How does your garden grow? ICO asks, with added color

Martinez plays Falla masterpiece with the ICO. 

 Marketing this month's Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra concert had the advantage of a glamorous guest soloist, and the organization even used most of the phrase in the title of the work Gabriela Martinez  played in labeling the performance. 

"Gardens of Spain" was the concert's billing, highlighting the pianist's  performance with the orchestra in Manuel de Falla's "Nights in the Gardens of Spain."

Still, the ICO didn't sell short the world premiere also on the program: a new work by the prolific composer Stacy Garrop, alluringly titled "Chroma," a six-movement salute to colors that the fine lighting system of the Schrott Center illuminated as the composition unfolded under the astute direction of Matthew Kraemer.

I first became acquainted with Garrop's artistry in concert more than a dozen years ago with her folklore-linked "Silver Dagger." Since then, when the Lincoln Trio of Chicago appeared in a concert series based at Congregation Shaarey Tefilla, I've had several recordings including Garrop works sent to me on the Cedille Records label, where she has long had a home. Saturday's ICO concert counts as my first encounter since then with Garrop's music in the concert hall. 

The experience was electrifying, as the succession of highlighted colors, and the meaning the composer attaches to each one in her program notes, amplified her rich palette of orchestral sound, including some blowing air tonelessly through wind instruments, a recorded siren, and a wealth of lavishly distributed glissandos. Her sense of implied narratives that can be attached to saffron, orange, "shocking" pink and three others picks up on the slogan you can find on the home page of her website: "a composer with a story to tell."  

This charming suite ends with "Cerulean Blue: The Vault of the Heavens." It's typical of Garrop's frequent reach beyond the world of the senses to mythology and mysticism. Though carried away somewhat by this finale, my after-impression is that the sense of occasion 'Chroma" conveyed may be essential to fully appreciating it.  

I recall, for comparison, that I was never fully engaged with Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony until the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra performed it with a show of stunning color slides of the region the composer had in mind. Fortunately, there was nothing literal being evoked Saturday in Garrop's new piece. I will rest content that much of what I admire about the Schrott Center, its sights and sounds alike, could be properly put to work in "Chroma." It will be interesting to learn of the impressions the work leaves when other orchestras play it, especially with the composer's permission that programming just one or more movements has her blessing.

The concert opened  with a 19th-century display piece by another American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, feted as pianist-composer from childhood on and poignantly short-lived. His Symphony No. 2 from 1868 shifts from flowing and sentimental to bumptious and march-like, incorporating the early American hit song that every child used to know, "Yankee Doodle." To open the second half, Kraemer again showed his programming knack with another light piece, Aaron Copland's "Three Latin American Sketches." The short wind solos in the middle sketch, "Paisaje Mexicano," were especially appealing. 

That leaves the especially publicized work by Falla to be discussed. The composer is perhaps easy for audiences accustomed to the Austro-German mainstream to underestimate. But a personality of some power and resourcefulness comes through in his scores. This one is especially good in weaving the solo instrument indispensably into the texture without making it seem like a piano concerto that has possibly lost its way. Martinez's playing helped make that quite evident; every phrase sparkled. For an encore, she helped anchor the program in the Western Hemisphere by playing a miniature piece by a Cuban composer, Ernesto Lecuona, best-known as something of a one-hit wonder for "Malagueña."

[Photo provided by ICO]