Mainstage passes are $145 and include premium seating at all four shows.

Single admission to each mainstage show is $50 for premium seating. General admission is on a sliding-scale basis to provide accessibility to a broader audience. Suggested payment is $40 per person, with a $10 minimum.

Tickets to the late-evening Nightcap performances are $10 each.

Admission to the September 2 masterclass is $15.00.

Tickets and information are available.at https://www.thirdcoastbaroque.org/2023-festival-overview. Epiphany Center for the Arts box office phone is 313-744-6359. For general information, call 872-216-1859, email info@thirdcoastbaroque.org.

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