Present Music opens its 45th season Friday with a concert called Forty Something!, a program that swings from a brand-new piano concerto to a performer using nothing but his own body as a percussion instrument. The 7:30 p.m. show lands at Bader Concert Hall inside UW-Milwaukee's Zelazo Center, and organizers have lined up an afterparty with a New Orleans-style brass band to send the crowd off once the music stops.
The concert marks the official kickoff of the ensemble's 45th anniversary season, according to presentmusic.org, and it's packed with premieres and genre-bending pieces that reach back into the group's history while pushing into new territory. Composer Donnacha Dennehy has written a new piano concerto, Limina, with Lawrence University Conservatory pianist Michael Mizrahi at the keyboard, while Alex Temple contributes a world premiere alongside works by Nico Muhly and Aviya Kopelman, per the ensemble's own season announcement. Deanna Tham, who has assisted with several previous Present Music concerts, conducts the evening's ensemble pieces.
As Urban Milwaukee reports, artistic director Eric Segnitz curated the program around an unusual throughline: the human body itself, explored through breath, movement, percussion and anatomy. That concept surfaces most vividly in ?Corporel, a 1985 work by Vinko Globokar in which performer Alex Wier plays only his own body as percussion in a choreographed theatrical presentation. The concert program describes it as a stark, raw and deeply political look at human vulnerability, and Wild Space will contribute a transitional dance performance woven into the evening.
A Concerto Built From Head to Nervous System
Dennehy's new concerto, Limina, structures its three movements as a journey progressing from head to chest to nervous system, according to the same Urban Milwaukee report. Segnitz, describing the piece, said it uses color in an unusual, almost extreme way and melds an electronic aesthetic with orchestral instruments. It's a striking anchor for a program otherwise stitched together from decades of boundary-crossing music.
That mix of eras shows up elsewhere on the bill too. Nico Muhly's Doublespeak, written in 2011 after a long collaboration with Philip Glass, shares the stage with Kopelman's Forty Something, a 2013 jazz fusion piece that remixes fragments of Mozart's Symphony No. 40. Alex Temple's 3 Arms and 17 Half-Legs, also from 2013, gets a jolt of industrial prog rock courtesy of guest electric guitarist Derek Johnson, who performs that movement with aggressive riffs set against an electronic soundscape, according to OnMilwaukee.
Temple also wrote 7x7x7, a piece commissioned jointly by Present Music and the Woman's Club of Wisconsin that premiered at a Woman's Club event last month. The piece opens with a seven-note chord repeated seven times, with the notes distributed across seven instruments spread over seven sections, per Urban Milwaukee's account of the program.
From Local Premieres to International Touring
Segnitz told Urban Milwaukee that Present Music has shifted over the years from simply bringing new music to Milwaukee toward exporting locally produced work beyond the country's borders — a trajectory the ensemble's own materials back up. The group has commissioned more than 100 new works over its history, according to a Present Music press release, and has released 17 recordings while touring internationally. It's also a six-time recipient of the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Adventurous Programming Award, per the ensemble's own account of its history.
Founder Kevin Stalheim established Present Music, which has released albums and toured internationally. Forty Something pairs Kopelman and Temple alongside Dennehy and Muhly.
Tickets for Forty Something are available by phone at 414-229-4308, online, or at the door, and the evening wraps with an afterparty featuring the New Orleans-style Extra Crispy Brass Band. Present Music also plans to add video selections from its concerts to its YouTube channel throughout the year, giving audiences who miss the live shows a way to catch up.
Next Up: A Thanksgiving Tribute
The season's next stop comes Nov. 22, when Present Music celebrates Thanksgiving at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist with world premieres by Angélica Negrón and Mikhail Johnson. That concert will also include a tribute to longtime arts champion Daniel Petry.
