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Chicago Tribune 06-10-09

Stephen Burns - guest conductor at the MusicNow finale concert on June 8, 2009

John von Rhein

"Various Chicago Symphony musicians took time out from the orchestra's Dvorak Festival to lend their talents to much newer music Monday night at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. The season finale to the MusicNOW series was curated by CSO composers-in-residence Osvaldo Golijov and Mark-Anthony Turnage, each of whom contributed a work to the program.

Inspired by the music of Led Zeppelin, Turnage's "Out of Black Dust" (2007-8) is very jazzy, very loud and great fun, with restless meters and insistent rhythms that suggest a Saturday-morning jam session at the conservatory with the doors thrown wide open. The exhilarating performance by 10 CSO brass men and guests under Stephen Burns provided the raw energy needed to counterbalance the softer-edged works that made up the bulk of Monday's concert.

Jeremy Flower, a composer who performs on the laptop (a mini-synthesizer), took part in two of the four pieces, including his own "Self Destruct" (2009).

Scored for six strings, piano, marimba and laptop, the piece mingles soothing New Age harmonies and a Hollywood heavenly choir before breaking into a joyous rock groove near the end. This was its world premiere.

I enjoyed "Self Destruct" more than the other work integrating electronic and acoustic instruments, Michael Ward-Bergeman's "Three Roads" (2007).

The composer/performer played hyper-accordion, a bass accordion equipped with microphones controlled by switches and foot pedals.

The texts sung by Christina Courtin are derived from "road" poems by Dante Alighieri, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman. Her amplified, pop-singer-style vocals float in an otherworldly soup of pulsing, bell-like and environmental sounds.

Before drifting into the final song, Courtin abruptly smashed her violin to pieces, an act of violent catharsis that presumably (I'm guessing here) freed her spirit to travel Whitman's "open road" of love. This is the second piece of new music I've heard in two days that involved the destruction of a fiddle. Enough of this lazy gimmick, already!

The program began with Golijov's "Mariel," a lyrical threnody for solo cello over shimmering waves of marimba, played (from memory) by cellist Brant Taylor and percussionist Cynthia Yeh. One had nothing but praise for their performance as well as for the performances of their colleagues."

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Chicago Classical Review 05-20-09

When musical worlds collide, politely

Lawrence A. Johnson

Under the energetic and imaginative leadership of artistic director Stephen Burns, Fulcrum Point has been breaking down barriers between musical genres for over a decade, finding common ground between classical and rock, jazz, dance, and non-Western music.

Many varieties of stylistic hybrid were in play for “Hong Kong at the Fulcrum Point,” a concert presented Tuesday night at Thorne Auditorium. The evening was part of a month-long Hong Kong Comes to Chicago festival, an initiative equal parts commerce and culture. The former was manifest Tuesday with an opening speech by Hong Kong trade official Donald Tong and a slick, if somewhat heavy-handed infomercial extolling the virtues of Hong Kong for business and recreation.

The program featured an array of music by Hong Kong-based composers as well as works by Western composers of Asian descent. Fulcrum Point was joined by the Chinese Music Virtuosi, six musicians performing on traditional Eastern instruments.

The evening led off with the Hong Kong ensemble in Thunder in Drought and Autumn Moon Over the Placid Lake, traditional works that made a worthy introduction to the bracing sonorities and exotic (to Western ears) timbres of the Chinese instruments.

Fulcrum Point’s bridge-building between different genres was manifest in two works. Ng King-Pan’s Semblance of Invisible, heard in its world premiere, combines Chinese and Western instruments in music that is accompanied by a Tai Chi master. Dong Xia-fei’s fluid gestures reflected the music, highlighted by the haunting high sound of the huqin, a body-less stringed instrument. And Law Wing-Fai’s Yi Zhi Shan offered duo virtuosity as Lam Tsan-tong’s bravura solo pipa backed the vibrant improvisational dance of Mollie Mock, a dauntingly flexible member of the Thodos Dance Company.

The most individual work was Vivian Fung’s Chanted Rituals, heard in its Midwestern premiere. East really does meet West in the Canadian composer’s chant-based work for trumpeter and two percussionists, and Burns displayed impressive chops as soloist in the jazz-inflected opening Dance, switching to flugelhorn for the atmospheric central Prayer.

