A rare Newberry Consort misfire ends the season with Osman
For nearly four decades, the Newberry Consort has seamlessly integrated scholarship and musicianship in their elevated early music programs. The arrival of Liza Malamut as Newberry’s new artistic director in 2022 breathed fresh life into the ensemble’s mission, and the first three years of her tenure have largely impressed as she has expanded the Consort’s roster and taken the group to new venues across Chicagoland.
These consistently positive trends made Friday night’s season-closing misfire at Hyde Park’s First Unitarian Church of Chicago all the more jarring.
“In the Realm of Osman,” as the evening was billed, presented music of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th to the 20th centuries. The program was guest curated by guest Ronnie Malley, an ud specialist and PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, with a roster of guest artists on traditional Middle Eastern instruments.
Newberry programs have typically benefitted from having a specific thematic focus, musically elaborating a particular life, epoch, or narrative. While Friday’s program took the 16th-century manuscript Tarih-i Yeni Dünya (“History of the New World”) as a point of departure, ultimately the evening’s selections were a confused bricolage, united by little more than their geography. While part of the point was to illustrate that the Ottoman Empire was a complex cultural melting pot, there was no through-line to sustain the assorted selections, and the feel was more of a pedantic lecture-demonstration than a curated experience.
Early Ottoman music has its own particular grammar and harmonic language (maqam), but even accounting for these, Friday’s performances felt repetitive and anemic. Selections tended toward an all-purpose plodding tempo and the entire evening took place at a generalized mezzo-something dynamic. In a perfectly avoidable self-own, the musicians performed seated at the same level as the audience, so no one beyond the first two rows could see any of the performers in action. (There was a raised stage immediately behind them.)
Multiple audience members voted with their feet, leaving during the first half.
Visual artist and music historian Shawn Keener, whose inspired projections have enhanced Newberry concerts for years, did not seem to know what to do with the program. Seemingly arbitrary images—a boat, a dragon—from the Tarih-i were slowly panned over behind the unseen performers, but these did not cohere in any additive way. The closing Sephardic-Turkish traditional “Si Verias A La Rana” was for some reason accompanied by an image of birds flying in the sunset, possibly borrowed from the cover of a self-help manual.
Malamut performed on the Western European sackbut with the guest artists throughout the night, but her claim that this was in the tradition of Janissary bands felt like a stretch, and the brass timbre never felt like it belonged. Malley’s own spoken commentary was punctuated with cringeworthy anodyne platitudes: “Despite politics, despite empires, people still live.” Oh?
This is not to say there were not isolated highlights. Naeif Rafeh offered multiple atmospheric solos on the ney, a flute-like instrument dating back to ancient Egypt, and Firas Zreik made several florid improvisatory statements on the kanun. There were fleeting moments when one could become lost in the music’s hypnotic qualities, and Kevser Hanim’s well-known “Nihavend Longa” provided some belated vigor, but these were exceptions to the general soporific impression.
The Newberry Consort will open its next season with Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, the earliest known opera, in collaboration with the Haymarket Opera Company, and one can look forward to the venerable group returning to its customary level of excellence.
“In the Realm of Osman” will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Newberry Library and 4 p.m. Sunday at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston. newberryconsort.org
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2 Responses to “A rare Newberry Consort misfire ends the season with Osman”
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Posted May 11, 2025 at 11:09 am by Cynthia Cheski
Perhaps it was the venue that was the problem. I saw this sold-out concert Saturday night at Newberry Library, and the audience was enthusiastic and engaged. I thought the projections enhanced the music, which had variety and interest and was energetically played. A happy experience for us.
Posted May 11, 2025 at 12:35 pm by ChiLynne
Wow, what a difference from Saturday’s performance at the Newberry Library! Sold out show, very enthusiastic audience! No one leaving early!
Yes, this differed from many Newberry Consort programs, but the virtuoso kanun and ney (inter alia) playing provided much delight as did recognizing some of the works on the program from other venues – Uskudar, in particular.