Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 4-3

Chicago Tribune ArtsEntertainment Section 4 Wednesday, October 18, 2017 3 MUSIC DANCE At U. of a major homage to Ligeti TERRENCE ANTONIO JAMESCHICAGO TRIBUNE left, Amy Iwano and Jennifer Iverson are joining the Ligeti celebration. bring to the journey is open ears and minds. Ligeti Series events Arditti Quartet. The ensemble intersperses Ligeti's pathbreaking String Quartets Nos.

1 and 2 with Bartok's Third and Fourth quartets, which greatly influenced his works in that genre. 7:30 p.m. Friday, Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th St. A discussion with Arditti Quartet members will take place at 10:30 am.

Saturday in the Logan Center, 915 E. 60th free, but reservations are suggested. Imani Winds, Ensemble Dal Niente, Doyle Armbrust, Winston Choi, Kuang-Hao Huang. The artists and ensembles survey Ligeti's chamber output, including Viola Sonata, Horn Trio, Bagatelles and Pieces for two pianos. Nov.

10, Logan Center. Eighth Blackbird and Amadinda Arrangements of several Ligeti pieces by Eighth Blackbird share the program with a North American premiere by the composer's son Lukas Ligeti and other ensemble works by Steve Reich and Aurel Hollo. Feb. 2, Logan Center. Third Coast Percussion and Rachel Calloway.

Three Ligeti scores including "Poeme Sym-phonique" and an arrangement of his solo -harpsichord piece "Continuum" are presented along with a piece by Christopher Cer-rone. Feb. 16, Logan Center. "Ligeti in Context: The Witch's Kitchen." A new sound installation by U. of C.

electronics studio director Sam Pluta reimagines the heady atmosphere of the Studio for Electronic Music at West German Radio (WDR) in Cologne, Germany, where Ligeti, Stockhausen and other Young Turks of modernism gathered in the 1950s and '60s to create compositions out of synthesized sounds. March 5-8, Logan Center. Pierre-Laurent Aimard. The formidable French pianist pairs Ligeti's dazzling solo piano Etudes with Beethoven's towering "Hammerklavier" Sonata March 6, Logan Center. Each concert will include a pre-performance lecture by a university music professor.

The department also will host a scholarly conference, "Dislocations: Reassessing Ligeti," March 7-8. Series subscriptions are $142 for all events. Concert tickets are $38 and include the lectures. For further information, go to http: chicagopresents.uchicago.edu tickets. John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.

jvonrheinchicagotribune.com Series to present wide swath of work by master modernist John von Rhein Heard Scene If the name Gyorgy Ligeti doesn't ring an immediate bell in the minds of local classical music buffs as do the names of Pierre Boulez, John Cage or other avant-garde composers working in the mid-20th century, a major series of events at the University of Chicago over the next six months could well upend that situation. Thanks to the initiative of Amy Iwano, executive director of the University of Chicago Presents concert series, audiences will be exposed to a wide cross-section of the pioneering Central European composer's music, in a thoughtfully planned series of events to be presented over the coming months. Precisely where that music falls within the spectrum of modern and postmodern composition is just one area to be explored in the Gyorgy Ligeti Series. Iwano's brainchild will launch Friday night in Mandel Hall with a concert by the Arditti Quartet, a top European ensemble long identified with 20th-century repertory. Ligeti's two string quartets will share the program with quartets by his Hungarian countryman BelaBartok.

Four later concerts of Ligeti works for chamber ensembles and solo piano, a sound installation, a lecture-demonstration and a scholarly conference will enlist local groups such as the Imani Winds, Ensemble Dal Niente and Eighth Blackbird, along with French pianist and Ligeti champion Pierre-Laurent Aimard, among other performers. The Ligeti series is a first for Chicago and a rarity in the U.S. as well. When organizing the series, Iwano made a point of involving U. of C.

music department faculty and students. Professors specializing in contemporary music will deliver pre-concert lectures, and a raft of student musicians will collaborate with Third Coast Percussion in a rare performance of one of Ligeti's quirkier experimental pieces, the "Poeme Sym-phonique" for 100 that's right, 100 windup metronomes. Iwano says that mounting a mental music, but always made for the listener as much as the composer, and equally rewarding for the performer," he observes. "Ligeti had the ability to create new worlds of surprise, humor and heart-wrenching pathos, while pushing the boundaries of sonic invention, timbral complexity and virtuosity." Ligeti's music pushes performers to their limits just as it engages the imagination of listeners, says Jennifer Iverson, a U. of C.

