Andrew Patner: The View from Here

4 months, 76 posts, 17,053 page views

_{^{Just a quick post to say thanks to all who have stopped by, written, quoted, linked to, and otherwise supported The View from Here.}}

We look forward to the next arbitrary chunk of time and having some time to learn how to better use all of these Typepad features.

At left, a favorite early-ish (1875) Degas, Uncle and Niece (Henri Degas and His Niece Lucie Degas), a portrait of two of the artist's Neapolitan relatives -- a bachelor uncle and his recently orphaned niece, now his ^ward.  

^{_{In the early 1980s, when I worked at}Chicago _{magazine downtown, I used to visit this painting every Thursday night at The Art Institute before the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert.  It's on vacation now, awaiting the redo of the main galleries of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, but I often still think of it, and my two "friends" in it, on Thursdays.}}

Muti meets the press: 'A musician is judged not by promises'

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Muti says performances will speak for him

CSO | 'A musician is judged not by promises'

By Andrew Patner

"I am only a musician, I am not a politician."

So Riccardo Muti showed himself to be both Monday at his first public meeting since his appointment as the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra's new music director Riccardo Muti talked to the media on Monday. 
(John H. White/Sun-Times)

Speaking at Orchestra Hall, the Italian maestro, a youthful 66, displayed charm, wit and a bashful yet confident demeanor. Muti, who will become CSO music director designate in January, deflected almost any potential criticisms of his style, repertoire or focus with humorous and thoughtful arguments for the importance of music in everyday life and the need to "bring music to more and different people."

"Before an election, a politician will make a lot of promises -- 'I will do this, I will do that, I will reduce taxes.' A musician is judged not by the words or the promises, but by the facts of the music that he makes," he said.

Muti, who has led annual concerts for international understanding in places of conflict as Sarajevo, Beirut, Armenia and Turkey, said that he wants to bring music to Chicago communities that, "for several reasons have been distant from the world of the music that we make." He called such work "a moral imperative."

Muti's predecessor, Daniel Barenboim, had made similar statements when he was appointed to succeed Georg Solti in 1988, but after saving the Civic Orchestra and conducting several community concerts, he largely backed off and devoted his energy in such areas to projects in the Middle East and in his adopted home city of Berlin.

Muti emphasized, however, that he had been a music director in the United States before, and unlike Barenboim, he had gained an appreciation for the U.S. system of volunteer boards, individual donors and community service.

"At my age, and in this late part of my career, I have made a decision to come here to serve the community," said Muti, who will begin his term as the CSO's 10th music director in the 2010-2011 season. "After I leave Chicago after a number of years, I would like to be judged by the work I did in these areas."

Muti was circumspect about details, but specifically mentioned schools, hospitals, prisons and neglected communities and neighborhoods as places that he hopes to visit and work with. "We must go them," he said. "We cannot ask them only to come to us."

As to the rounds of dinners and other fund-raising events that Barenboim disdained and that Solti could rely on his wife, Valerie, to manage, Muti observed to much laughter, "If the food is good, then why not?"

With a long connection to opera and other Italian repertoire, Muti used his prepared remarks to lay his diverse musical interests on the table: "My repertoire ranges from the Baroque to the contemporary. This is known to everyone except the blind and the deaf." Muti also said that he would fill his seasons "with the greatest soloists and surround [my subscription weeks] with the greatest conductors."

Responding to a question about his departure from Milan's fabled and tempestuous La Scala opera house in 2005 after 19 years, Muti said that if he "told the whole story, [he] would be late for [his] rehearsals in Vienna in two days" and that one would need "to truly understand the aspect of Italian attitudes" to comprehend the politics and factionalism that led to his resignation at La Scala.

Some of his legendary fire did appear when he observed that "one hundred ushers voted against me at [La Scala]. One hundred ushers!"  He also suggested that "mediocre people who do not understand demands for quality" were behind his ouster there.

He added that he maintains good relationships with many Milan players and choristers and that "every other orchestra I have led -- Florence, London, Philadelphia -- they love me." He pointed also to his 38 years as a guest conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, "known as one of the most difficult orchestras in the world," as "a love affair that only grows deeper."