Loo Sze-wang was a forceful soloist in Tang Lok-Yin’s It is What it is, a scherzo-like concerto for the woodwind sheng, though much of the music felt like vamping without a strong idea.

The program was certainly offbeat and well performed by all the musicians. Though considering Fulcrum Point’s reputation for edgy, envelope-pushing programs—the group presented Antheil’s icon-smashing Ballet mecanique two months ago— much of the music sounded merely piquant and tame.

Aenon Jia-En Loo’s a bliss: day in, day out, composed specifically for the occasion joins all the musicians together. One kept waiting for the Fulcrum Point brass to explode at some point, but Loo’s work is content to have the Western instruments double the repetitive, easy-going lines of the Chinese players, making a rather anti-climatic coda to a diverting if over-polite musical evening.

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Chicago Sun-Times 03-05-09

Termites running the asylum

Bryant Manning

The late painter and film critic Manny Farber famously denounced movies that were self-important, preachy, ornate temples of a bygone European sensibility. "White elephant art," he called it. Instead, Farber much preferred "termite art," which constantly nibbled away at artistic boundaries, making spontaneous decisions with no conscious intention of becoming a masterpiece.

You could say Tuesday night's concert at Harris Theater was, more or less, a musical tribute to termite art. The tirelessly creative Fulcrum Point New Music Project dug up a handful of absurdist creations that festered and crawled under the floorboards of the 20th century. Artistic director Stephen Burns titled this entertainingly nutty program "Dada Machinations," a celebration of the coexistence of music and machine.

As one of its many exemplars, George Antheil's supremely chaotic "Ballet mecanique" (1924) may in fact be a Dada masterpiece. Yet it isn't hard to see why a relatively well-known work like this hadn't received its Midwest premiere until now, since a pretty penny is spent on the requisite equipment alone: eight player pianos, two grand pianos, assorted percussion, airplane propellers, sirens, whistles, fans, etc. Not to mention the tough task of coordinating countless human and non-human components in lockstep.

When accomplished, "Ballet mecanique" is a spectacle hard to forget, and Burns conducted with outsize ambition, giving the performance a primal intensity. The thousands of notes that poured over ritualistic drum cadences clutched the audience and didn't let go. Kudos to Amy Briggs, whose sheet music scattered about, thanks to an overly aggressive propeller, but who unflinchingly soldiered on.

From the John Cage school of Fluxus -- often characterized by humor and extreme simplicity --the world premiere of Larry Miller's "Remote Music" (1976) risibly featured three grand pianos awaiting slowly descending cords from the ceiling. Attached to the end of those cords were stuffed gloves, eventually plunking down on the piano keys and sending the audience into a fit of laughter. In Jacob TV's engaging 1998 "Lipstick," flutist Mary Stolper, as a one-woman show, produced sparkling timbres over a short-circuiting boombox.

Dutch composer Robert Zuidam's "Three Mechanisms" (1991) seemed like residue from the postwar avant-garde. Sounding like a Glenn Miller big band strung out on amphetamines, the music's clever rhythmical layers highlighted an otherwise long-winded chamber suite. Performances from the 14-piece ensemble were, however, thoroughly detailed and vibrant.

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Chicago Tribune 03-05-09

Fulcrum Point's heart belongs to Dada

John von Rhein

The only limits Chicago's Fulcrum Point New Music Project sets for itself are those of artistic director Stephen Burns' questing and apparently limitless imagination. The ensemble closed its 10th anniversary season Tuesday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance with an absorbing program of new and new-old music made or inspired by machines.

The influence of Dada and Surrealism was strongly felt in George Antheil's "Ballet mecanique," one of the most notorious examples of avant-garde experimentation of the 1920s; and three works that carried his fascination with mechanistic processes into the late 20th Century.

At its New York premiere in 1927 "Ballet mecanique" touched off one of modern music's biggest scandals. Scored for 16 player pianos, two human-played pianos, three airplane propellers, xylophones, bass drums, electric bells, siren and tam-tam, its highly rhythmic din dragged the industrial age into the concert hall.

Fulcrum Point billed its Midwest premiere as the original score. Not quite: Burns used only (only!) eight player pianos and two propellers. The performance still packed a wallop. Antheil's chugging, noisy proto-minimalism at times suggests Stravinsky and Varese, but much less sophisticated. The Fulcrum Point players, synchronized to an amazing degree, made me glad to experience this once-shocking, now-dated period piece in the flesh. Once was enough.
Maximal minimalism was the driving force behind the Dutch post-minimalists Jacob ter Veldhuis' "Lipstick" and Robert Zuidam's "Three Mechanisms."

