"NO PEDESTRIAN PROGRAMMER": CHICAGO TRIBUNE REVIEWS 2022 COLLABORATIVE WORKS FESTIVAL CONCERTS
Nick launched the present season in early September by curating and performing in the eleventh Collaborative Works Festival of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago (CAIC), where he is now in his twelfth season as Artistic Director. The 2022 festival, “The Song of Chicago,” explored the city’s rich association with song through concerts celebrating prominent composers with connections to Chicago, including its many trailblazing Black composers, and examining Carl Sandburg’s seminal folksong anthology, The American Songbag. The festival performances will be broadcast on CAIC’s website from late September through early October.
Nick performs with pianist Kuang-Hao Huang at the opening festival concert in Ganz Hall
Reviewing the festival, the Chicago Tribune wrote of Phan’s curation:
“‘The Song of Chicago’ proved, once again, that CAIC is no pedestrian programmer. As tenor and Artistic Director Nicholas Phan made clear during his interstitial comments, this ‘Song of Chicago’ had not just a chorus but a well-researched thesis, arguing that Chicago was uniquely nurturing to composers in the 20th century. Its conservatories educated, if not always warmly welcomed, more Black musicians than peer institutions, and during the same period, the city’s pro-labor leftist movements gave refuge to artists who might have been forced to the fringes elsewhere — like Sandburg and his alliances with composers Ruth Crawford Seeger and Ernst Bacon.”
Nick performs with pianist Yasuko Oura at the festival’s closing concert at Epiphany Center for the Arts
Praising the festival’s third concert, the Tribune wrote: “The last, at Epiphany Center for the Arts on Sunday, narrowed its focus on settings of Sandburg’s poetry and the folk songs documented in his 1927 “The American Songbag” collection…that program felt positively ripe for an album treatment…”
2022 Collaborative Works Festival Concert II Performers
The Tribune singled out the festival’s second program as their favorite, writing:
Pound for musical pound, however, “Song of Chicago’s” strongest recital was its second, on Sept. 8 at Ganz Hall. Dedicated to the music of Black composers, its premise could have easily crashed and burned into a tokenistic mess. But CAIC executed this decision more thoughtfully and narratively than a clumsy grab-bag approach. While Chicago’s conservatories might have been nominally integrated, its musical communities were not; CAIC traced pedagogical lineages and collaborations that were as much a function of the city’s segregation as anything. In one particularly stark speech, Phan noted that the National Association of Negro Musicians met for the very first time in the middle of the 1919 Race Riots. Black creatives flocked to the city with a shared goal of artistic self-determination, only for their meetings to be forced underground by the mayhem.
That program also highlighted a hiccup in the ongoing Florence Price revival: The local and international attention lavished on the late Chicago-based composer has mostly buoyed her instrumental output. But her art songs? Exquisite, and woefully underrated — not to mention comparatively under-recorded…
In closing, the Tribune described the comprehensiveness of the programming by stating:
“Song of Chicago” wouldn’t have been complete without its requisite reading of Sandburg’s “Chicago” — and it came at its very end, during the “Songbag” recital. Had listeners not traversed all that emotional terrain in the meantime, it might have felt unearned. But come Sunday, could I show you another city with lifted head, singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning? Not possibly.
CAIC broadcasts the three festival concerts on September 21, September 28, and October 5 at their website and YouTube channel.