He used the highest praise to describe the CSO in both technical and artistic terms. Recalling a passage in Prokofiev's Third Symphony that usually requires extra rehearsal time with most orchestras, he said, "[The CSO] played it perfectly and without questions the first time. So I tested them again just to see if it was an accident. And they played it perfectly again and at every performance."

Muti also confirmed that he has no computer or iPod and does not even know how to work either one. He said that he almost never listens to recordings -- his own or others, except for some historic recordings by "great conductors," giving the example of Fritz Reiner's renowned recordings with the CSO. "I find these astounding."

Boris and Bessie -- to beat the band

^{Here is my Tuesday June 3 suntimes.com review of the Sunday June 1 performance of The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theatre:}

Celebrating Boris and Bessie, to beat the band

By Andrew Patner

RECOMMENDED

Orchestra Hall

220 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago

Repeated Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

Tel. 312-294-3000

To paraphrase the late star -- nay, diva -- of the American Yiddish theatre, Mme. Bessie Thomashefsky, before I tell you about conductor Michael Tilson Thomas's production of The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theatre, "foist, I gotta bring out!"

You see, Bessie and her husband Boris were the king and queen of the Yiddish theatre in this country from the late 19th century until the 1920s, and their grandson, Mecheleh, OK, that's the Yiddish name by which Bessie called him, grew up with what you might call a double consciousness.

He was a prodigy in classical piano and conducting, but he was also ever aware, especially with the weekends he spent with his bubbe (that's "grandmother" in Yiddish) until her death in Hollywood in 1962 when he was 18, that he came from -- you won't mind the expression? -- theatrical royalty.

On top of his demanding job as music director of the San Francisco Symphony and his other work as a classical performer and educator, Tilson Thomas (his father, Teddy, at left with Bessie and Mecheleh, changed Mecheleh's last name to protect him from the spotlight of the Thomashefskys) has devoted the last decade to pulling together everything that still can be found of his grandparents' vanishing legacy. In addition to a newly catalogued archive in New York, he has also developed this live multimedia stage show to bring back the music, the humor, the struggles -- oy! were there struggles! -- and the triumphs of Boris and Bessie.

With members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (they should have been so lucky to have these players when they played the show at Carnegie Hall!) and some young actors and singers -- Tilson Thomas presented -- ladies and gentlemen! -- the latest incarnation of this pageant Sunday afternoon before -- you won't mind my noting this? -- a full house at Orchestra Hall, thank you, and will rev it up again tonight.

There's laughter, there's singing, there are tears -- especially when an audio clip of Bessie and the one known surviving film clip of Boris in performance are played.  And there's music -- with 34 players, mind you! -- from such Thomashefsky specialties as Khantshe in America (1915), Der Yeshive bokher (1909) -- Boris's take on Hamlet "translated and improved!" and Dos pintele yid ("A Little Spark of Jewishness"), also from 1909 (Boris was busy!). It's played, with the grandson conducting, with a loving frenzy that includes John Bruce Yeh's klezmerian clarinet and Russian-born percussionist -- from Kiev! -- Vadim Karpinos playing drums with a smile, you will excuse the expression, to beat the band.

Actress Judy Blazer is Bessie, and she's a wonderful Bessie. Actor Neal Benari is Boris, and he's not bad. Soprano Ronit Widmann-Levy adds musical support, but it's the young baritone Eugene Brancoveanu -- from Romania! Romania! -- whose voice nearly steals the show. And, let me tell you -- the Thomashefskys knew from stealing shows!

And when Mecheleh himself does the patter and strutting of the 1910 Tin Pan Alley hit "Who Do You Suppose Married My Sister? Thomashefsky!" you can feel Boris and Bessie's spirits beaming.

But if I might pick a nit or two, despite emphasizing the social consciousness and edgy topics -- birth control! women's rights! assimilation! -- of his grandparents' work, the context of where the Yiddish theatre came from and where it went during and after the heyday of the Thomashefskys -- to such higher art as The Golem and The Dybbuk and great legitimate actors such as the Adler family and Chicago's own Dina Halpern -- is missing. And the influence of the music -- on Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, on to our own day, is implied but not demonstrated.

