The Los Angeles-based Wild Up chamber orchestra made its Boston debut on March 30.
“The composer and conductor Christopher Rountree is a musician sharply attuned to the rituals of classical music, and especially to their symbolic importance,” writes David Weininger in last Wednesday’s (3/22) Boston Globe (login required). “Take an ordinary orchestral concert experience: … The whole format, Rountree said during a recent phone interview, accentuates the distance and the sheer unlikeness of audience and performer. So when he founded Wild Up, a chamber orchestra-size new music group based in Los Angeles, Rountree tried to undo as many of those tradition-bound norms as he could…. These were aesthetic choices; but as Rountree, the group’s artistic director, gradually realized, they were also ethical ones. In fact, they formed a kind of mission statement for Wild Up, which makes its first Boston appearance on March 30, in the Celebrity Series of Boston Stave Sessions…. Wild Up’s repertoire cuts a wide swath … Much of the band’s focus is on the many composers in its ranks, which include violinist and violist Andrew McIntosh and saxophonist Shelley Washington…. The Stave Sessions concert [in Boston] juxtaposes four of [Julius] Eastman’s compositions against works by Felipe Lara, Jürg Frey, and Anthony Braxton.”