The Veldhuis was a delight, melding Mary Stolper's nimble flutes with a boombox blasting a manic collage of American pop culture and speech. The Zuidam pulsed with off-kilter repeating rhythms over dense modernist harmonies laced with big-band and Latin grooves.

Completing the program was University of Illinois at Chicago Fluxus Ensemble composer Larry Miller's "Remote Music."

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Chicago Sun-Times 01-22-09

Fulcrum Point balances modern realities with exotic myths in eclectic program

Hedy Weiss

As Stephen Burns readily admitted Tuesday night in his remarks to the audience at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, scheduling a concert on Inauguration Day -- particularly this Inauguration Day -- might not have been the best idea, and it was entirely inadvertent. Yet as it turned out, Burns' ensemble -- the ever-adventurous Fulcrum Point New Music Project -- delivered a fascinating program, "Modern Myths," that could not have been a more ideal reflection of the tremendously varied roots of the 44th president. And in their own way, the four artfully juxtaposed works on the program had more to say about the interplay of world cultures than any round table of television commentators.

Though contemporary ears have become a great deal more attuned to both atonal music and "world beats" in recent years, "new music," which draws on both these traditions, remains a very hard sell. But Burns has become a master at employing imaginative strategies to draw in even reluctant listeners. And the "Modern Myths" lineup, which looked at both European and Asian forms of myths, and what might be termed "cosmic currents," showcased several of them.

Guest artist Tantric Buddhist dance master Prajwal Ratna Vajracharya is part of "Modern Myths" at Harris Theater.

Burns began the evening with "Aries," a section of a larger work about the signs of the zodiac written by Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the 20th century's most renowned new music pioneers. And he invited Chicago choreographer Melissa Thodos to create a work for her company of 12 precise, unaffected dancers that captures the music's playful sense of space and mythic characters. With its clever patterning, original gestures and cyclical structure, Thodos' pieces proved to be a sophisticated yet accessible evocation of the composer's musical mathematics, and it brought genuine accessibility to the score. Burns played the bravura trumpet accompaniment and almost became a 13th member of Thodos' cast by way of his graceful moves through the action.

American composer Richard Danielpour turned to the poetry of the great 20th century German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke for the texts of his song cycle "Sonnets to Orpheus." And the 15 razor-sharp musicians of the Fulcrum Point ensemble gave a sublime performance of this exquisite, gently mystical, alternately frolicking and meditative work. Soprano Mary Mackenzie (in an ivory gown that had a hint of classical Greece about it) was the radiant soloist who delivered immensely varied and expressive renderings of the cycle's six songs. Danielpour's music has a touch of eclecticism that recalls Leonard Bernstein -- alternately atonal, romantic, jazzy, dreamily impressionistic and always rich in color and nuance.

The Nepalese dance master Prajwal Ratna Vajracharya opened the program's second half with a solo performance of "Vajrapani," a traditional ritualistic solo evoking one of the more aggressive "protector" deities. A taped chant blended with the heavy necklace of bells he wore for musical accompaniment. The dancer did not even take a bow for this demanding and quite formal dance is, for him, less a performance than a sacred rite.

Finally, the program featured the American premiere of Param Vir's "Hayagriva" (horse-headed incarnation of the Indo-Tibetan deity Vishnu, who is associated with wisdom and knowledge). Vir, a Dehli-born composer now based in London, has conjured rhythms and colors vaguely reminiscent of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." His work is a stunner, with the sounds of harp, timpani, chimes, clarinet and strings all superbly rendered here. The composer was on hand for well-deserved bows, and he saluted the brilliant musicians in turn.

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Chicago Sun-Times 11-14-08

'Popcorn,' from 'Blood' score, gets a performance worthy of its significance

Bryant Manning

As Daniel-Day Lewis won the best actor Academy Award this year for his role as Daniel Plainview -- that ruthless wretch of an oil tycoon in P.T. Anderson's film "There Will Be Blood"-- the unbearably tense musical score that completed his character didn't even earn a nomination.