But with a new editor, Mecheleh could refine and rework this entertainment into something both tighter and with a broader reach. The Thomashefskys embraced shund (trash theater) as Tilson Thomas makes clear, but they also made, you'll excuse the expression, art, and this show could use a bit more of the latter. And, after all, as Boris himself might have said, "it wouldn't hoit!"

Muti (Heart)s Chicago

Correction: In the print version of this story and in an earlier version posted here, I mistyped the dates of Riccardo Muti's first full season in Chicago.  He takes up the music director position in full with the 2010-2011 season, not, as I wrote earlier, 2009-2010.  So I'm a bit enthusiastic. . . . 

------------

Here is my feature story from Monday June 2's Chicago Sun-Times previewing today's press conference at Orchestra Hall with Riccardo Muti, his first, and his first visit to Chicago, since signing a contract last month to become music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra beginning with the 2010-2011 season.

You can hear a tape-delayed broadcast of the statements from the press conference as well as my report on the question-and-answer period in the 4 p.m. hour Chicago time (2100 GMT) today at 98.7WFMT Chicago and streaming at wfmt.com.

^{Muti (Heart)s Chicago}

^{Conductor looks ahead to 'a new phase' in the Windy City}

By Andrew Patner

Riccardo Muti wants to make it clear that his connection to Chicago is already personal.

In a handwritten letter to the members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra after he signed his contract to become their 10th music director, the Italian conductor cited "your fantastic music-making and human warmth to me" as the chief factors in taking the position here.

Muti also praised the openness and candor of representatives of the board of trustees and of CSO president Deborah Rutter Card who had courted him for the job over the past several years.

Muti is flying into town for 24 hours between pre-existing European commitments to send some "human warmth" back to the players at a luncheon Monday, meet more board and staff members, and discuss his hopes and plans for the CSO with the press Monday morning.  

Muti will assume the title of music director-designate in January, beginning to take on duties of auditions and artistic planning in conjunction with current podium leaders Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez.  The 2010-2011 season will be his first as music director -- a position empty since the controversial departure of Daniel Barenboim two years ago.

In a number of backstage and rehearsal break conversations in Salzburg, Austria, last month in May -- where Muti leads an annual spring festival of 18th century Neapolitan music and opera -- and at dinner in his holiday home in the neighboring village of Anif, the maestro expanded on a number of areas of interest to him about the CSO and about Chicago.

"While I am not in a position to move full-time to Chicago," he said, "I can assure you that the vibrancy and welcoming nature of the city have a great deal to do with my accepting this position.  Believe me, I no longer have anything to prove to anyone," Muti, who turns 67 this July, continued.  "If I did not feel that Chicago was a place that I wanted to be for 10 weeks and more each year, I would not come."

^{'A whole new world'}

He links this as well to his interest in working in and with different communities in Chicago. "People say, 'Muti will not want to do these educational matters.  This is beneath him.'  Apparently these people know a different Muti," he said. 

"What musician does not want to bring music to people?  What musician does not want to see how music changes peoples' lives?  How they can change their own lives with music?  If I never conducted another Brahms symphony or another Beethoven symphony, I think that the world would still turn.  Now is a new phase of life.  A time to do new things and take new challenges."

Muti’s talk is backed by action.  The outstanding orchestra in Salzburg for rare revivals of a fully-staged production of Giovanni Paisiello’s exuberant opera buffo The Unexpected Marriage and a remarkable oratorio by J.A. Haase was Muti’s own Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra.  "A group that I built in three years from nothing. From nothing," Muti said animatedly. "Italy has abandoned too much of its commitment to music and art.  All of my training came in Italy and I have wanted to give back for this.  I want also to show how we can do these kinds of things in Chicago."

"It is an adventure, coming to Chicago," Muti said at the end of the evening.

