When Martha Graham founded her company 100 years ago, she instigated a dance revolution in America. We’ve now had a century of modern dance, led by the likes of Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine and many others whose modernism delved into the very essence of the body’s ability to express the ineffable. One of the key modernist figures formed her dance company 60 years ago as a motley troop of five women who danced spontaneously outdoors for passersby. It was, after all, the 1960s. But the diamond jubilee tour of Twyla Tharp Dance, which began a series of Southern California performances in Santa Barbara on Tuesday night, gradually evolved into one of the country’s most popular companies, taking dance into a new and surprising direction. Over those six decades, Tharp had her ups and downs — the company disbanded and reformed. But neither she nor her often startling dancers (star ballerina…

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In front of a packed house at Northrop on Sunday, Twyla Tharp Dance launched its Diamond Jubilee, a coast-to-coast tour of the celebrated choreographer. For the performance, the dance company performed two expansive works set to live music that highlighted the choreographer's intensive interest in pattern, repetition and structure. Opening the show was the revival of Tharp's "Diabelli" (1998), set to Ludwig van Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations," performed live by pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev. The Diabelli of the title refers to Anton Diabelli, a well-known composer in Beethoven's time. He had written a waltz theme and sent it to all the top composers, with a plan to publish their variations and donate the proceeds to widows and orphans of the Napoleonic wars. Instead of composing just one variation, Beethoven composed 33. Beethoven's composition breaks down Diabelli's waltz into its structural make-up, then expands on those building blocks. Similarly, Tharp strips waltz dancing…

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Presenting chamber groups in classical configuration has been the stock in trade of the Northwestern University Winter Chamber Music Festival since the series’ inception nearly two decades ago. But the 28th season demanded an add-on concert to honor the 20th anniversary of Third Coast Percussion. The ensemble’s four founding members are all Northwestern alumni, having met there in 2005 when they formed the internationally celebrated ensemble that played to a packed Pick-Staiger Concert Hall on the Evanston campus Saturday night. The stage was arrayed with a veritable arsenal of pitched and unpitched mallet percussion that lent an intriguing visual dimension to a stimulating program of mostly new music whose rhythmic asymmetries and textural complexities were like mother’s milk to TCP’s astonishing resident virtuosos David Skidmore, Peter Martin, Robert Dillon and Sean Connors: The more intricate the music, the more incisive and precise their reflexes. The majority of pieces centered around, but were…

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It has been nearly 20 years, but Third Coast Percussion has managed to retain its uncanny freshness and vitality. The Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra remains one of the most original scores in the chamber repertoire. And given that its composer, Lou Harrison, bent tradition every creative which way, that is really saying something. For much of his creative life, Harrison was a musical chameleon, as at home with the 12-tone techniques of Arnold Schoenberg as he was with the diatonicism of Aaron Copland and clamorous pastiches of Charles Ives. Yet his affinity for rhythm — and the often-forceful use of it — established him as a unique voice in 20th-century American music. Harrison helped rethink the percussion ensemble as a viable expressive force. Several works, such as Concerto No. 1 and Canticle No. 1, call for sizable percussion sections. But above those stands the Concerto for Violin and…

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Within classical music, many like to pretend that a performer’s role — whether presenting a classic work, commission, or arrangement — is to access something static and predetermined about the composer’s intent.  The reality: Through the act of performance, musicians give unique embodiment to a score, imbuing it with singular and experientially specific emotional resonance. In this way, performers are collaborative producers in every work, be it a staple of the canon or a world premiere. Few ensembles lay out this case in clearer terms than Third Coast Percussion did in its Friday night program at the Nimoy Theater for UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance. The ensemble’s interpretive powers expanded the emotional architecture of commissions from Gemma Peacocke and Danny Elfman. And across arrangements of music by Philip Glass and Clarice Assad and a collaborative realization of composer Jlin’s electronic scores, Third Coast’s distinctive footprint came into even clearer focus. Peacocke’s Death…

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