"Popcorn Superhet Receiver," written by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, was declared ineligible because the rocker hadn't written the music specifically for the movie, even though it was one of 2007's most original and compelling scores.

Oscar's stubbornness aside, artistic director Stephen Burns and Fulcrum Point New Music Project gave the Midwestern premiere of Greenwood's "Popcorn" in full Wednesday night at the Harris Theater. Launching its 10th anniversary season with a program called "Soundtracks in New-Art Music," Fulcrum Point provided images from each film that flickered above the mini-orchestra.

Influenced by Krzysztof Penderecki's chaotic "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima," Greenwood similarly piled on quarter tones into clusters to create the illusion of mental unrest in his disturbing soundscape. Violent pizzicati would give way to soft, anguished purring, and when the strings reached a fever pitch, it gave off the effect of pushing down all the organ keys at once. This was a score worthy of a concert setting, and Fulcrum Point's musicians gave it a memorable sendoff.

Almost 50 years later, the mama of all horror soundtracks, Bernard Hermann's all-string score to Hitchcock's "Psycho," still unnerves us. The chamber ensemble played possessed, from the zigzagging opening credits all the way through Norman Bates' final sinister smile. Strangely, Detective Arbogast's famous bird's-eye view staircase meeting with "Mother" was completely out of sync with the orchestra, and Hermann's signature shrieking chords didn't even begin until the detective was falling halfway down the stairs.

More optimistic in tone were Toru Takemitsu's thematic "Toward the Sea II" (featured in the 1983 Greenpeace "Save the Whales" campaign) and Michael Nyman's luscious score for "The Piano." Alto flutist Mary Stopler and harpist Kara Bershad partnered against the backdrop of this heavily Debussy-influenced music. While the few whale photos were provided with good intentions, they were ultimately unnecessary.

Burns rearranged Nyman's score to include a piano part, and Wednesday night was its world premiere. It was hard not to think back on Harris Theater's other film music night, when pianist Michael Riesman played Philip Glass' uplifting "The Hours" Suite. This was effusively emotional music, and pianist Lori Kaufman showed no signs of downplaying its full throttle neo-Romanticism.

Bryant Manning is a local free-lance writer.

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Chicago Tribune, 3-20-08

'Omega' Caps Off Fulcrum Point's Epic Journey

Michael Cameron

In an era of ever-shrinking attention spans, Fulcrum Point's five-year concert series, "Essential Arts: Essential Elements," seemed especially audacious at its inauguration in 2003. The ensemble reached the conclusion of the ambitious cycle Tuesday night at Harris Theater with works by composers dear to music director and conductor Stephen Burns. Subtitled "Omega: Earth on Fire," the rather grandiose evocation of a latter-day "Götterdämmerung" may have seemed like a rhetorical stretch, but Burns' commentary stitched together a plausible final act. Derek Bermel's "Continental Divide" opened promisingly, with bold statements that incrementally developed fissures. While intermittently fascinating, it succeeded more as a sonic experiment than a finished musical expression. Steven Mackey's "Ground Swell" grew out of a similar disconnect between ends and means, but the conflict worked itself out more fruitfully. Threads of Americana emerged now and then, but they were colored in unexpected ways. Exhilaration was the guiding force at times, while other passages seemed overcome by vertigo and fatigue. The sophisticated orchestration certainly helped Mackey's cause, as did the superb artistry of violist Hsin-Yun Huang. Her tone was rich and earthy, and she negotiated each phrase with remarkable agility and expressive acumen.

After some early imbalances between soloist and ensemble, Burns and company settled into an impressively authoritative reading. The most vivid memories of the piece were its risky, lopsided proportions. The opening movement ("Approach to Sea") was cut brutally short just as its material began to take shape, while the finale ("Sailing Away") was leisurely, loose and gently repetitive.

"Inner Demons" by the local composer Stacy Garrop seemed at first to be an unabashedly neo-romantic movement with source material redolent of sundry dances and hymn-tunes. The performance was committed and genuine, if a bit untidy. One of Bermel's mentors was Dutchman Louis Andriessen, the composer of the series finale, "Racconto Dall'Inferno." With a text from Dante's "Inferno" as inspiration, the work is a brilliantly evocative mono-drama, sung on this occasion by soprano Tony Arnold with complete technical command and deeply felt artistry.

