Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge on Cermak is a jazz club, but on Tuesday (Oct. 27), it hosted a contemporary classical music performance. Claire Chase, one of the founders of the International Contemporary Ensemble, stood alone on the stage with her flutes and made some otherworldly noises with those innocent-looking pipes. This was not your grandmother’s flute music. Chase was playing some of the pieces she performs on her new record, Aliento, as well as a few others. Although she was solo for most of the show, she was almost always accompanied by electronic sounds and textures. In some of the pieces, her notes and even the sounds of the keys clicking on her flutes echoed and reverbed back at her, creating alien soundscapes. Fellow ICE member Eric Lamb joined her onstage for Brazilian composer Marcos Balter’s piece “Edgewater,” and the two of them slowly moved in tandem from one side of the stage to the other as their notes danced around one another. Chase closed the show with Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 for violin, using effects to transform it into a duet between “flute and gear.”
www.newfocusrecordings.com/Aliento.html
International Contemporary Ensemble and composer Kaija Saariaho will perform at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 19 at the Museum of
Contemporary Art. www.mcachicago.org