CHICAGO — The term “composer in residence” has been somewhat loosely applied by orchestras in the jet age, but Jessie Montgomery’s actual presence in the Windy City as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s resident composer has been ongoing.
Now 42 and completing her third season as the CSO’s Mead Composer in Residence, Montgomery got along handsomely with former music director Riccardo Muti from the start, and she has aggressively networked with the musicians of the CSO who can’t get enough of music’s cutting edge. Bonding especially with those players who enjoy performing the newest musical challenges, she has also coached a handful of hot talents in their teens and tweens as part of the CSO’s Young Composers Initiative.
And yes, the resident composer actually resides in Chicago’s near-downtown Pilsen neighborhood, a lively multicultural scene not far from Symphony Center — and yet a place with a multi-ethnic community vibe and a rich mix of outdoor art, iconic food, and music venues. As Montgomery continued to bond with Chicago-area composers, she has curated the CSO’s MusicNOW concerts that attracted a growing audience of jazz and new-music enthusiasts to the after-parties in the Symphony Center’s back-of-the-house rotunda.
Montgomery has become such a reliable part of the local music scene that a recent stretch of four events in three days — beginning with her own CSO-commissioned world premiere percussion concerto the weekend of May 30 and featuring an additional marathon concert of prodigy compositions by six young (and very young) Montgomery pupils in her Young Composers Initiative — seemed like business as usual. Montgomery’s virtuosic percussion concerto, however, was anything but.
A serious piece of theater, Procession offered the bewildering exhilaration of a high-sugar day at the summer fair with a parade forming, attention-seeking barkers competing for attention, and serious trouble brewing. The focus was slowly and surely drawn toward a more serious collective purpose, much of it at the insistence of the percussionist on the move.
Procession was a hit out of the gate — a 20-minute athletic event for the soloist in five movements, with percussion arrays in two huge setups that included the African djembe, bass drum, vibraphone and glockenspiel, and a full orchestra led expertly by guest conductor Manfred Honeck. The Austrian maestro paired Montgomery’s new piece with an elegant reading of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, making masterful use of orchestra’s capability for both high-impact virtuosity and rare finesse, a legacy of Muti’s tenure.
The idea for a Montgomery percussion concerto originated with Cynthia Yeh, the CSO’s principal percussionist, in the spring of 2022, around the time that Muti led the world premiere of Montgomery’s orchestra work Hymn for Everyone. Yeh did not know Montgomery well at that time, although she knew the composer’s music, so Yeh arranged for the two of them to meet outdoors in Grant Park, under the statue of Sir Georg Solti, to ask about the possibility of a percussion concerto.
Montgomery’s answer was an immediate yes; the resulting Procession is a bold piece of theater. Doubtless its gradual crescendo put some listeners in mind of Ravel’s Bolero, but the piece didn’t result in that impression at all.
It began with insistent wake-up raps by the soloist from the first of two elaborate drum stations. The orchestral response, at first, was mostly silence. A cello here, a double-reed there, a couple horns, then soon the first occurrences of a haunting seven-note reflection that curls upon itself, as if slowly stirred into awakening. By the second section of Montgomery’s opus, the orchestra had become all agitation and staccato. Yeh then took it on a vibraphone cadenza detour of some length, ultimately calming the waters.
In the third concerto segment, the orchestra and percussion moved toward a meeting of the minds, but then things veered into an extended riff for fife and drum. Piccolos Jennifer Gunn and Yevgeny Faniuk dashed and dallied in the giddy heights with Yeh, a bizarre refreshment that melted into the finale, a gradual fade, as if the little band had continued on until well out of sight.
On another night, the after-concert discussion would have focused on the remarkable elegance of Honeck’s shaping of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, the otherworldly nature of the CSO’s set of Wagner tubas that whispered such a magical element into that overwhelming Adagio, not to forget the orchestra’s formidable brass section as a whole, or the tremendous power of a symphonic work of these proportions. Despite the grand pull of 19th-century tradition, however, it was Montgomery’s night, and history was young.