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Chicago Tribune, 1/31/08

Chicago's Fulcrum Point Enters 10th Season With a Performance Full of 'Essential Elements'

John von Rhein

"The Fulcrum Point New Music Project is devoting the fifth and final season of its multi-year exploration, "Essential Art: Essential Elements," to a condensed recap of all the elements. Indeed, the concert that began the group's 10th anniversary season Tuesday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance vaulted through time and space before reaching for the cosmic light.

Like another of Chicago's splendid contemporary groups, eighth blackbird, artistic director Stephen Burns' ensemble has hitched its star to the Harris Theater in hopes of attracting larger audiences and greater funding. The sizable, attentive crowd that turned out for Tuesday's event suggested it is well on its way toward realizing the first objective. The world premiere of Geoffrey Gordon's "Lux Solis Aeterna" (2007) shared the bill with the Midwest premieres of Sebastian Currier's "Nightmaze" (2005) and Richard Danielpour's "River of Light" (2007). Duke Ellington's "The River" added a symphonic jazz classic to this bracing and brainy mix of new music. Gordon's opus for 13 players -- the Latin title means "Eternal Light of the Sun" -- tries, and succeeds, to evoke cosmic beauty in a dozen minutes of acutely crafted music. The sun rises in iridescent shimmers and sprays of instrumental color, now quiet and glowing, now fierce and eruptive. There is a sacred subtext but the sonic evolution may be enjoyed as pure music, complete with a bebop interlude led by two saxophones. The multimedia "Nightmaze" lasts three times as long and packs half the impact. Currier's pulsing, nervous rhythms for nine-member chamber ensemble under gird a hallucinatory road trip based on a scenario by novelist Thomas Bolt. The text, read by Sandra Binion, has a sleep-deprived college student dreaming of speeding along a blackened highway that has road signs indicating psychic forks and turnoffs -- terror, death, ego, id, infinity and so forth.

I had a couple of problems with the piece. Sage Marie Carter's stark video conspired with the surreal text to reduce Currier's often inventive score to mere accompaniment. Also, entire chunks of narration were drowned out by the musicians or rendered unintelligible by the amplification. Danielpour's elegiac violin ruminations, framed by the piano's tart and muscular chords, were sensitively taken by violinist Sharon Polifrone and pianist Kuang-Hao Huang. Lovely piece. Burns' lush, 44-piece orchestra had a ball with the Ellington suite, and so did the audience.

All four performances, for that matter, represented Fulcrum Point at its considerable best."

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“Based on the book by Eleanor Coerr and using the charming chalk illustrations by Ed Young (flashed on a screen behind the ensemble) the 45 minute cantata melds images, narration, and music by Kevin James to recount the poignant real-life story of Sadako Sasaki, a spirited young Japanese girl.  Music, song, image, and spoken word form a seamless and deeply moving meditation. Unutterable sadness at last gives way to the hope that the warring nations will learn to make a better, safer world for their own Sadakos...With the threat of mass nuclear suicide again bullying its way to the center of the world stage, 'Sadako: Prayers for Peace' could not be more timely."

— Chicago Tribune


"The most energetic and innovative of Chicago’s younger music ensembles, the Fulcrum Point ensemble has built its reputation on boldly straddling the barriers between classical and world music.”

— Chicago Tribune


“Stephen Burns’ intrepid chamber ensemble Fulcrum Point has made a mark in Chicago, providing a bracing shot of youthful adrenaline to the local music scene and drawing a loyal audience to the group’s imaginative concerts of classical works with strong popular music influences.”

— Chicago Sun-Times


"Hand it to the dynamic young trumpeter-conductor Stephen Burns. Many groups talk about the possibilities of crossover and multicultural programming using classically trained musicians in concert hall settings. His Fulcrum Point New Music Project is doing it, and doing it with remarkable skill and consistently provocative programming.

Presented by Performing Arts Chicago, this season Fulcrum Point ranged from ecumenical meditations on Sept. 11 to Brecht and Weill to contemporary poetry and music. For their season-closer Saturday evening, they paired with the Art Institute of Chicago to offer 'Border Crossings,' a program of three Chicago premieres by Mexican and Mexican-American composers in the museum's spectacularly restored and intimate Fullerton Hall."

