The musicians of the Sphinx Virtuosi strode onto the Harris Theater stage Sunday afternoon with a stylish swagger that betrayed the exuberance of their music.  A chamber orchestra without a conductor, the Sphinx is made up of alumni of the national Sphinx Competition for young Black and Latino string players.  The Detroit-based Sphinx Organization has been promoting ethnic diversity in American orchestral music for 15 years while producing top-rate musicians, some of whom were on display in a program perfectly designed to showcase their virtuosity and youthful energy. 

Musicians, like actors, assume a persona in our imaginations that may or may not have anything to do with who they are in reality. Furthermore, whilst we often have the pleasure of seeing our favorite interpreters perform live, we most often enjoy their talents by way of recording. In other words, this physical art form is frequently disembodied.

Enter Cambridge Jones, photographer. Mr. Jones has a large repertoire of portraiture. Thus, an aspect of his work is about embodying.

Currently, you have the opportunity to see one of Mr. Jones’ portrait exhibits, “Talking Pictures,” which is featured in one of the Pop-Up galleries conveniently located in the Loop, which I visited the evening it opened.

Your mother’s beating heart was the first sound you ever heard, and every day you live and breath, you create a constantly evolving rhythmic symphony between your pulse, your inhalation/exhalation, and your footsteps. Then of course, there is the voice, with all its lyrical possibilities. A kind of hard-wired resonance is hibernating within us, waiting to a reason to wake up. This past week, the alarm clock went off at Mayne Stage where Third Coast Percussion (TCP) – along with Tim Munro, the tremendously talented flutist of Eighth Blackbird (another stellar Chicago ensemble) – presented their concert “Bells and Whistles.”

“What do you think of these little chestnuts?” asked one concertgoer to another during intermission Monday night, referring to Music of the Baroque’s performance of the final three Mozart symphonies.  “I could just hum along with them,” he answered himself. 

To another concertgoer, Mozart “sounds like Mozart.” 

The ubiquity of Mozart’s music has perhaps dulled our senses to it.  Orchestras may program an early symphony to open a concert or a late symphony to take the edge off a contemporary work.  Soloists of a variety of instruments have a concerto in their repertoire always ready to go for a fifteen-minute appearance.  No matter how rich or engaging these performances can be—and there have been a number of remarkable such performances here in recent memory—they never seem to be enough of the soloist or the music. Mozart ultimately becomes relegated to the quaint, clichéd “chestnut” of the concert hall.