Update Title: 74D863F0-2E00-49BD-8FF8-A425CAFD2CF6

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A Koussevitsky Commission for the Chameleon Art's Ensemble. Musical portraits of seven women, in works by Petrus Christus, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo Da Vinci, Paul Cezanne, Johannes Vermeer, John Singer Sargent and Gustav Klimt *** -Review in Boston Music Intelligencer, Chameleon Paints With Music *** The Artist’s Muse for flute, clarinet, cello, piano and percussion, a world premiere Koussevitsky Commission from Laura Elise Schwendinger, followed. Without the mediation of words, the composer proceeded directly to the inspiration behind the painter’s work, bringing to life the women behind seven famous masterpieces, as though honoring but also contesting the visual surface. Throughout, Boldin’s flute served beautifully as the ongoing voice of the perennial muse, the elusive “Other” constructed by the gaze of male painters. A short introduction took us out of linear time, William Manley’s percussion especially effective in plunging us into vanished realms, from the enigmatic interiority of a 15th-century Young Girl by Petrus Christus, to the concluding gold-patterned swirl of Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer. Picasso’s Jacqueline appeared with all of her modernist angst, Cézanne’s wife moved bodily in a poignant waltz, Leonardo’s Cecilia Gallerani stroked her elegant carnivorous ermine, and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pitcher appeared with staccatos in the piano and pizzicatos in the strings, bathed in the light of percussion as she poured her milk. With a sudden twist of waltz, so to speak, the mood darkened as the eternal muse took the form of Sargent’s Madame X, cosmopolitan and scandalous, high-priestess of intoxication and city lights, followed in conclusion by her more vulnerable sister, gold-shimmering Adele Bloch-Bauer, vestal and victim, muse and mourner. Schwendinger’s delightful piece effectively transformed my own gaze on the Artist’s Muse by introducing a competing muse of flesh and bone, hardship and failure, grievance and glory, behind the painter’s still-life effigy.

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