On Friday, May 22, the Grossman Ensemble, in residence at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition, closed their 2025–26 season with the world premieres of pieces by four different composers.

The Grossman Ensemble features thirteen world-class musicians and was founded by Augusta Read Thomas in 2018 as the resident director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition. Every year, the ensemble performs 12 new works, which are developed over the course of three nine-week rehearsal periods, with the goal of workshopping, perfecting, and eventually performing them. The premiere of each piece usually takes place during the second to last week of the quarter at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. Titled Illuminations, the recent concert showcased the works of Katherine Balch, Matthew Ricketts, Gity Razaz, and Shawn Okpebholo, under the direction of guest conductor Luke Poeppel.

waggle dance — Katherine Balch

Balch, an associate professor at Yale School of Music, opened the concert with her piece, waggle dance, named after the dance that honeybees use to communicate.

The piece started at an extremely quick tempo, with all instruments at once producing intense, percussive sounds. The string players beat their bows against the strings of their instruments to produce staccatos, contributing to the energy of the piece. At times, each of the two percussionists created sounds that initially felt disjointed from the rest of the work, including clicks of a ratchet and pings of a triangle. Nevertheless, the chaotic blend of rhythms and sounds in the piece ultimately evoked the beautiful image of thousands of bees performing their frantic waltz.

While not as prominent as the percussion, the brass section injected a buzzy hum, laying out the foundation for the image of the bees. The remainder of the piece flowed between sections with lots of open space and softer dynamics and a handful of short, abrupt climaxes that seemed to go as quickly as they came, all while maintaining the whimsicality and chaos of the opening. In her introduction, Balch said that she aimed to portray the “coexistence of play and rigor,” which the electrically performed piece confidently achieved.

Into Air — Matthew Ricketts

Into Air came next, which Ricketts, a teacher at the Manhattan School of Music, dedicated to his grandmother who passed away in 2020. The piece aimed to deconstruct a melody from 20th-century composer Oskar Rieding’s Air Varié, which Ricketts recalled duetting with his grandmother as a child.

The piece introduced the members of the ensemble gradually, with a small number of musicians playing softer legato melodies with bright and airy tones, as opposed to the sharp and urgent percussiveness of waggle dance. The standout feature of the piece was the entrance of the piano, played by Daniel Pesca, who added a layer of somber nuance and depth under the strings and woodwinds. Pesca’s piano, which would return later in the piece, filled an empty space in the music up to that point, bringing a sense of fulfillment. Unfortunately, Pesca’s playing only constituted a small fraction of the piece—other sections highlighted the marimba and harp, offering variations on the Air Varié melody, but these parts did not elicit the same sense of nostalgia as the sections with piano. While the marimba evoked the simple joy of the melody, the piano had contributed a dark and sentimental color to the texture that was lost in its absence.

Toward the end, the instruments slowly faded away, just as they had come in, the marimba lingering behind with one final pulse of melody. Overall, the piece offered a powerful reflection on memory; Ricketts and the Grossman Ensemble delivered an elegant tribute full of joy and nostalgia.

The Angel of All Mortal Things — Gity Razaz

Iranian-American composer Razaz, named a “Rising Star” by BBC Music Magazine, based her piece, The Angel of All Mortal Things, on Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “The First Elegy.” In her introduction, Razaz described the piece as an encounter with an angel in three parts, inspired by Rilke’s description of an angel as something both beautiful and terrifying.

The music maintained an unsettling and eerie atmosphere throughout the first parts, masterfully interweaving aspects of horror into the texture. Each melody in the piece was distorted in some way, either through a shift away from the tonal center or a rapid rhythmic change. The first sections of the piece even felt otherworldly and alien at times, as if the music was being recited in some long-forgotten language. This quality further strengthened the idea that the piece depicted something impossible to fully understand.

Razaz described the third and final part of the piece as a trance, a suspension in beauty. But the intended elegance of this section did not come through. The turbulent eerie melodies from the earlier parts, depicting the initial fear upon first contact with the angel, bled into the third part, dominating the soundscape. Although the piece nailed the horror of the angel, the beautiful and majestic aspects of the angel left much to be desired.

City of Wide Shoulders — Shawn Okpebholo

The fourth and final piece, City of Wide Shoulders, composed by two-time Grammy nominee Okpebholo, aimed to offer a comprehensive picture of Chicago’s range, from its strength to its gentleness. The piece was divided into several distinct sections, each calling into mind some part of Chicago life. Okpebholo and the Grossman Ensemble displayed everything from the bustle and chaos of traffic to light, spacious themes reminiscent of gentle snowfall.

The most exciting section depicted the Chicago jazz scene, for which the city is world-renowned. Taimur Sullivan delivered a magnificent saxophone solo at a blistering pace, while percussionist Gregory Beyer created many of the distinctive sounds that evoked city images, including his skillful use of a piercing traffic whistle. During the jazzy section, Beyer sprinted over to the drum kit and gave up-tempo swing rhythms for Sullivan to solo over. The penultimate section brought together many of the memorable themes and sounds from the piece, painting a holistic picture of the city in all its variety and complexity. In comparison, the finale was a bit lackluster, culminating in a new, softer passage that ended with an abrupt cut. That said, the piece as a whole offered a unique perspective on the city of Chicago, demonstrating the coexistence of the city’s many beautiful sides.

The next Grossman Ensemble rehearsal period will occur during autumn quarter, with the performance, Stitched from Silence, scheduled for December 4. The concert will premiere works from composers Charles Peck, Marta Ptaszyńska, Peter Shin, and Xi Wang. UChicago students can get tickets for free on the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition website.