Present Music Goes Groucho.

You might call it the Music Director’s revenge. Kevin Stalheim, the usually reserved leader of the Present Music pack, unleashed his theatrical id last weekend. The concert, presented on two nights at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center, was called “Close Up.” But during the last piece, you had to be careful not to get too close.
    If you did, you might have gotten whacked by Stalheim as he cavorted/conducted/soloed in Henry Brant’s “The Marx Brothers,” a comic tribute to Chico, Groucho and Harpo.  A sort of Symphonia Concertante for tin whistle and chamber orchestra, Stalheim honored the absurd spirit of the brothers with cadenzas that quoted from Brahms and Handel and others. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard excerpts of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony “interpreted” via an instrument that could be heard by an Airedale seven miles away.
    If you accidentally wandered too close to “Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread” you would have been trapped in a strange universe where a few words are spun into an endless variations of sentences. A tribute/satire to Glass’s minimalist imagination by playwright David Ives, it could have easily been a real Glass piece, perhaps a little experiment in “word music.”
    The other pieces on the program were more traditional in a contemporary way. My favorite was Saed Haddad’s Le Contredésir, a polyglot trio (it uses Israeli, Western and Eastern motifs) for cello (Karl Levine), clarinet (William Helmers) and French horn (Greg Flint). Haddad has a great way with textures, combining sharp staccato notes with a long held notes to create varieties of sound. The ambition of Le Contredésir is almost orchestral, and the trio here dug in with brio.