"It is un mondo nuovo, a whole new world," added his wife of almost 40 years, opera and Ravenna Festival director Cristina Mazzavillani Muti.  "And an exciting one."

^{'I am coming back'}

Muti is not the only one who will be making a new start. Li-Kuo Chang, the CSO's highly regarded assistant principal viola, had been vocal as an advocate for Barenboim and a critic of management's handling of his departure.  

Last year, anticipating the birth of his first child, Chang decided to take a season-long leave from the orchestra even though he did not qualify for a paid sabbatical.  He and his wife would have the child in his native Shanghai and let the baby and Chang’s elderly mother spend time together.  He would try to cool off from all of the emotions.  He might even think about playing with Barenboim’s Staatskapelle orchestra in Berlin.  

Chang’s devotion to Barenboim was so great that when the baby, a boy, was born at the start of this year, he was named Daniel.

At Thursday night's CSO concert, however, there was Chang, sitting in his old chair at the front desk of the viola section, for the first time in 11 months.  He was back, he told me after the concert, for the last two weeks of the season, to play with his colleagues and to make some arrangements for moving his family back to Chicago.

"So you are coming back?"

"I am coming back."

"I wondered what you would think without having had the experience of playing these recent weeks with Haitink and touring with Muti."

"I heard only great things.  Great things,” he replied.  "I talked with many people.  Certainly his style and method will be different, but not his seriousness and standards.  Not his goals for us.  I am very happy.  Very excited.  We have a real future now!"

Tilson Thomas and the CSO do the Ives thing in a major way

^{Here is my Saturday May 31 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Thursday May 29's Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting music of Ives and Dvorák:}

Tilson Thomas brings Ives to life

Chicago Symphony Orchestra 

with Michael Tilson Thomas

By Andrew Patner

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeated Saturday at 8 p.m. 

The singular American maverick composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) is more talked about than he is heard in the concert hall.  Outside of the mystical The Unanswered Question and Three Places in New England, it is mostly his remarkable songs that are performed -- works that both capture the Victorian America of the composer's youth and filter it through his own collagist style, part Proust, part Cubist before its time.

Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, has been an advocate for Ives throughout his career and his 1986 recording (now available on a Sony CD) of the rarely played A Symphony: New England Holidays (1909-1920, rev. 1933) with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has long been considered one of the finest recordings of any work by the eccentric New Englander.  To hear “MTT,” as he is known, lead the work here again for the first time in 22 years, and now with the Ives Critical Edition, promised to be a highlight of the whole CSO season.  Thursday night's performance confirmed that promise and then some.

Tilson Thomas chose to introduce the seemingly sprawling work -- an assembly of four salutes to different American holidays -- with a small group from the Chicago Symphony Chorus singing five hymns and songs that Ives used as inspiration and material for his manipulations.  This excellent choice put material into the audience's head that would have been immediately familiar in the early decades of the last century when Ives wrote the individual pieces.  It also allowed listeners to realize both the subtlety and the intricacy of the full work that followed.

^{From the Jew's harp in “Washington’s Birthday” to “Taps” in “Decoration Day” to competing orchestras (complete with a second conductor!) in “The Fourth of July” and his own scoring for mixed chorus in “Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day,” Ives weaves sounds in and around the traditional orchestra to make a piece that is much a work of philosophy, nostalgia, literature, and history as it is an engulfing sea of wholly irresistible musical pandemonium.  Tilson Thomas is this music's champion in every sense of the word.}

Would that the same could be said of his rushed and pseudo-whimsical take on Dvorák's 1889 G Major Symphony, Op. 88, now known as the Eighth.  Whether this tepid performance was the result of rehearsal time spent on the unique complexities of the Ives, preparations for this week's CSO presentations of the conductor's tribute to his late grandparents, The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theatre, or some greater reason is hard to know.  But the appearance of the work on the program of the orchestra that played it under Dvorák himself at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition is an opportunity to salute the memory of Otakar (Otto) Sroubek, a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia who was a CSO violinist for 47 years before retiring three years ago.  Sroubek, a gentle man with gem-like blue eyes, died in Downers Grove on May 6 at 84.

