Review: Chelsea Komschlies’s “Mycelialore” at Grant Park Music Festival

In the August 14 Third Coast Review (Chicago), Louis Harris writes, “The Grant Park Orchestra played an excellent concert at Jay Pritzker Pavillion on Wednesday evening…. Giancarlo Guerrero was his typically perky self at the podium, and the orchestra’s prowess was on full display for … Clayton Stephenson’s stellar performance of Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 [and] a powerful performance of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 … The concert started with a recent work [Mycelialore] that set to music a phenomenon found in nature…. Composer Chelsea Komschlies explained the unusual fungal root structure of mushrooms, known as a mycelium. These fungal roots can spread great distances in the ground, forming an interconnected organism that connects trees and other plants. She … imagined what it could sound like if the interconnected mushrooms and plants could communicate via the mycelium…. She used a large orchestra enhanced by electronica….. The effect that Komschlies created of mushrooms talking to each other was startling…. She added a very charming melody, later interspersed with moments of cacophony…. With Mycelialore, Chelsea Komschlies was very effective in setting nature to music.” Mycelialore was commissioned by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program, an initiative of the League of American Orchestras in partnership with the American Composers Orchestra.