Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Richard Ferrin -- 1927-2008

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

Richard 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:

1. 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.

Letters, we get letters

First, 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.

Young 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!

You talk too much

The first of my annual Chicago Opera Theater season talks has snuck up on me. It's today at 12:15 p.m. at the Chicago Cultural Center, Washington and Michigan/Randolph and Michigan (technical address: 78 East Washington), probably on the Fifth Floor but signs are posted throughout the building.

I talk about the ideas in and behind each opera and there is plenty of time for questions and discussion as well.

Today's topic is Don Giovanni. COT's production, conducted by Jane Glover and staged by Diane Paulus, opens next Wednesday April 30 at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park. It completes the thus-far successful COT/Glover/Paulus traversal of the Mozart/Da Ponte cycle.

It's free. And the audience tells me that the speaker is quite spontaneous.

John Adams's A Flowering Tree talk -- Tuesday May 6 at 12:15 p.m.

Handel's Orlando -- Thursday May 22 at 12:15 p.m.

MusicNOW -- young and old

World premierès by three young composers whose ages add up to just 92 and a salute to the 100th birthday of Elliott Carter led by another titan, Pierre Boulez, will highlight the 2008-09 season of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's highly popular MusicNOW series.

Derrick Hodge, 28 (left, above), and Gonzalo Grau, 35 (left, below), will each have new works on the season opening program November 10, along with two works from the 1980s, "Ziji" and "Raising the Gaze," by Peter Lieberson, winner of the 2008 Grawemeyer Award for Composition for Neruda Songs, to be played in Chicago and toured to Carnegie Hall by the CSO with Bernard Haitink and mezzo Kelley O'Connor next month.

Lieberson's wife and muse, the brilliant mezzo soprano Lorraine Hunt Liberson, died of breast cancer two years ago at 52. Lieberson, 61, is now battling lymphoma.

Hodge, of Philadelphia, has worked with filmmaker Spike Lee and trumpeter/film scorer Terence Blanchard. Venezuelan-born Grau has collaborated with CSO Mead Composer-in-Residence Osvaldo Golijov on two of Golijov's most popular works, La Pasión según San Marcos and Ainadamar. Another young artist, French conductor Ludovic Morlot, will lead the concert.

CSO conductor emeritus Boulez, 83 (left), will lead a salute to his friend Carter (far left) on March 2, 2009, including Carter's 1975 song cycle A Mirror on Which to Dwell, setting poems by Elizabeth Bishop, with a soprano to be announced. Carter, who is composing more actively than ever, turns 100 this December. The Boulez program also includes a short 2006 work, "Streets," by the Frenchman Bruno Montovani, 33, and the Berlin-based Swiss Hanspeter Kyburz's "Réseaux" (2003-2007).

MusicNOW principal conductor Cliff Colnot will direct a January 12 program in conjunction with the CSO's "Echoes of Nations" season-long theme with recent works from Portugal, by Luis Tinoco, Australia, by Brett Dean, and Germany, by Heiner Goebbels, as well as American Lee Hyla's 2007 Polish Folk Songs.

And the series will conclude June 8 with a world première by laptopper Jeremy Flower, 29 (left, with "friend"), another member of the Golijov posse; a U.S. première of a new work by Mead Composer-in-Residence Mark-Anthony Turnage for 12 brass players; and Golijov's 1999 Mariel in the version for cello and marimba with young CSO stars Kenneth Olsen, assistant principal cello, and Cynthia Yeh, principal percussion. (The CSO will have performed the version for cello and orchestra with conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya as a part of its "Inca Trail" concerts in October.) Michael Ward-Bergeman, Golijov's regular hyper-accordionist, rounds the program out with his "Thee Roads."

MusicNOW concerts, now in their 11th year, are booked for Monday nights and take place at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park. Subscriptions and tickets: (312) 294-3000 or www.cso.org.

Aimard et Bach -- les pensées

Here is the full text of my Monday Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Sunday's recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard at Chicago's Orchestra Hall.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Bach's Art of Fugue

Sometimes critics raise the questions while audiences just lean back -- or forward -- and enjoy the performance they’ve come to hear or see.

Why this repertoire? This performer? This order of works? This interpretation?

And sometimes, as was the case with French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard's recital Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall, it's the other way around. A critic has no questions, but the audience has many, and they are not necessarily unreasonable.

With the conjunction of the program in question and the performer presenting it, it could probably have been no other way.

Bach's Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, was left incomplete, or at least not fully transcribed, at its composer's death at 65 in 1750. For two centuries it was more of an academic and historical object than a repertoire staple, and even now there are debates about what Bach's intentions were. For what instrument or instruments was it meant? And was it even composed to be played at all?

