Friday Forecast: ICE, With A Chance of Atonality (Free!)

By Alexander Hough in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 26, 2011 9:20PM

Think of the best, most thoughtful holiday card you've ever given. Now prepare to feel bad about your feeble effort as we tell you about the card composer Augusta Read Thomas gave flutist Claire Chase in 2008 that contained "Euterpe's Caprice," a two-minute solo work dedicated to Chase. As of posting, we cannot determine whether the card also contained a tedious summary of the achievements and news of Thomas's family that year. Anyhow, you can hear "Euterpe's Caprice" and other works for free at a concert put on by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), one of our favorite new-music groups kinda-sorta based in town (they split their time between here and New York), at the Art Institute this Friday evening.

Other pieces on the concert featuring Chase and pianist Jacob Greenberg include Salvatore Sciarrino's solo flute arrangement of J. S. Bach's famous organ piece Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a version that overcomes the vast range difference of the two instruments by drawing out surprising timbre similarities; "fili" by Franco Donatoni, who, oft-overshadowed by the main figures of the Italian avant-garde, Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono, is getting some deserved air time; "Thoreau," the final movement of Charles Ives's Second Piano Sonata ("Concord, Mass., 1840-60"), a piece written about four transcendentalist figures; and "Sonatine" for flute and piano from 1946 by Chicago Symphony Orchestra Conductor Emeritus Pierre Boulez, who seems like a nice old chap now but who was sanctimonious and downright mean regarding the superiority of the hyper-modern, often borderline-inaccessible twelve-tone music he wrote in the avant-garde heyday of post-WWII western Europe. It's a great selection of modern music in an easy-to-consume hour-long portion.

Friday, January 28, at 6:00 p.m., Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, FREE