Chicago Classical Review

Nova Linea Musica, one of Chicago’s most interesting new chamber music series, returned on Wednesday night with a performance by Chicago’s own contemporary percussion emissaries, Third Coast Percussion. 

Departing its usual venue at Guarneri Hall on this occasion for roomier digs at Merit School of Music’s Gottlieb Hall, the dynamic series’ directive remains the same: Engage artists to commission new works by living composers and premiere those works in an intimate, salon-esque setting.

Third Coast Percussion, consisting of ensemble members David Skidmore, Sean Connors, Peter Martin, and Robert Dillon, was also in typically fine form on this outing. Wednesday evening’s program was a grab bag of modern percussion literature that spotlighted short, accessible, and conceptually focused works. 

Despite the more spacious outpost, Third Coast’s setup remained compact, at least by the ensemble’s standards. In fact, creative constraint was one of the themes of the program. This was particularly true of the program’s centerpieces: a pair of new works composed by South Carolina-based composer JaRon Brown and Third Coast ensemble member Dillon, each receiving its world premiere.

Dillon’s Scoundrel follows a straightforward concept: subdividing the beat by five. Despite the simple prompt, it’s a dense piece in multiple senses; with all four ensemble members crammed behind a single marimba, the work unfurls in alternate layers of resonant, sing-song melodies and swirling ostinati that deliberately obscure the downbeat — all propelled by a constant, five-note figure that ratchets along like a ticker tape. By turns knotty and winkingly playful, this premiere found amplified success thanks to the committed advocacy of Dillon’s colleagues.

Brown’s and this too, shall pass was this program’s Nova Linea Musica commission and easily the evening’s highlight. As with Dillon’s piece, Brown’s opus prescribed that all four percussionists play simultaneously on the same marimba (with ensemble member Martin playing opposite his bandmates, on the reverse side of the instrument). 

By contrast from Dillon’s, though, the subject matter of Brown’s work is concrete and decidedly personal. Written as an homage to a great uncle diagnosed with dementia, it surveys the emotional highs and lows of caring for an ailing family member through a warmly textured sonic language. Tuneful melodies bloom and evolve before changing course abruptly, much like an interrupted thought, but the piece’s cohesive palette, marked tonal harmonies and organic-sounding raps on the marimba’s wood frame and metal resonators, painted a nuanced portrait of its complicated subject. Third Coast’s adept reading imbued the flowing, sometimes loping trajectory of the work with a sense of vitality and optimism befitting its heartfelt inspiration.

Other works on Wednesday’s program examined their premises with a narrower focus. The evening’s opener, Andrea Venet’s Bulldog, takes paradiddles — a percussion sticking rudiment sometimes relegated to a technical exercise — and spins it out into a spirited romp for toms, woodblocks, cowbells and other more clangorous textures in the percussion arsenal. 

Matters/Mind by Alexis Lamb began in similar sonic territory, but follows a gradual shift in timbre from unpitched percussion to gentle marimba passages and back again. Jesse Montgomery’s Study No. 1 likewise is a color study that explores variance in pitch by, for instance, directing players to insert one end of a piece of surgical tubing into the vent holes of a tom drum and blowing into the other to alter the tension, and therefore the pitch, of the drumhead.

Third Coast gave these too a firm shake, though the framing of these works as demonstrations of certain music qualities at times read as didactic, especially when other selections resonated on a more emotive wavelength. Take Ivan Trevino’s Watercolor Sun — also scored for four players and a single marimba — whose steady ostinato, wistfully consonant melodies, and transparent harmonies lend it a popish, nostalgic character.

This percussion melange wouldn’t be complete without playing some of the hits. Rounding out the program were Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood and “Derivative” from Jlin’s Perspective, two fixtures of Third Coast Percussion’s repertoire. The latter of these is masterful in its blend of imaginative timbral variety and deep-pocket groove, and may have been the program’s zenith had the boominess of Gottlieb Hall’s bright acoustic not smudged some of these finer details.

Third Coast has taken Reich’s touchstone of 20th-century repertoire and made it their own, using dowel-rod mallets and blocks of rosewood in place of tuned claves. Despite the brisk reading — performing with four players rather than the five called for by the score, and clocking in at a very taut eight minutes — Third Coast’s performance infused a technically crisp delivery with subtly cheeky showmanship and an indefatigable sense of groove. It’s an excellent summation of what makes this ensemble so great: making the sometimes weird and wildly virtuosic corners of the percussion repertoire into something wonderfully accessible.

The Nova Linea Musica’s 2025/26 season continues March 11 at Guarneri Hall. Rabia Brooke and Nathaneal Canfield perform a program including a world premiere by Jennifer Higdon. novalineamusica.org

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