Posted by chicagomedia.org on July 04, 2008 at 10:48:26:
In Reply to: WFMT host takes performance to the park posted by chicagomedia.org on July 04, 2008 at 10:47:16:
McGlaughlin at ease at Grant Park
WFMT host runs through 125 years of music
Fusing music pedagogy and entertainment is a curious feat. There's the risk of becoming a snooze or a clown, and people can sniff out when you're trying too hard. To decode and present classical music for a large audience needs an amusing and friendly mediator, but one that isn't going to compromise the art either.
Enter Bill McGlaughlin, who has educated millions across the globe with his endlessly probing mind and curious voice that can be heard nightly on the syndicated WFMT-FM (98.7) program "Exploring Music."
Though to call McGlaughlin just an educator would be a slight to the other notable bullets on his decorated resume. The ebullient New Yorker has played trombone with a major U.S. orchestra, conducted the Kansas City Symphony for 12 years and composes music.
Wednesday night at Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, WFMT aired a live narrated presentation with the Grant Park Orchestra that sprinted through 125 years of American orchestral music. McGlaughlin handled the 2½-hour program -- which included an extended 30-minute intermission -- with all the familiar ease of his intimate radio broadcasts.
Grant Park Principal Conductor Carlos Kalmar gets a thumbs-up for programming eight seldom-played concert works, including two that were introduced by their composers. Stacy Garrop of Roosevelt University wrote the evocatively moody "Shadow" for chamber orchestra with the intention of banishing her old composing habits and instead experimented by attaching sounds to photographs.
The Dallas-born Christopher Theofanidis walked on stage and declared his love for melody and the 12th-century abbess and composer Hildegard von Bingen, whose clear lyrical lines influenced his "Rainbow Body." Locals also got in a few yuks with the introduction of the music of Joliet-born Ron Nelson. "You see, Joliet is not just a prison town but also the birthplace of composers," McGlaughlin joked before a festive performance of "Savannah River Holiday."
McGlaughlin's aim was to get to the heart of what American music is, and by sitting at the piano, he played excerpts from Leonard Bernstein's "Lonely Town" and asked, "What's an F doing there? That's the blues and that isn't European." He also spent a considerable time meandering through the orchestra and handing the mike over to the ensemble's unsung contributors. Additional selections from George Whitefield Chadwick, William Grant Still, Tomas Svoboda and John Adams nicely framed the century of a country in search of its musical voice.
(Sun-Times)