These questions have rarely troubled me. The more Bach we can hear on the more types of instruments the better. And ever since Dame Myra Hess and Glenn Gould the debate over whether Bach can or should be played on the modern piano has interested me about as much as that over flouridated water.

The same with questions about whether a master of modern and contemporary repertoire such as Aimard should turn his attention to Bach, as he did at his Sunday recital consisting solely of the nearly 90-minute Art of Fugue.

Aimard's is a questing intelligence, or rather a questing set of multiple intelligences, and Bach is the source and the discoverer of so much that makes music interesting as well as what makes it beautiful that the pairing seems natural.

Treatise, menu, or template, Bach's attempt to explore the fugue -- a laying out of several lines derived from a single subject or melody -- in all of its forms in 20 "takes" is the ultimate meeting of a chess game and a work of art. Simple lines doubled back on themselves, not so simple lines intertwine three times over -- everything fascinates. Aimard's own first public take on the work is not concerned with "interpretation" rather it puts the work in front of us "straight" for our own additional contemplation.

For an hour and a half, as Douglas R. Hofstadter put it in his 1979 mindbender Gödel, Escher, Bach, Aimard spun for us Bach's "eternal golden braid."

But don't take my word for it . . .

Friends on the East Coast tell me that the Pope was pretty busy this past week and so no word yet if Benny's been checking out our podcasts.

But we've done one better with a lovely shout-out from the music world's Master Weblogger Alex Ross (left), music critic of The New Yorker, author of the acclaimed The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (FSG, 2007) -- winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction -- and the proprietor of the gold standard in the arts and music weblog business, www.therestisnoise.com.

Alex and I might not agree about a lot regarding Pierre Boulez, but we see ear to ear when it comes to listening to the way the Great Man talks!

Alex's "Bløgösphèric notes" item today also calls attention to our friend and colleague Russell Platt's excellent posts on the Goings On weblog of The New Yorker. In addition to being on the staff at the magazine, Russell is a critic and a composer and the twin brother of peripatetic conductor Alexander Platt.

Buttons, buttons, we've got the buttons

You can now click the button to the right and download our podcasts or hear them right here (or there) and now.

Thanks, as ever, to Matt and David for their creative management and ingenuity!

A-podcasting we will go

Readers of these posts are no doubt aware of their author's tenuous connections with technology. Nevertheless, he has found ways of getting pieces up here with some regularity and even has found ways to add pretty pictures to his texts. And somehow, too, averages of between 70 and 110 of you a day drop by, depending, I suppose, upon the timeliness of my posting and its subject matter. (We're omitting from our calculations the day, March 24 to be exact, that that nice Sullivan man linked to our Barack Obama and the South Side of Chicago essay and we had, we kid you not, 3,266 "page views" in 24 hours.)

Now comes news that our radio work is getting even easier to find and hear thanks to the derring-do of our WFMT producing engineer and dear colleague, young Matt DeStefano (left) who has started setting up our Monday night hour-long program Critical Thinking as a podcast in addition to its current availability as an audio stream.

Remarkably, in the first two days of a very quiet launch this week, we averaged 218 visits a day with 188 "unique listens" a day for just two programs -- our recent walk-through of the exhibition Big Picture: A New View of Painting in Chicago at the Chicago History Museum and the second of our two recent one-hour conversations with legendary lyricist, Chicago native, and Northwestern University alum Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello!, She Loves Me, songs for Blossom Dearie, etc.).

But, wait! There's more!

As of today, programs available as podcasts also include:

1 -- Part One of our Sheldon Harnick conversation.

2 -- In honor of his upcoming 96th (!) birthday, my 2005 conversation with Studs Terkel discussing his book And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey. It's the only interview with Studs that I know of where he discusses in detail his passion for opera and opera singers including Rosa Raisa, Lotte Lehmann, and "his" diva, Claudia Muzio. Studs also talks about his disc jockey days in general and the music editions of the old and long-running Studs Terkel Program on WFMT.

3 -- Last year's conversations with pianist, scholar, and critic Charles Rosen, recorded in honor of his 80th birthday in 2007.

4 -- The only English-language radio interview in captivity of conducting Wunderkind Gustavo Dudamel, recorded in Chicago on April 3, 2007, before the surprise announcement five days later that Dudamel would become the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic beginning with the 2009-2010 season. You heard Gustavo first on WFMT -- Take that, Bob Simon! ;-)

5 -- Our exclusive radio conversations with Bernard Haitink, principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, inter alia. As well a recent programs with Leon Fleisher, Kent Nagano, Cliff Colnot, Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls, and the new executive director of the historic Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, James "Bau" Graves, with many more to come.

