On Wednesday night Carlos Kalmar and the Grant Park Orchestra seemed to pick up right where they left off at the end of the Austrian conductor’s 24-year tenure as music director two years ago. In the second of two Kalmar-led programs, the GPO played with fluent rapport in a lineup featuring a 21^st-century concerto and a Romantic warhorse that recalled Kalmar’s inspired programming throughout his time at the orchestra’s helm.

The evening opened with the Chicago premiere of Drum Circles, a five-movement concertante work by Christopher Theofanidis that featured Chicago’s own Third Coast Percussion in their Grant Park debut. Kalmar led the world premiere of the work with the Oregon Symphony in 2019, and his fluency with the score came through in his deft direction.

The opening movement “Rivers and Anthems” begins with shimmering tintinnabulation in the xylophones, its modal proclamations punctuated by chimes. The solo quartet is rhythmically at odds with the orchestra for most of the movement, coming together at the end in a grand final statement. “Sparks and Chants” proceeds with dry, interrogatory gestures in the claves creating a primeval atmosphere that ultimately gives way to a hypnotic marimba melody.

“How Can You Smile When You’re Deep in Thought?” starts skittishly, and here one encountered the problem of the soloists’ unpitched instruments inevitably sounding like accompaniment, a difficulty endemic to writing for solo percussion with orchestra. “Spirits and Drums” went with tribal propulsion with the orchestra percussion section fully joining TCP members Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore. (The musicians were unlisted in the thin program flier).

Traffic horns and sirens bedeviled the closing “Three Chords and the Truth (or, Learning to Breathe Again)” though subsided to make way for a closing chorale-like theme in the marimbas and a bookending return of the first movement’s material. 

The gentlemen of TCP were dedicated protagonists as they circulated among their vast battery of solo instruments, bringing their trademark electricity now familiar to Chicago audiences. Still, one felt the paradox that this is music that must be seen to really be heard, benefitting substantially from the soloists’ visual choreography, and that Grammy-winning ensemble actually makes an even stronger impression in their solo recital appearances.

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