assistant professor of music, Ligeti scholar and author of a recent book analyzing the cultural impact of mid-2 0th century electronic music. "We hear sounds that we didn't know were possible, sequences that threaten to spiral out of control, or out of the range of hearing. Sounds transform in unexpected ways, and we have the pleasure of following a process through to its logical conclusion." What Cheung calls "bits and pieces of historical tropes, intermingled with the truly strange and invented" make perfect sense in Ligeti's sound world, because of "his understanding of traditional forms of narrative and rhetoric." Like Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart and Haydn centuries before him, Ligeti was, in Cheung's view, "a great synthesizer of traditions, genres and moods." Iwano would like nothing better than for audiences to come away with a greater understanding and appreciation of Ligeti's music, its importance and influence, she says all they need to The U. of Anthony Cheung, from Ligeti series had been high on her list of priorities ever since she took over the administration of U. of C.

Presents in 2012 but that she had to wait for the stars to be in alignment for the event to become a reality. She planned the mini-festival as "a significant contribution to learning" on campus, she says, also as a means of bringing together European musicians who knew and worked with the composer, such as Aimard and the Arditti ensemble, and younger musicians who were influenced by him, including his son, composer Lukas Ligeti. "I find Gyorgy Ligeti's music at once challenging and accessible, experimental and playful," Iwano says. "It has great visceral impact open your ears and you get it. Musicians who spend a lot of time with this music love it, while even people who may be listening to it for the first time are really taken with it." Born into a Hungarian Jewish family, Ligeti (pronounced Lig-iih-tee) survived the Holocaust but lost his father and brother to it Soviet Russian artistic oppression forced him to immigrate to Austria in 1956.

He became an Austrian citizen in 1968 and taught composition at the High School for Music and Theater in Hamburg, Germany, from 1973 until his retirement in 1989. He died in Vienna in 2006, at 83. Obituaries celebrated what critic and author Paul Griffiths called Ligeti's "sometimes eerie, sometimes humorous, usually fantastical and always polished" of it like a three-day progressive dance dinner, a chance to peek inside the artistic processes of some of our city's most prolific and innovative creators, who don't often grace the pages of this publication. Just a few of the highlights: Thursday's late-night showing at Defibrillator Gallery boasts excerpts from Khecari's mesmerizing audience immersion called "Teem," and Zephyr Dance's site-specific "Valise 13," which takes over the gallery's creepier spaces. On Friday morning, the beautiful, lakeside field-house that Synapse Arts calls home will host selections from its ongoing project mixing dance with needlecraft, plus Joanna Furnans' Co-MISSIONS-sup-ported "Genuine Fake," and Ginger Krebs' delightfully dissonant 2014 work called "Soft Parade." "The field of dance in Chicago is much broader, and more diverse, and stronger than it has ever been, at least since I've been in Chicago, and there is less recognition outside the city for the field of dance and its individual practitioners than there ought to be," said Taub, who spearheaded performing arts programming at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996 and was director of performance programs until his departure from the MCA in 2016.

"The vast majority of independent contemporary artists are not known or recognized, so this is a good time for us to improve visibility both within the city, and for our colleagues across the country." Why is this dance buffet happening now? Much of the timing has to do with the completion of the Regional Dance Development Initiative, a program sponsored Elevate Chicago Dance offers extended look at diverse artistry music. Many obit writers mentioned director Stanley Kubrick's use of several Ligeti scores in the soundtrack to his "2001: A Space Odyssey," which brought the composer worldwide recognition. But popularity was never something Ligeti sought or had any use for. Throughout his composing life he was perfectly content to follow the beat of a different drummer: himself. Indeed, his refusal to throw in his lot with other European avatars of musical modernism such as Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Boulez brings to mind Groucho Marx's famous remark that he would refuse to belong to any club that would have him as a member.

