Sunday, 11 May 2008

Right man, right job


Tuesday, 06 May 2008

Muti -- "fun facts"

The Sun-Times wanted to know Il Maestro's favorite color and Beatle.

Here's a longer version of what I filed. A somewhat shorter version ran in today's paper as "Riccardo Muti, Off the Podium."

Born: Naples, July 28, 1941

Family: Father a doctor and amateur musician, mother a singer. He's one of five brothers, all of whom studied music -- but only Muti became a professional musician. The others: a maritime economist, an engineer, a sociologist, and a psychiatrist, all in Italy

Spouse: Christina Mazzavillani, a former singer, stage director, and founder and chief of the Ravenna Festival

Muti_family_2001Children: Sons Francesco and Domenico, an architect and a lawyer, respectively, both involved in historic preservation. Daughter, actress and singer Chiara Muti (2001 Muti family photo, courtesy the brilliant and enterprising Opera Chic. See "His biggest fan," below.)

One grandchild: 6 month old Riccardo Muti (!), son of Francesco and his wife Susanna

Residence: Ravenna, Italy; second home in Anif, Austria, next to Salzburg; small farmland and ancient stone houses in the Apulia region of southern Italy

Teacher and mentor: Nino Rota, composer for Federico Fellini's films and for Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. Muti's also a fan of film composer Ennio Morricone.

Favorite food: All Italian, all the time

Favorite restaurants: Among them, San Pietro in New York and Spiaggia in Chicago

Idea of a good time: Rummaging through old manuscripts at the Conservatorio San Pietro a Maiella in Naples; studying scores on vacations to such out of the way islands as the Seychelles and the Maldives

Dislikes: Parties, celebrity, too much socializing

Sense of humor: Wicked

Cars: Italian, sports. Natch.

Hair: Envied by all.

Favorite team: Naples -- yep, that kind of football.

What's on his iPod: Nothing. He doesn't have one. When asked by the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore last year, he replied "iPod?! Cos'è?" ("What's that?") As with many conductors, he prefers not to listen to much recorded music. Through his children, he has enjoyed Italian singer-pianist Paolo Conte.

His biggest fan: Opera Chic. Proprietess of one of the world's great weblogs. Said to be an American gal in Milan.

Monday, 05 May 2008

Where I'll be Tuesday night


Imaginary Coordinates:
A Concert and Conversation

Tuesday, May 6 at 7:30 pm

Tickets: $15 | $12 for Spertus members | $7 for students

Call 312.322.1773

Chicago critic Andrew Patner and Egyptian conductor and violinist Mina Zikri curate a program of music and conversation in response to the [superb] Spertus Museum exhibition Imaginary Coordinates.

Imaginary_coordinates_thumbYoung Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian, and other musicians from the Middle East, many of them present or former members of Daniel Barenboim's award-winning West-Eastern Divan, present musical selections that explore a musical landscape parallel to the visual representations of artists and mapmakers in the exhibition.

Performance and narration will be followed by a conversation with the audience, and a jam session on traditional and Western instruments.

In addition to Mina Zikri, performers include Israeli pianist and composer Matan Porat, Egyptian oboist Mohamed Saleh Ibrahim, Israeli horn player Itamar Leshem, and Israeli and Egyptian pianists Oksana Glouchko and Wael Farouk.

Music of Frank Martin, Matan Porat, Brahms, Schumann, Fairuz, Riyad al-Sunbati, and from the Coptic liturgy.

[Some of us are shown in these tiny pictures below.]

Mina

The CSO gets its man -- Muti!

Here is my revised afternoon story for the Chicago Sun-Times website suntimes.com on the appointment of Riccardo Muti as the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. More to come, there, here and on 98.7WFMT and wfmt.com.

I'll be Phil Ponce's guest on Chicago Tonight tonight on WTTW11 in Chicago talking about Muti's appointment at 7 p.m. with repeats at 1 a.m. and 4:30 a.m.

And tonight on Critical Thinking I have a special CSO double bill -- at 10 p.m. a rebroadcast of my September 2007 conversation with Riccardo Muti and at 11 p.m. a new conversation, taped on Friday, with CSO principal conductor Bernard Haitink.

