Red Cedar’s ‘Licorice Schtick’ series wraps up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City

A lively debate recently broke out in the newsroom over red licorice versus black licorice. Red won, hands-down.

Red Cedar Chamber Music is winning over audiences, too, with it latest “Licorice Schtick” concert series. It features music by living composers, performed by Red Cedar’s core musicians, cellist Carey Bostian and his wife, violinist Miera Kim, of Iowa City, as well as guest artists Christine Bellomy on clarinet and Elizabeth Oakes on viola.

Bellomy is principal clarinetist for Orchestra Iowa and the Cedar Rapids Municipal Band, and Oakes, who spent 22 years with the Maia Quartet, is director of the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program.

The quartet has been performing the repertoire indoors and outdoors around Eastern Iowa since late September. The concert series culminates with ticketed main stage performances Saturday night, Oct. 23, 2021, at First Presbyterian Church in Cedar Rapids and Sunday afternoon, Oct. 24, at Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City.

Pandemic protocols

The performers are vaccinated and will continue to be masked, and request that audiences follow suit.

Bostian knows their previous listeners have been enjoying the return to in-person performances, even if they can’t see each other’s smiles behind their masks.

“It’s been great. We've had very good compliance with masking, and people have shown up,” he said, even for the Sept. 21 season launch in Marion’s outdoor Uptown Artway.

The season brochure hadn’t even gone out yet, so he was thrilled to see about 50 people come to the chamber ensemble’s first performance in that venue — a place filled with vibrant art and patio seating that has transformed an alley tucked inside the heart of the city’s business district.

“The (Marion) city staff suggested I think about it, after our Lowe Park success,” he said, “and so I think we’re going to keep it as our first event of the season. If it rains, we’ll go to the City Council Chambers.”

He’s the first to admit masking alters the experience for performers and audiences, but said Red Cedar is committed to making the concerts as safe as possible.

“It is a challenge,” he said. “We've been taking our masks off to speak or if we're like in a senior place, we’ll just make sure we use a microphone.

“It is different. You have to be really conscious of how your eyes are acting, because (audiences) can't see you smile, and we like to smile. We’re happy to be playing, and so we smile,” he said.

"And the audience is happy. There's some really fun music on this program. It would be obvious from their faces how positively they were reacting to it. I do think that in general, the mask is inhibiting. So people in the audience, if there’s a really great group, they're not bopping around, they're not dancing in their seats the way they might normally be. There’s not big smiles.

“It is inhibiting — and I think it's inhibiting for the performers as well as the audience, but it's better than not performing.”

The musicians also have been sitting a little farther apart in rehearsals as well as onstage.

“I think we’ve found a good happy medium of feeling really close, like a chamber group,” he said. “It’s great to be back — just being able to play and have people in the same room, and hear the applause.”

Licorice Schtick

Bostian is happy to be making music with Bellomy again, as well as welcoming Oakes, who was set to perform with the group before the pandemic shut down.

Adding viola to the mix opened the door to a wider selection of chamber music scored for violin, viola, cello and clarinet than for Red Cedar’s previous outings as a trio with violin, cello and clarinet, Bostian noted.

“There’s a tremendous amount of music … for a mixed quartet,” he said.

“We just chose the best music for the program, and as it turns out, it's five very distinctive styles — five really different, very different composers, and gosh, they work together well.”

Jerry Owen’s “Licorice Brittle” became the starting point. Owen of Cedar Rapids was Red Cedar’s first composer-in-residence. He has arranged this 1994 piece for the quartet, after originally scoring it for clarinet and piano. Bostian described it as having “tremendous energy and an intricate texture.”

“It was no problem for him to turn it into a quartet,” Bostian said. ”That's a super fun piece. … A really great example of Jerry's work. It’s fun and jazzy — he's got his own style.”

Opening the concert is “A Cup of Rejoicing,” by Natalie Hunt, a young composer living in New Zealand. Audiences also will hear works by Gwyneth Walker, a former faculty member at Oberlin Conservatory, now retired to her hometown in Connecticut; and Canadian composer Jeff Smallman.

Rounding out the program is a commissioned piece from Michael Kimber of Iowa City, Red Cedar’s current composer-in-residence. His “Four Chorinhos for Little Brazilian Birds” features a Brazilian style akin to New Orleans jazz, Bostian said, and each movement is dedicated to an endangered Brazilian songbird. Three are up-tempo and the fourth has more of a ballad feel, Bostian noted, and are “as colorful as the birds that inspired them.”

“We're beginning and ending with joyful music,” Bostian said. “Really joyful music.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com