MUSIC REVIEW: FREUND ORGAN AND TRUMPET
Concert-goers feel lively gusts of musical winds
By Peter Jacobi
H-T Reviewer | pjacobi@heraldt.com

February 2, 2012
Don Freund thinks big.
A few years ago, he set about writing an opera based on “Romeo and Juliet,” a project he tenaciously completed. Last May, on the University Theater stage, he produced a remarkably complex performance piece called “Passion with Tropes,” consisting of music, theater, dance, poetry, philosophic humanism and explosions of visuals.
Tuesday evening, to fill his faculty recital slot, he gave an Auer Hall audience “Out of the Ordinary: Music for Organ and Trumpet by Don Freund.” That meant a presentation of two works by the composer: “Ordinary Pieces: A Concert Organ Mass,” written in 1991, and the 1997 “Breeze Works,” an exercise for trumpet and organ.
One never knows, arriving at a concert featuring Don Freund’s music, just what to expect. He writes in virtually every style and form, and he’s an adventurer with the courage to try his hand at whatever drives those creative urges of his at the moment. As consequence, even if an individual listener considers a here-and-there result not to be a total success, he or she will find it impossible to be bored. Freund, after all, is a composer who exudes imaginative energy.
Prime example: “Ordinary Pieces.” It is scored for solo organ. The religious themes and welter of emotions usually expressed in a Mass by chorus and vocal soloists are given to the organ. The absence of words makes such an approach questionable, but Freund made it work far better than one might have expected. He scored the Mass so creatively, gave the organ such a range of expressions and tonal colors, that the messages he intended to impart somehow are.
Of course, Freund’s program notes helped ease the journey of significance. Take the Prelude, a setting meant to symbolize a verse from Psalms, “You sprinkle me, O Lord, and I shall be cleansed,” and meant to recall, from the composer’s own boyhood, the priest sprinkling holy water on the congregation. Freund describes the music as “angular jagged harmonies . cleansed by a drizzling pentatonic fountain.” Later, about the Benedictus (“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord”), he writes: “Picture a funky procession of a ragtag gang following a guy on a donkey. Enjoy the rests.” Both descriptions were spot on reflections of the music.
On Tuesday, Freund chose to have the movements of “Ordinary Pieces” played by thirteen different organists: students, faculty, and that very much non-retired retiree from the faculty, Marilyn Keiser. For the record, the others were, in order of appearance, Josef Ciskanik, Daniel Corneliussen, Juan Mesa, Bruce Neswick, Elizabeth Clark, Chappell Kingsland, Mike Powell, Martha Sliva, Stephen Price, Colin Andrews, William Bryant, and Ryan Brunkhurst. Their tasks were not easy; for some the assignment was, indeed, of highly challenging nature.
They acquitted themselves famously well. Because of all the shuffling and seat changing from player to player and for consistency of approach, one might have preferred a single organist versus a baker’s dozen, but the concert gave attendees a welcomed opportunity to hear the breadth of talent in and about IU’s organ department.
Freund’s “Breeze Works,” which followed the Mass, proved most definitely breezy. Played with ferocious enthusiasm by Janette Fishell on organ and John Rommel on trumpet, it blew lively gusts of musical winds through the hall. And, yes, as Freund expressed the wish in his program notes, the two wind instruments, thus unleashed, caused this listener and no doubt others there to “feel lightly tossed about.”

Copyright: HeraldTimesOnline.com 2012