— Chicago Sun-Times, Andrew Patner 5/13/02


"The Wolpe quartet, a prime example of his flexibly expressive use of 12-tone techniques, made a good foil to the gritty Brechtian poetry. In his rumpled raincoat, Studs Terkel even looked like a character out of Brecht, and his marvelous readings were all too brief. Paul Schoenfield's manic and enjoyable 'Burlesque' brought the program full circle."

— Chicago Tribune 4/02


"Fulcrum Point dug into Bowles' genially mordant 'Music for a Farce' while Belden read some of Bowles' bizarrely beautiful poetry. Listening to the clash of Bowles' vivid, often violent words against his amiable but austere and unsettled musical lines, I longed to be sitting at a cocktail table nursing a drink in a casually hip spot like HotHouse. With evocative but unobtrusive black-and-white photos filling the wall behind the ensemble, this was a performance to sit back and absorb rather than sit up straight and analyze."

— Chicago Sun-Times 4/02


"The Fulcrum Point ensemble has built its reputation on boldly straddling the barriers between classical and world music. There was some of that barrier-busting in the five 20th Century works for strings, which shared a meditative serenity and a tonal harmonic base despite their composers' different ethnicities and traditions."

— Chicago Tribune 12/01


"Fulcrum Point Chamber Ensemble at the School of the Art Institute. Fulcrum Point makes children's fare a winner with rock and a show. Burns, a trumpeter and a conductor of the American Concerto Orchestra, has boundless and a restlessly eclectic taste. Ever since settling down here in the mid-1990s, he's given concerts that straddle musical categories from Baroque to jazz to pop. It was only inevitable that he, a father married to a school psychologist, should get around to music for children. What's more, he also realized that the Nickelodeon wouldn't sit quietly just for music.

No surprise, then, that this concert was really a multimedia show, complete with narration (by Channel-7 Chicago anchor Kathy Brock) and slides of crayon drawings (courtesy of patients at Rush Children's Hospital).

Under Burns' crisp direction, the musicians -- violinist Sharon Polifrone, bassoonist Lewis Kirk and piccolo ace Mary Stolper, among others -- played with verve, but they were upstaged by Brock's vivid storytelling in many (well, at least six) voices and by the beguiling, colorful drawings. Kids are notoriously tough customers to please. Fulcrum Point's performance, however, kept this bunch -- and their elders—in rapt attention."

— Chicago Tribune Music Review October 7, 2001


"Frankenstein" Lives! Fulcrum Point toys with a classic to the audience's delight.

"Conductor Stephen Burns ably guided Fulcrum Point through an often complex score. The costumed instrumentalists, whose conservatory classes surely were lacking in the finer points of the toy saxophone, performed with admirable aplomb. A highlight for me was repeated paper bag explosions at the outset, an opinion seconded by the enthusiastic outbursts from the youngsters present."

— Chicago Tribune 10/00


"The fledgling Fulcrum Point, two years old, is already distinguishing itself through uncommon and often brilliant musical juxtapositions. Its Performing Arts Chicago program focused on the kinship between jazz and classical music, as director and solo trumpet Stephen Burns led a program that showed off the group’s delectable playing. String work meshed seamlessly, with a burnished hue that triumphed over the decidedly not classical-friendly Park West acoustics. Deftness was the calling card.”

— Chicago Sun-Times 5/00


“Stephen Burns’ intrepid chamber ensemble has made a mark in Chicago, providing a bracing shot of youthful adrenaline to the local music scene and drawing a loyal audience to the group’s imaginative concerts of classical works with strong popular music influences.”

— Chicago Sun-Times 2/00


“The most energetic and innovative of Chicago’s younger musical ensembles, the Fulcrum Point ensemble has built its reputation on boldly straddling the barriers between classical and world music.”

— Chicago Tribune 12/99


“In a lean-and-mean envelope pushing mode, Stephen Burns and Fulcrum Point presented a bracing evening of edgy chamber music that was daring, imaginative and exhilarating.”

— Chicago Tribune 12/99


“Few of Chicago’s musical ensembles combine audacious programming and full-throttle musical energy with such flair as Fulcrum Point...Burns led the group in a performance bristling with energy and bite. It was a terrific performance.”

- Chicago Tribune 11/99


"The ensemble displayed uncommon exuberance in its first Chicago appearance (3/98). Burns has shown himself to be a meticulous, energetic conductor who draws the most eloquent articulations from his players, and his programming already looks promisingly irreverent.”

— The Reader 10/98

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