May 14, 2003

BY WYNNE DELACOMA Classical Music Critic

Many composers are reluctant collaborators. The idea of bending their craft to the needs of a choreographer is barely tolerable. Writing music that will end up in a TV or film production is too horrible to contemplate.

But Dutch composer Louis Andriessen thrives on collaboration. One of Europe's leading composers, he wrote the music for "Odyssey" (1995), a work by Dutch choreographer Beppie Blankert to be presented this week by the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Inspired by Homer's epic poem and James Joyce's epic novel, Ulysses, it explores Odysseus' love for Calypso, Circe, the Sirens and Nausikaa, the women who waylay him for years before he returns to Greece and his wife, Penelope.

'ODYSSEY'/BEPPIE BLANKERT When: 8 p.m. tonight through Sunday Where: Wolf Point, Chicago River and Orleans Tickets: $22 Call: (312) 397-4010

The work will be presented outdoors on the Chicago River at Wolf Point, just south of the Apparel Center at Orleans. The cast includes three dancers, one actress and four sopranos singing Andriessen's a cappella score.

"I think music likes to be surrounded by other disciplines," said Andriessen, who started working with Blankert in the mid-1980s. "I think music never liked the concert hall at all. Music likes to be in the church, or to be danced on, or be used in the theater. Music likes words. It's like a costume for music.''

Born in 1939, Andriessen made his name in the late 1960s and early '70s with strongly political works. His style has evolved into a unique blend, unapologetically open to all kinds of influences, including minimalism, jazz and Stravinsky. But live performances of his music are rare in the United States, and audiences here probably know him best for his work with British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, who wrote the libretto for Andriessen's opera "Writing to Vermeer'' (1999) (which the Nether-lands Opera performed to good reviews at the 2000 Lincoln Center Festival in New York). Andriessen and Greenaway also created "Rosa/The Death of a Composer,'' produced in Amsterdam in 1994.

"With Greenaway, you just talk. We found out that we had the same taste about a lot of things. But you talk and then you just do your thing, you put it together and you see what happens.''

The collaboration is closer with Blankert, whom Andriessen first spotted as a dancer in a concert of postmodern choreography in the early 1980s. "She is very musical,'' Andriessen said. "During collaborations, she would have ideas about how the music should go. She has very good ears.''

The score for "Odyssey'' offers a glimpse of Andriessen's obsession with breaking down barriers between musical styles.

"I find the world of singing much too isolated. You have opera singers and jazz singers and pop singers, and they don't learn from each other.

"I want to change that because I need, for my music, a different singing style, basically closer to folk music than classical singing."