“When the University of Wisconsin at Parkside commissioned Otto Luening in 1979 to write music for its 10th anniversary, the Milwaukee native responded with ”Potawatomi Legends,” a piece with both personal and local connections. At the end of his 1980 autobiography, ”The Odyssey of an American Composer” (Scribner’s), Mr. Luening wrote, ”The premiere is scheduled to be near the port where my great-grandfather Neukirch debarked in 1839; the Potawatomi tribe still camped near his log cabin at the time.”

In belated celebration of Mr. Luening’s 90th birthday (June 15), Richard Auldon Clark and his Manhattan Chamber Orchestra performed ”Potawatomi Legends” on Tuesday evening to open the first program of their seven-concert season at Symphony Space. It is an attractive piece, written in the uncomplicated yet sophisticated style of the adventurous composer’s later years.

The first movement, ”Keepers of the Sacred Fire,” sets a primitive, inchoate tone and, through a series of held notes, gradually reinvents harmony. The seven movements that follow evoke Indian preoccupations and activities, with homespun and occasionally angular and modal melodies and innovative harmonies, but never descend to crude pictorialization with tom-tom effects and the like.”

– James R. Oestreich
September 22, 1990. New York TImes