Chicago Symphony clarinetist John Bruce Yeh was about to perform when a draft swept the sheet music off one of his eight — yes, eight — music stands. Yeh smiled, his bow to the audience now doubling as a page-recovery crouch. “That was Pierre,” he told them. “Pierre” is Pierre Boulez, th e composer and former CSO conductor emeritus who died in 2016.  Boulez would have been 100 on March 26, an anniversary the orchestra has recognized with a thorough web feature but scant season programming. Sunday’s MusicNOW concert, titled “Inner Dialogues,” was one of the few exceptions. As López told the audience during a pre-concert panel, the “Inner Dialogues” title riffed on “Dialogue de l’ombre double” (1985), a signature Boulez work for clarinet and its prerecorded, disembodied double. It also referenced the afternoon’s theme. Each of the five pieces featured a single instrument family in the orchestra — hence the reference to dialogues within, rather than between, sections.  The staging hit this point home, illuminating musicians in their usual spots onstage with colored lights. López’s string works “La Caresse du Couteau” and “Guardian of the Horizon” were both sheathed in green on the main floor, Adam Schoenberg’s “Reflecting Light,” for brass, gathered upstage left in baubles of gold and white, and Quinn Mason’s “Weapon Wheel,” for three bass drums, convened upstage right, glowing blood-red. Yeh, representing the woodwinds, played Boulez’s “Domaines” (1968) — “Dialogue’s” predecessor piece — at the front of the stage against a moody blue.  In a full performance of “Domaines,” the soloist plays six short movements (Boulez calls them cahiers, or “notebooks”) in any order. Then, their “mirrors” are played — the same music, just in reverse. Because of time constraints, Yeh played all six of Boulez’s cahiers but only the miroirs  of Cahier A and D, making his way across all eight music stands as the piece went on.  Yeh’s years of close collaboration with Boulez came to the fore in a fleet, poetic, even sorcerous performance.  In Cahier B, the soloist must overlap two phrases — a lower-pitched phrase and a higher-pitched one beginning above it — through multiphonics (a technique producing more than one pitch).  Yeh’s handling of this moment was as clear and articulated as if he’d plunked out both voices on organ.  He shapeshifted further throughout, from the piercing whistles of Cahier D to glass-harp transparency in Cahier C. Clarinetist John Bruce Yeh in a performance of Pierre Boulez’s “Domaines.” Part of the CSO MusicNOW concert on March 23 at Symphony Center in Chicago. (Todd Rosenberg) While a ghostly Boulez turned 100, Mason, the youngest composer on Sunday’s program, turned 29 the day of the concert.  His “Weapon Wheel” (2018, revised 2019) might have been composed while he was still an undergrad, but it’s the work of a mature composer, embedding drama and intrigue into an unusual three-bass-drum instrumentation. Each player uses a mix of mallets, drumsticks and their own fingers to expand the drum’s palette, with some extras — like a rat-a-tat against the mallet tray, or clacking together drum sticks like a rock-n’-roll countoff. The piece leans on the performers’ immediate reflexes, lines seamlessly handed off between percussionists Ian Ding, Patricia Dash and Douglas Waddell. The improvised cadenza shortly before the end, however, sounded more half-hearted than “insane,” per Mason’s note in the score. More musical unevenness followed.  As López wrote in a foreword to the program notes, the “Inner Dialogues” concept allowed him to “show the diversity and variety of instrumental forces within the CSO.” That only works if said forces show up: No rostered brass players joined the concert for Schoenberg’s “Reflecting Light,” originally written in 2006 for the American Brass Quintet.  An already-formed brass quintet from the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the CSO’s training ensemble, played in their stead. In this case, a rugged performance of Schoenberg’s otherwise appealing piece showed, rather than belied, the young musicians’ greenness.  The section of the piece that came off best was the very part Schoenberg mentioned in the preconcert panel: a hocketed descending line in the trumpets over cycling trombones. López’s own “Guardian of the Horizon,” a 2017 concerto grosso for string orchestra and solo violin and cello, followed the same formula: good piece, undercooked performance.  While grieving the death of his father, López turned to ancient Egyptian cosmology — a wink at the piece’s commissioner, the Sphinx Organization — for inspiration. The responsorial “Riddle” movement nods to Oedipus’s famous encounter with the Sphinx, “Crossing the Threshold” features an elegiac, tuneful dialogue between soloists, and “Into the Effulgent Light” ends the work on a lively, irrepressible note. Associate concertmaster Stephanie Jeong and cellist Karen Basrak perform Jimmy López’s “Guardian of the Horizon” with conductor Nicholas Koo and musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a MusicNOW concert on March 23, 2025, at Symphony Center in Chicago. (Todd Rosenberg) Associate concertmaster Stephanie Jeong and section cellist Karen Basrak played adroitly and sensitively in their starring roles.  The string ensemble behind them, however, could be scattershot. Conductor Nicholas Koo led them with the same controlled elegance as his mentor, CSO music director emeritus Riccardo Muti, but more energized impulses might have better guided the orchestra through a rough-and-tumble final movement. López’s earlier contribution, his 2004 string quartet “La Caresse du Couteau,” was more solidly executed. CSO violinists Jesús Linárez (in the orchestra’s fellowship program) and Gabriela Lara were joined by violist Pédro Mendez and cellist Tahirah Whittington for a rich and tensile performance. A restless introduction eventually lofts the strings into their upper register, tinkling there before getting yanked back to earth into a slip-and-slide of glissandoes.  The slides get “stuck” in the following section, parking on queasy dissonances.  The music frees itself into more busy polyphony before evaporating again in a solitary, searching line in the first violin. “The work, we could say, does not end, but stops at a certain moment in time,” López wrote in the program notes for the piece.  So, too, does Boulez’s memory. Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer. ...read more read less