The Third Coast Percussion Quartet played to about 300 people (by my estimate) last night at St. James Cathedral as part of the Rush Hour Concerts series. Having played in the lovingly distressed environs of the Hideout and the Empty Bottle,
as well as concert halls, the quartet can now claim to have covered the
gamut of available sacred and secular performing spaces. I wrote about
the ensemble last week, and it’s always nice to have your high expectations met.
They started out with quartet member David Skidmore’s Ritual Music, which calls to mind earthy, primitive rites with its thumping tom-toms and driving, unrelenting rhythmic pounding. Steve Reich’s two-marimba fantasy Nagoya Marimbas and Tobias Brostrom’s Twilight, both played with soft mallets, brought the energy level down a bit, then they closed with the vivid and (what the heck?) joyous Third Construction by John Cage. That last one, with the use of coffee cans and other bits of clanging metal, calls to mind a gamelan orchestra. (You can hear Ritual Music and Twilight on the group’s MySpace page. I wish they’d played Ta and Clap, by wunderkind composer Nico Muhly, but you can’t always get what you want.)
Rush Hour Concerts, which I first wrote about here, is the only concert series I know of that puts the listener first. Organizer and pianist Deborah Sobol arranged to have free receptions before the free weekly concerts (with wine!), and there’s a coupon for discounts to Argo Tea and Bijan’s Bistro stapled to your program. Sobol wants to make it easy for people to integrate a concert into their life, and brings the music to them. The start time for concerts is 5:45 and each consists of 45 minutes of music, with the musicians giving brief comments from the stage. (Those musicians include Chicago Symphony players and other top musicians and singers in the area.) Judging by the turnout last night—professionals covering all the age brackets, parents with children, and the handful of diehards who seem to attend every single classical concert—she’s succeeding.
Sobol recently launched a series of podcasts in addition to the Rush Hour Concerts blog, and it’s one of the few places where you can hear Chicago Symphony members talking about what it is that they do. (The other is the CSO’s archive of its BP Chicago Symphony Radio Broadcast, which is broadcast Sunday afternoons on WFMT-FM, 98.7.)
There’s still time to check out the summertime series, which runs through August 28, and I’d recommend next week’s collaboration with the Poetry Foundation, with poets reading original poems inspired by J.S. Bach’s music, and the August 14 performance featuring flutist Claire Chase and cellist Katinka Kleijn. If you’re so inclined, you can count it as your weekly round of church attendance, too.