By Wynne Delacoma, Classical Music Critic

CCP shines in challenging season opener

The University of Chicago's Contemporary Chamber Players has had its ups and downs since its founding four decades ago by the indomitable composer Ralph Shapey.

At times, the programs were doctrinaire and performances felt more like graduate-student recitals than professional concerts. But CCP has been on a roll in the last few seasons. With composer Shulamit Ran as its artistic director and Cliff Colnot as conductor, CCP's 2003-04 season opened Friday night with a winning combination of intriguing music and superb performers. There was an air of luxury in Mandel Hall that came from knowing that CCP has some of the city's best young musicians at its disposal ready and willing to play challenging music.

U of C has not one but two outstanding young ensembles in residence, the Pacifica Quartet and eighth blackbird, and both were on hand Friday night. (Both groups have won the Naumburg Award, one of chamber music's most prestigious prizes; Pacifica in 1998 and eighth blackbird in 2000.) The ferociously intense Pacifica was featured in two works, Sofia Gubaidulina's haunting "Perception,'' written between 1981 and 1983 for soprano, baritone, strings and tape, and Osvaldo Golijov's "Last Round,'' a 1996 tango-inspired work for two quartets and double bass. Dorothy Chang's restlessly searching "Wind/Unwind,'' composed last year, was performed by eighth blackbird members Molly Alicia Barth, flutes; Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets, Matthew Albert, violin/viola, cellist Nicholas Photinos and pianist Lisa Kaplan.

Coming after intermission, Gubaidulina's 13-section "Perception'' was the major work. Colnot conducted soprano Tony Arnold, baritone Stephen Swanson and the Pacifica plus violist Claudia Lasareff-Mironoff, cellist Daniel Klingler, bassist Kathryn Nettelman and David M. Gordon handling additional pre-taped material.

With its text drawn from the Psalms, poetry by Gubaidulina and her friend, the German poet Francisco Tanzer, "Perception'' unfolded with Gubaidulina's signature atmosphere of austere, awe-struck mysticism. Arnold was spellbinding, whether reciting Tanzer's text in an urgent, ghostly whisper or sending forth Gubaidulina's deliberate, wide-ranging vocal line with laserlike clarity. Swanson found understated drama in his long stretches of spoken declamation and quasi-sung speech. But in the seventh movement titled "At the Sea,'' he found warm nobility in the Bach-like melodies.

Golijov's "Last Round'' opened the concert with the steamy parry and thrust of tango partners dancing to kill. Despite the often dense, noctural moments of "Wind/Unwind,'' eighth blackbird never submerged their strongly colored, individual voices.

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