Mind you, the musical selections in these programs are edited down for reasons of copyright, fees, Congressional inaction, money, etc. But we are working daily to change the world for you.

Programs currently only available for audio streaming include exclusive recent radio interviews with Riccardo Muti (left) and Pierre Boulez, Renata Scotto, composer Howard Sandroff and pianist Abraham Stokman, New Yorker classical music critic, weblogger supreme, and Pulitzer Prize finalist (for The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century) Alex Ross, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, Chicago architects Stanley Tigerman and Wilbert Hasbrouck, and others.

More details, widgets, and the like as we get them and, as importantly, try to understand them.

By the way, all of my interviews in my ten years at WFMT are conducted in person and live to tape with only minor editing, usually at the inconveniently located WFMT studios on the Northwest Side of Chicago and sometimes in various warrens of Orchestra Hall in downtown Chicago. For radio, and when possible, for the Chicago Sun-Times and other print outlets, I do not do telephone interviews or long-distance studio interviews via ISDN line, etc. For my WFMT "Critic's Choice" commentary this week, "You Play the 'Cello?," on why an interview is two people talking to each other in the same room, click here.

Salonen -- OTOH, OTOH; Bronfman -- oh yes

Here is my Friday Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Wednesday's first performance of this week's Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concerts -- Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and Yefim Bronfman as soloist in Salonen's 2007 piano concerto. Due to the Passover holiday, there are, alas, no further CSO performances of this program. Salonen and Bronfman will give the piece its Los Angeles première with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in four performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall May 29 to June 1.

RECOMMENDED

Esa-Pekka Salonen (left) has protested for many years that he is a "composer who conducts." As he steps down from a 16-year tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he will perhaps have more opportunity to focus on the first part of this description, and the one which he does best.

Beloved by coastal critics who see in his spirit and youthful energy (maintained into middle age -- he turns 50 in June) an antidote to the old-fashioned reputation of symphony orchestras, Salonen is articulate, curious, charming, and self-deprecating in ways that add to his allure. But when it comes to making music, he has been more of a "shake-up-the-repertoire" man than one taken up much with interpretive ideas or details in the score on the stand before him.

As a composer, though, he carries through with his excitement. His first and untitled piano concerto was widely anticipated when it had its première with Salonen conducting soloist Yefim Bronfman and the New York Philharmonic last year. (Bronfman was one of the keener anticipators as Salonen did not finish the busy, involving, and nearly continuous score and solo part until a few weeks before the first performance.) It was the major draw of the Afterworks Masterworks concert Wednesday night at Orchestra Hall, with Salonen on the podium leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Bronfman (terrific portrait by Israeli photographer Dan Porges at left) is as disparate physically and in demeanor from the pixie-like Salonen as two almost exact contemporaries can be -- the Russian-Israeli-American pianist hit the half-century mark last week. But the two men are soulmates in both the Russian repertoire most associated with Bronfman and in the idea for what a 21st-century piano concerto might sound like. Salonen is the best kind of sponge when it comes to acknowledging and using influences, for here he has pulled sounds and rhythms and styles from sources ranging from Rachmaninoff to Messiaen to John Adams to Ravel to Gershwin to Bernstein to Bernard Herrmann to make a 33-minute work that still sounds and feels both new and like Salonen.

Quirky, emotional, edgy, cumulative, and skillfully scored, it might not be a work for the ages -- how many are these days? But at least as performed by the phenomenal and music-always-first Bronfman and conducted by its composer, it grabs the listener's attention and holds it through its rollicking and repetitive (in a good way) forward motion. In this crackling CSO performance, Burl Lane, in an extended alto saxophone solo, and principal viola Charles Pikler deserved the bravos they shared with Bronfman and Salonen.

Following his own work with Beethoven’s almost 200-year-old Seventh Symphony, the A Major, Op. 92, was not a mistake in comparing compositional techniques or interests, as the piano concerto stays with you for a good while. Rather it was an error because it was unclear what Salonen was hearing in the piece and wanted us to hear. Perhaps he was listening for more musical ideas. If so, he slowed things down to an almost deadly pace, exposing the talented CSO players to unsupported transitions. It is not easy to make Beethoven dull and purposeless but Salonen did.

Thursday's and Friday's programs also will feature the first CSO performances of a set of contemporary (1975) adaptations of a 1795 Boccherini piece, Ritirata notturna di Madrid, by the late Luciano Berio. These should be something to hear.