Handeling Orlando

^{Here is my Friday May 30 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com} of Wednesday May 28's opening night performance by Chicago Opera Theater of Handel's  Orlando:

Airy production could use more driving force

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Repeated Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday June 3 at 7:30 p.m., Friday June 6 at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday June 8 at 3 p.m.

When Brian Dickie took over and transformed Chicago Opera Theater eight years ago he announced that COT would steer both late and early in the operatic repertoire and leave the midsection of grand opera to "the big house" on Wacker Drive.

As a part of this mission, COT has done invaluable work in presenting -- and often premiering -- works of the 17th  (Monteverdi) and early 18th centuries (Handel).  The company is now rounding out its 2008 season at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park with a rare revival of Handel's 1733 psychological pastoral Orlando, seen only once before in Chicago, at Lyric Opera in 1986 with the great Baroque pioneer Marilyn Horne in the title role, June Anderson as the coveted princess Angelica, and Gianna Rolandi, now the director of Lyric’s Ryan Center for young artists, as the rock-solid shepherdess Dorinda.  (The portrait of Handel at left, attributed to the German Balthasar Denner, is from 1733, the year of Orlando's première in London.)

COT’s new production, with Handel veteran Raymond Leppard in the pit and young Australian stage director Justin Way handling the action and concept, shows the difficulties and rewards of presenting this historic masterwork before a contemporary audience.

One change since the 1980s is the remarkable renaissance of male singers taking on the roles created for the high-voiced castrati of Handel's time.  Both the title role of the warrior driven mad by love and rejection and his rival Medoro were played here by countertenors, British Tim Mead and Canadian David Trudgen respectively.  Another is the assumption -- correct as it turned out on Wednesday's opening night -- that today's operagoers know what to expect from Baroque opera, and tune their ears and pace their attention accordingly.

Orlando tells its story, adapted by Handel from Aristo's 16th century Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso (1877 Doré illustration at left), in an often elliptical fashion and there are none of the duets, trios, quartets or big choral numbers that would become a part of the genre of opera in subsequent periods.  Individual singers sing, and then sing again, verse, chorus, and repeated and ornamented versions of same.

But a modern audience does want some clarity in storytelling, something that was overwhelmed by inappropriate comic bluster 21 years ago at the Civic Opera House and that that has escaped Way's much too episodic treatment for COT.  As the opera itself takes place in an imaginary and timeless world there is nothing wrong per se with Way's recasting it in a film noir fashion and time period.  Consistency and clarity are all we ask and these are lacking here.

In fact, there is a feeling musically and dramatically in this production of too much air around everything and no driving force moving everything along and connecting all the elements.  Set and costume designers Andrew Hays and Kimm Kovac confuse us and Aaron Black's lighting has to play catch up with the concept.

That said, we are bathed in beautiful music skillfully played by the COT orchestra under Leppard's leadership.  And this next generation of singers shows promise, although only American bass Oliver Neal Medina, as the sorcerer Zoroastro, and, especially, Canadian soprano Andriana Chuchman as Dorinda, seemed fully commanding on opening night.  The others, including American Kate Mangiameli as Angelica, will grow in the run.  But on Wednesday it was only when Chuchman, a current member of Lyric's Ryan Center, took off with Dorinda's avalanche of a second act scene that we had the full wonder and glory of Handelian opera -- one that we have come to expect thanks to the efforts of such advocates as COT.

Capa -- in his own words and voice

NPR's Weekend All Things Considered yesterday included an obituary story on Cornell Capa that was built around an interview that our old pal Jackie Lyden had with Capa in 1994, when he was 76.  Nearly 60 years after he left his native Budapest, his wonderful Hungarian accent is still strong and his marvelous Central European character comes through even in these brief excerpts (click on the "Listen Now" feature).

Capa's Credo -- 1918-2008

The photographer Cornell Capa (left), who died Friday at 90 at his home in Manhattan, was both one of the most humble and one of the most important figures in photojournalism and the history and appreciation of photography as an art form and a subject of study.