New tune at CSO:
Muti takes on role as music director

BY ANDREW PATNER

MutiAfter a smooth and steady courtship that began quietly three years ago and blossomed into an open international love affair in September, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has appointed the charismatic and renowned Italian conductor Riccardo Muti to be its tenth music director beginning with the 2010-2011 season.

Confirming what had been something of an open secret among the CSO’s leadership and trustees, the orchestra’s president Deborah Rutter Card and Muti discussed the appointment by telephone this morning from Muti’s second home in Anif, Austria, outside of Salzburg. Muti is there preparing performances for the four-day Salzburg Whitsun Festival, which begins Friday.

Muti -- the former music director of Milan’s La Scala Opera House and the Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as leading organizations in London and Florence -- has signed a five-year contract with the CSO through 2015 that has him taking up the position of music director-designate in January 2009. During that preparatory period he will assume responsibility for auditions and artistic planning and from fall 2010 he will conduct a minimum of 10 weeks of concerts per year in Chicago and will lead domestic and international tours by the CSO.

Although Carlo Maria Giulini and Claudio Abbado were the CSO’s first two official principal guest conductors, Muti will be the first Italian to head the 117-year-old ensemble. He takes up the job when many other U.S. orchestras are turning to American and -- in the case of Los Angeles and the young Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel -- South American, musical leadership.

At 69 in the fall of 2010, the vibrant Muti, known for his youthful appearance, will be the oldest incoming music director in the orchestra’s history. The legendary Fritz Reiner was 64 when he came to Chicago in 1953.

"Our first and foremost issue has, was, and will always be musical integrity and the strongest musical connection with the players and the public," said Card, who has spearheaded the efforts to hire Muti starting not long after Daniel Barenboim, the CSO's prior music director, announced in 2004 that he would be leaving the CSO two years later.

"Age, ethnicity, nationality, prior experience as a music director, left-handedness, right-handedness -- none of these were prerequisites, we had no preconceptions. We were looking for the right connection and the right relationship and we found it -- even beyond what we were hoping for."

Said Muti, who had been enjoying his life as a much sought after freelance conductor since leaving La Scala in 2005 after 19 years, “Something excites me very much about this orchestra, these players, this dynamic city of Chicago, the leadership of this organization. It was not what I was expecting but it is what I am excited about.

"At this point in my life, I don’t have to make a career. I don’t have to prove to anyone 'Who is Muti,'" the conductor, who twice turned down offers in the last decade to become music director of the New York Philharmonic, said. "But I want both to devote myself to making music with the Chicago Symphony and to bringing music to the many communities of Chicago and to new generations. This is our future."

Haitink and Boulez stay on through 2010

No grass will be growing under the collective feet of the CSO in the meantime. For the next two seasons, the orchestra remains in the expert hands of two of the music world’s most highly regarded senior figures, principal conductor Bernard Haitink, 79, and conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, 83. Concerts have been well reviewed and attended, an active touring program has the orchestra headed to New York, Europe and the Far East with Haitink over the next 10 months and a new self-produced recording label, CSO Resound, has exceeded management’s expectations. The orchestra has also returned to a full year of nationally-syndicated weekly radio broadcasts.

Ravenna, Italy, will remain the Naples-born Muti’s home. But he says that he aims to accomplish a great deal with the CSO in the three months he spends with them each year.

"I know from 40 years of experience that it is a question of the way you spend your time — the quality of that time, not the quantity. I was away conducting for much of my children's early years and they have all three turned out very well! But Chicago will certainly be my 'second homeland.'"

While Muti’s repertoire and his many years as an advocate of known and little-known Italian opera might seem to have a different emphasis than the CSO’s historical focus on the core Austro-German symphonic staples, the conductor is unfazed.

"My repertoire ranges from the Baroque to the contemporary. A great orchestra should be able to play everything and this orchestra certainly can. To be specialized is to be limited, to not grow to be an adult. We all need to go over the entire history of music as much as we can."

And just last month even the notoriously chauvinistic Viennese press raved over Muti's conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic in that city's fabled Musikverein.

Muti also wants the record to show that when he was in Philadelphia "I played more contemporary music, more contemporary American music, than anyone. And I am already talking to young American composers about commissions for Chicago."

He remains close with his former composer-in-residence Bernard Rands, now a Chicagoan and the husband of former CSO resident composer Augusta Read Thomas.

A unanimous choice

Muti was the unanimous choice of an unusual committee of CSO trustees, senior staff and musicians chaired by former board chair William H. Strong. Many other orchestras have left their searches with a single director or board chair frequently leading to discomfort with those choices. Muti bridled several times over the past year when the New York Philharmonic made statements about a future role with them as principal guest conductor for a fixed number of weeks without consulting him.

Muti will come to Chicago on June 2 for celebratory gatherings with CSO musicians, staff, trustees and donors. He next conducts the CSO and its chorus in the Verdi Requiem in January 2009.

Muti made his CSO debut at Ravinia Festival in 1973. But it was his appearances with the orchestra in September -- the first in more than 30 years -- both in Chicago and on a European tour that included the ensemble’s first performances in Italy in more than a quarter century that indicated the strength of a potential connection.

Paisiellomilanovlb
The work at the centerpiece at his festival this weekend in Salzburg is a rarity by the prolific Neapolitan composer Giovanni Paisiello (left), the 1779 opera Il Matrimonio Inaspettato with his own Luigi Cherubini Italian Youth Orchestra.

"Do you know what that means?" Muti laughed. "The unexpected marriage!"

Saturday, 03 May 2008

Hurrah, Haitink!

Here is the full version of my Saturday Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Thursday night's Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert.

Mahler in Haitink's expert hands

The conductor's in perfect sync with CSO players

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeated Saturday May 3 at 8 p.m.

Where to start with the magical pairing of Bernard Haitink and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra?

Haitink2007At once a perfect and unlikely match, the modest and no-nonsense Dutchman and the virtuoso and storied orchestra read each other almost telepathically, and the intentions of the conductor, 79, are rewarded with sublime work by the players collectively and individually.

Haitink himself starts this week's concert with an oddity, Ravel's 1929 orchestration of his own 1895 piano piece, Menuet antique, a sort of French-Impressionism-meets-Kurt-Weill work. In addition to its inherent beauty, the Menuet also demonstrated how Haitink calibrates every section of the orchestra with both clarity and grace.

The death, at the height of her career, of American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson from breast cancer just under two years ago hit the classical music world like no other blow in recent memory. The chance again to hear Neruda Songs, a work written for her in 2005 by her husband, Peter Lieberson, and performed by her here with the Boston Symphony Orchestra a year later, was a bittersweet occasion, especially as Lieberson himself, 61, is now battling lymphoma.

Kelley O'Connor a fine García Lorca here in Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar this season, was Lieberson's own choice as his wife's successor in the work, this year’s Grawemeyer Award winner, and she brought a careful intelligence and Iberian flavor to the five settings of the Chilean writer's Spanish love poems. The vocal lines are Lieberson's greatest accomplishment, while the orchestrations sometimes edge towards kitsch. Haitink knit them all into a moving whole, and the composer was clearly touched when he took the stage to acknowledge the audience's applause.

Haitink's Mahler is the product of decades of consideration and probing study. His CSO recording of the Sixth Symphony is out now, and his shepherding of the Third was one of the proofs that his marriage with Chicago was the right one at the right time.

This week, it is the much overplayed, in Haitink’s own estimation as well, First. But Haitink does what is often claimed but rarely true about other performances: He takes the score, often at a slow pace that requires extra attention, and makes it float and sing and move anew. Rather than playing it as a race to its final climaxes, Haitink on Thursday night made the brass huzzahs of a piece with all that came before. And if you have ever heard anything as beautiful as the third movement, Mahler's world within a world, I hope that you know how lucky you are.

Friday, 02 May 2008

One dark Don

Here is my Friday Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Wednesday night's opening performance of Don Giovanni at Chicago Opera Theater..