To that point, critics who would label Ligeti as an experimentalist or a postmodernist were misguided, he told an interviewer in 1981. "I reject both (labels)," the composer said. "The avant-garde, to which I am said to belong, has become academic. As for looking back, there's no point in chewing over an outmoded style. I prefer to follow a third way: being myself." Ligeti had a uniquely personal way of acknowledging musical tradition while subverting and rewriting its rules, says Anthony Cheung, a composer and U.

of C. assistant professor of music who taught a class last year on Ligeti's late works. And that's one of the main reasons Cheung finds the music so absorbing. "With Ligeti, it's always experi by the New England Foundation for the Arts and CDF, which, over a two-year period, worked with 11 of Elevate's artists on career development through customized programming aimed at strengthening their artistic processes. Unlike most artist development series, RDDI pinpoints specific needs of each selected artist and shapes the curriculum around those needs.

"A big part of what CDF does is not only support an extended period of research and exploration for artists during their grant year, but also a big part of our work is building relationships between artists and others of all sorts potential collaborators, writers, presenters, donors, funders being a connector for those lands of relationships to start is an important part of our work, and although Elevate is presentational, it is about making these connections and relationships," said CDF Executive Director Ginger Farley in an interview with the Tribune. To that end, Elevate includes a few events closed to the public. These are reserved for established Chicago dance artists to show work to and mingle with nearly 25 presenters and festival organizers from all over the country, brought in specifically for the festival to orient and immerse them with the city's dance scene. But unlike other presenters' conferences, and frankly unlike any other dance festival, there's no pressure on the artists to present a finished, ready-to-wear product Likewise, Farley does not want presenters to approach their time as though they're "shopping" for dances to present. "It's more about everyone think Lauren Warnecke Dance Card This weekend, Chicago dance artists and venues are opening their doors and inviting the public to stages all over the city to witness excerpts, works-in-progress and studio processes from our rich community of independent artists and small to midsize dance companies.

Called Elevate Chicago Dance, the Chicago Dance-makers Forum is the presenter of the multiday, multivenue, mostly free festival aimed at highlighting Chicago dance and increasing the visibility of established dance artists across a range of genres and disciplines. With CDF celebrating its crystal anniversary in 2018, Elevate Chicago Dance feels like an apropos check-in. In those 15 years, CDF has supported about 50 artists through its coveted Lab Artist grant program, which awards $15,000 to independent artists engaged in yearlong, research-oriented artistic processes. The focus of the Lab Artist program has always been on artistic development, which has given Chicago some of richest and most compelling audience experiences on record but might be considered out of the "mainstream" dance scene. Many of the Dancemakers Forum's previous lab artists are represented in Elevate Chicago Dance, an invitation-only endeavor curated by Peter Taub.

Think ZEPHYR DANCE PHOTO Defibrillator Gallery on Thursday. the land of the wilis, a forest haunted by the ghosts of betrayed maidens and the iconic centerpiece of the Romantic classic "Giselle." This time, audiences are treated to the Chicago premiere of the 2012 version by former associate director of San Francisco Ballet, Lola de Avila The best bet is the opening night cast: Victoria Jaiani in the title role, real-life hubby Temur Suluashvili as Albrecht and April Daly as Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis. Wednesday to Oct. 29 at the Auditorium Theatre, SOE. Congress Parkway; at 312-386-890S and wwwJofffrey.org.

Project Bound Dance presents "Imprint," the third collaboration between directors Ashley Deran and Ericka Vaughn, adds vocal artist Jazelle Morriss to the mix for a dance centered on homophones soul and sole, pitting self-worth against material possessions. Thursday andFriday at Hamlin Park, 303SN. $20 at www.projectbounddance Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic. "Valise 13" will be performed at the ing: How can we look at what we're doing and what we have, and with those things, elevate one another and the field?" said Farley. "That's the kind of dialogue we would like to engender." Elevate Chicago Dance takes place Thursday, Friday and Saturday at various venues.

Nine events are open to the public, including studio showings at Links Hall, 3111 N. Western Defibrillator Gallery, 1463 W. Chicago Loyola Park Fieldhouse, 1230 W. Greenleaf the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington and the South Shore Cultural Center, 70S9 S.

South Shore Drive. Two main stage performances take place Friday and Saturday at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, 1306 S. Michigan Ave. All studio showings are free; Defibrillator will accept $5 suggested donations at the door. The Dance Center performances are ticketed events, $30.

Reserve or buy tickets and view the full schedule at www.chicagodancemakers.org. Also worth noting Joff rey Ballet of Chicago: It's been 10 years since Joffrey visited.