He lived, willingly and purposefully, in the shadow of his elder brother, the great war photographer Robert Capa, even, and perhaps especially, in the more than half a century since Robert Capa's death from a land mine while on a Life magazine assignment during the French War in Indochina in 1954.  But, through his care and advocacy of his brother's legacy; his own work as a photojournalist, chiefly also for Life and for Magnum Photos, the agency founded by his brother, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and David Seymour; and in his founding, in 1974, and direction of the International Center for Photography in Manhattan, Cornell Capa brought the field to wider attention, enabled it to be taken seriously, and trained and inspired several generations of photographers around the world.  

^{_{Born Kornel Friedmann, in Budapest in 1918 -- his brother, born there as well in 1913, was originally}} Endre Ernő Friedmann -- Cornell anglicized his first name and followed his brother in changing his family name to Capa in Paris in the 1930s.  Although from an assimilated family, and able to leave Hungary before the World War II, the Nazi Occupation, and the Holocaust, neither Capa brother forgot his Jewish heritage nor his connection to the Jewish people.  Robert Capa covered the 1948 War of Independence in Israel and Cornell photographed the Six Day War in 1967.

In his writings and his talks, Cornell Capa frequently quoted the pioneering socially conscious photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940) in expressing a credo:

"There are two things I wanted to do.  I wanted to show the things that needed to be corrected.  And I wanted to show the things that needed to be appreciated."  

Is there a finer goal?  A greater purpose, in living one's life?

Formats: The Typepad nightmare continues

Typepad has posted a note to its users that basically confirms that they "rolled out" this new system of formatting without sufficient testing, explanation, or need.  

Believe me, I am not trying to do anything fancy with design here --  I just still have no idea how to make my posts appear as simple and clean as they had before.

CSO: Bicket's Baroque

Here's my Saturday May 24 Chicago Sun-Times review of Thursday May 22's Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert:

CSO surpasses best expectations

REVIEW | Mundane program is a fooler

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeated: 8 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday May 27

(At Sunday's performance, "The Four Seasons" will be analyzed as part of the CSO's multimedia "Beyond the Score" series.)

A concert is a matrix. The program, conductor, soloists, period and style all combine -- or don't -- into a single entity.

Looking only at the works programmed for this week's Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concerts, one might have shrugged or even sighed. A piccolo concerto? Orchestral excerpts from a French Baroque opera? And, no, not really -- Vivaldi's The Four Seasons?

But when an expert and enthusiastic young conductor, Britain's Harry Bicket (left), and two dynamic young soloists from the CSO's own ranks are added to the mix, things looked -- and sounded -- quite different Thursday night at Orchestra Hall from what many might have expected.

Bicket, who presided over remarkable productions of Handel's Partenope and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice at Lyric Opera of Chicago in recent years, is an unassuming but results-oriented _{^{enthusiast o}}f ^{early music who has an excellent way of working with players trained on and used to modern instruments.}

Only Jennifer Gunn's predecessor, the legendary Walfrid Kujala, had played Vivaldi's C Major Piccolo Concerto before with the CSO. Gunn (left) brought both Kujala's technical standards and her own extension of his sense of play to the piece, demonstrating that the piccolo is a serious instrument well beyond a maker of high pitches and sound effects. Kujala was in the house. I hope that he was as pleased as the audience and I were.

Rameau's 1763 Les Boréades was not presented for more than two centuries after the work's completion and the composer's death, but its suite has become a staple of early music groups since its 1982 revival. Still, it was being played for the first time by the CSO and, along with the Vivaldi, was an excellent reminder of how both symphony orchestra players and audiences benefit from experiencing and working with such pieces. When played this well, they are peaks of another era, sounding as if they are from another fascinating world entirely.

Pulling all of these aspects together, The Four Seasons with assistant concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu (left), like Gunnn, an invigorating Danbiel Barenboim hire, was heard entirely afresh. You could see the CSO string players working to bring a period feel to this alternately sprightly and moody set of concertos normally misapprehended as chestnuts. Yu's violin playing and commitment put her at least in a rank with many top international soloists in this material. It was a memorable and moving accomplishment.