Glover-Paulus team creates a superb 'Don Giovanni' for Chicago Opera Theater

Don Giovanni

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday May 3;
also, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday May 6 and Friday May 9;
and 3 p.m. May 11
Where: Harris Theater for Music and Theater
205 East Randolph, Chicago
Tickets: $35-$115
Phone: (312) 704-8414

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Dark. Very dark. Beautiful. Disturbing. Provocative. Hilarious. Chilling. Engrossing.

Giov_1Chicago Opera Theater has scored another triumph with its new production of Don Giovanni, the last of the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy to be taken up by the company's superb partnership of conductor Jane Glover and director Diane Paulus.

Their seventh project together, Don G forms a sort of bookend with the invigorating take on Monteverdi's Orfeo that introduced them to Chicago -- and to each other -- eight years ago. There, launching Brian Dickie's first fully planned season as COT's general director, we had the excitement of new -- to us -- talents and the fizz of a fresh collaboration.

Here we have a fully matured partnership where both artists share an understanding of the work and read each other implicitly. With this authority, everyone -- from the hugely talented young singers to the experienced design team of Riccardo Hernandez (sleek sets), David C. Woolard (wonderfully tongue-in-cheek costumes) and Aaron Black (spooky lights) -- is working here as a part of a unity.

The lack of such a shared vision is where innovative productions often go wrong (and make no mistake, this is not your grandmother's Don Giovanni) and why audiences sometimes roll their eyes when they see or hear that something has been "updated."

But Paulus is not applying some sort of Eurotrash appliqué to the well-known story of the ultimate -- in more ways than one -- rake and his demise. And Glover is not thrashing around in the pit at cross purposes with the stage action. Rather the two artists are taking the daring qualities of Da Ponte's telling of the Don Juan legend -- its harshness, boldness and cold matter-of-factness -- and the equally complex ways that Mozart tells the story through musical shifts and surprises and offering them in a very serious way.

This is the first Don of many I have seen, for example, who actually makes you feel uncomfortable in your seat and who gives you a real sense of why his servant Leporello fears him as much as he finds him a theatrical-type character. When Scottish bass-baritone Iain Paterson, in his U.S. debut, sings that he knows no fear of death and cares not for the views of others concerning right and wrong, we absolutely believe him. And shudder.

Giov_2As an uncommonly put upon Leporello, Minnesota native Matt Boehler makes a wonderful Chicago debut as the Don's enabling manservant. With a rich, dark voice and both physical and vocal agility, the bass-baritone helps us to see why his character cannot leave a master he despises.

To those who think that highlighting the sadomasochistic dependency here is too much, or who question the placement of this 1787 dramma giocoso in a contemporary strip-and-sex club, one has to ask, what do you think the story of a man who has had 2,065 "successful" conquests is about? It is not surprising that it has taken a team of two strong and insightful women to give us such a compelling and frightening answer. There is also much practical sense at work here -- the club is a logical setting for the kinds of connections that the Don lives on, and it also provides a reason for the mismatched crew of dramatis personae to run into one another constantly, something that can make little sense in the sprawling city of Seville.

Canadians Rhoslyn Jones, soprano, as Donna Anna, and Michael Colvin, tenor, as Don Ottavio are well-matched as the opera's second odd couple and do more to humanize their characters than one sees in many a stand-and-sing grand opera production; and COT veteran soprano Krisztina Szabo similarly gives her Donna Elvira a beautiful and seductive three dimensions. With triumphs at the Metropolitan Opera and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this season, mezzo Isabel Leonard is luxury casting as Zerlina, again seen as much more than a prop here, and her Masetto, Ben Wager, seems on an upward trajectory. Paulus has found one of the most convincing solutions that I have seen to the problem of the murdered Commendatore as inanimate and then animated statue; bass Andrew Funk carries it through with an appropriately icy chill.

Giov_3
Glover is on top of the score from the first cold chords of the overture to the fiery sounds of Hell at the opera's end, moving things along with the natural fluidity of a true Mozartean.

The Harris Theater was full on opening night Wednesday -- another success for this company that spends little money (even with rising costs, they have kept their annual budget at a remarkably low $3 million) but makes few artistic compromises. You may not come out of this season opener whistling happy tunes, but you will have a sense that you have understood Mozart and Da Ponte's examination of the dark sides of human character as never before.

Thursday, 01 May 2008

Jeremiah Wright: Scandalize My Name?

ObamawrightOur old friend Lee Leibik is a native of the Great West Side of Chicago and a former Hyde Parker and Evanstonian, long resident in Vancouver, B.C. A visit with Lee or an envelope of clippings from him is always a multi-directional joy. A 'phone call from him reaches still another level of pleasure.

Lee called today from Canada to suggest that Barack Obama adopt the Negro spiritual "Scandalize My Name," popularized in modern times by Paul Robeson (below right), as a campaign theme, particularly the song's third verse and chorus:

I met my preacher the other day
And gave him my right handPaul_robeson_1942_2
As soon as ever my back was turned
He scandalized my name

Now do you call that a preacher?
No, no!
You call that a preacher?
No, no!
You call that religion?
No, no!
He scandalized my name!

Wednesday, 30 April 2008

Richard Ferrin -- 1927-2008

The following is a longer version of the obituary I wrote for today's Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com.

ViolaRichard Ferrin was almost invisibly unassuming in daily life but he played the viola with a uniquely vibrant sound and had a generous streak, an insatiable curiosity, and a sly wit that made lasting impressions on hundreds of colleagues and students.

Mr. Ferrin, a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 39 years until his retirement in 2006, died at his home in Lincolnshire, north of Chicago, last Wednesday. He was 82, and had been in declining health for several years.

A native of Pratt, Kansas, Mr. Ferrin became an accomplished violist and violinist and played in both the viola and first violin sections of the CSO over the years. He held two degrees from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and was a student in Jascha Heifitz’s master class at the University of Southern California. His viola teachers included the giant of that instrument, William Primrose. Before joining the CSO in 1967 at the request of music director Jean Martinon, Mr. Ferrin had been principal viola of the Seattle Symphony and on the faculty of the University of Washington.

"I loved sitting in the section with him," said his frequent CSO stand partner Max Raimi. "His sound was so alive and he had a unique facility with his left hand that could produce a wonderful vibrato."

Always curious about the people, languages, and teaching and performance techniques of other cultures and countries, Mr. Ferrin studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland, as a Sibelius scholar in 1957. His scholarship overlapped with the death of Sibelius himself at 91 and Mr. Ferrin attended the composer's state funeral in Helsinki. In 1962 Mr. Ferrin traveled on a university research grant to Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa in what was then the Soviet Union to observe string pedagogy there. In 1986 he was invited by the People's Republic of China to solo with the Shanghai Symphony and to give the first performances of Bartók's Viola Concerto with a Chinese orchestra. He returned in 1988 and 1990 to play the work with the Central Philharmonic of Beijing.

He personally sponsored four students from Shanghai to study with him at Roosevelt University in Chicago and in 1993 he went to South Africa to work with the African Youth Ensemble in Soweto. His project there was featured on ABC's World News Tonight.

As a member of Chicago Pro Musica he participated in many chamber music recordings and he produced his own records as well, including one of Bach cello suites and transcriptions with his CSO cellist colleague Richard Hirschl.

Although he had a quiet speaking voice and a formal accent that did not sound at all like Pratt, Kansas, Mr. Ferrin had a captivating smile, a love of wordplay, and a deadpan style of humor that he exhibited frequently in CSO rehearsals and at the members' luncheon table of The Cliff Dwellers, an arts club that for decades occupied the top floors of Orchestra Hall.

Max Raimi recalled, "Shortly after Dick retired, we were playing Borodin's Polovtsian Dances. When we got to the big Kismet tune, I saw Dick's unmistakable handwriting in the part, maybe from 25 years before. He had written, '"Take my hand, I'm stranger in paradise!" How much more interesting the sentiment becomes when you leave out the "a"'!"

Srdjan Majdov, a former employee at the CSO's Symphony Store, recalled "Mr. Ferrin's rather frequent and sometimes long visits to the store. He was overly modest about his own accomplishments and engaged in conversation with us about music without any inhibitions."

Acording to Max Raimi, at Mr. Ferrin's funeral in in Spring Grove in McHenry County Monday, an Episcopal priest told mourners that Mr. Ferrin in his last years "took to visiting his church at odd times, usually during the week, and would play his viola for hours at a time in the sanctuary. This priest would thank him, and Dick would wave him off: 'I'm doing it for God, not for you.'"

When ill health forced Mr. Ferrin's retirement he told his colleagues and friends that he was "heartbroken."

Survivors include his wife, Lieselotte, two daughters, Genevieve Noel and Vanessa Ferrin, a granddaughter, Emily Noel, and a sister, Carol Guenot.

Make no confusing plans . . .

Zac Thompson tagged me.

The rules [as he copied them]:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Now Zac being a stickler, perhaps the stickler, for both detail and accuracy, I am surprised that he did not indicate that the rules are ambiguous. Zac chose to post the fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences; I would have read rule No. 4 as calling for the sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences to be posted.

Be that as it may:

Planchicago1. The nearest book: The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City, by Carl Smith. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Paperback edition, 2007.

2. Page 123: The midst of Chapter Seven, "Promotion" [of the Plan].

3. Fifth sentence: A bit of a toughie here. Much of the page is taken up with a black-and-white reproduction of a period (1910's) colored lantern slide of traffic congestion in downtown Chicago with the ever-timely original caption "Chicago's rapid growth has been one cause of street congestion" and additional caption material by Carl Smith, so there aren't five full sentences of text proper on the page. Counting the non-boilerplate sentences from the caption, though, I am anointing this as the fifth sentence:

"But his [Walter L. Moody's] most impressive publication, in both conception and execution, was his Wacker's Manual of the Plan of Chicago."

4. The next three sentences are:

"The first version of several editions of this book appeared in 1911. Like Chicago's Greatest Issue [: An Official Plan], Wacker's Manual was a shorter and more economically produced version of the Plan of Chicago, though it was more substantial than Chicago's Greatest Issue. The first edition included a very self-congratulatory chapter on the planners."

5. I tag: Edward Lifson, Brian Dickie, Lynn Becker, Lee Bey, and Curtis Black.

Friday, 25 April 2008

Letters, we get letters

BriandickieFirst, a very nice shout out from Chicago Opera Theater's Brian Dickie (at left) from his pioneering Chicago weblog. Merci bien!

We don't run comments here on The View from Here for all kinds of reasons, but we do accept, and even invite, them. Having yesterday rounded the 50-plus-posts mark, we thought we'd share what we've heard thus far:

Some young pups wrote early on (we very-soft-launched on January 30) with the slogan "Turn on the comments!" See above.

On March 24, five folks wrote in to say "thank you" for our Barack Obama and the South Side essay, including three people previously unknown to me with Chicago connections, a New Yorker transplanted to Los Angeles, also previously unknown to me, who regrets the lack of Midwestern civility in those two cities, and an old comrade-in-arms from Hyde Park activism days, Tom Panelas. Thanks to you all. We're sure that there were people with contrasting views but either they share them only in unregulated sandboxes or they just kept them to themselves for whatever reasons.

On April 6, the proprietor of a conservative weblog wrote to say that she liked our Charlton Heston memories. We also had a lot of positive e-mail (as opposed to comments via the weblog site) on this one.

On April 9, Jim Ginsburg, founder and president of Chicago's Cedille Records and all-around mensch, wrote to say "thank you" for our calling attention to the Chicago Tribune's inexcusable behavior towards violinist and serious-accident survivor Rachel Barton Pine and for our friend and colleague Marc Geelhoed's own post on this sad story of the abdication of journalistic responsibility by the Tribune and its editors.

David_polk_pyramidsYoung Pup No. 1 (left, with Pyramids) wanted to know on April 10 why we put "Chicago Children's Museum" in quotes in our Save Grant Park! post. 'Nuff said.

And this week the co-proprietor of a controversial website that picks apart and makes fun of those of us in the classical music criticism business liked our Pierre-Laurent Aimard review but suggested that "ensemble[s] of recorders" playing Art of Fugue be excluded from our "the more Bach we can hear on the more types of instruments the better" principle. "Empiricus," we're with you on this one!

Thanks! And keep them coming!

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