Expanded ICO goes on a charm offensive with "Suite Brilliance"

Ryan King and Nancy Ambrose King, concerto partners with the ICO. 

The Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra took on extra players Saturday night for a program featuring a work by its current composer in residence, the prolific Miguel del Aguila.  Besides the temporary hires, two guests were on hand solely for that piece, "Concierto con Brio": oboist Nancy Ambrose King and clarinetist Ryan King, two prominent Michigan musicians who happen to be mother and son.

Music director Matthew Kraemer chose program mates for the double concerto that made good use of the extra players, ending with a mixed spectacle by Jacques Ibert, a 20th-century Frenchman with a kind of a one-hit wonder status as the composer of "Escales" (Ports of Call), an attractive Mediterranean travelogue. More about his "Tropismes pour des amours imaginaires" below. 

As for the del Aguila piece that centered all this robustness of concert personnel, it brought the duo rapport of the guest soloists immediately to the fore. Clarinet and oboe feel nearly inseparable in the first movement, "Interrupted Tango," which rises to a big ensemble climax with the soloists holding their own. 

Sinuous lyricism characterizes the middle movement, "Blue," whose title hints at the classic jazz idiom. That's put at a nostalgic distance in part by a muted trumpet solo, with minimal accompaniment establishing a harmonic base. 

Latin American composers tend to find the demotic dance styles of the region irresistible. So does del Aguila, a native of Uruguay who now lives in Seattle, in the propulsive "Sambeada" that concludes the work. Orchestra and soloists knitted their rhythmically enlivened contributions into a seamless whole under Kraemer's guidance.

ICO's punning concert title embraced music that indeed brought sweetness into play. The performance opened with Camille Saint-Saens' Suite for Orchestra. In the spirit of generalization I applied to "Concierto con Brio," French composers often have an unconflicted bond with the music of their past; the kind of breach evident in the Austro-German tradition is much less evident. Even the crucial break Debussy forged managed a kind of modernism that immediately went down easily with the general public.

So Saint-Saens here created a particularly charming Sarabande and Gavotte between a deft Prelude and a suave Romance, in which the boosted ICO's strings made a splendid impression. The Finale brought trumpets and timpani into the texture for the first time in a manner that seemed to allow the composer to murmur to us: "See, I am of my own time, after all, even when looking backwards." He would have endorsed William Faulkner's famous insight: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

France was in the spotlight for the two pieces that followed intermission. Germaine Tailleferre's "Petite Suite" (just three brief movements; thus, another precise title on this program) stood out for its lovely "Sicilienne," a gentle exercise in a durable genre beloved from such an iconic example as the one by Gabriel Faure and a shirttail cousin,  Offenbach's "Barcarolle" in "Tales of Hoffmann." The French never seem inclined to make a big deal of their creative borrowings from accessible styles.

Musical ideology was understandably foreign to Ibert.  "As a whole his work is stylistically difficult to define," says the Ibert entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, "because the elements are, like the output itself, extremely diverse....'All systems are valid,' he said, 'provided one derives music from them.' "

That certainly applies with great effect to "Tropisms of imaginary loves," to translate a title that warns us to expect the wide-ranging emotional colors, the lights and shadows, of its subject.

The episodic work has the sudden shifts and considerable range of movie music. Kraemer and the orchestra made of this novelty a compelling, if occasionally disorienting, exhibition of French clarity, wit, and the sort of ease that suggests important matters (like love, of course, even the imaginary kind) can be significantly addressed with free imaginative play and a soupçon of insouciance.

[Photo: Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra]