Andrew Patner: The View from Here

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.

Letters, we get letters -- 2

First of all, Typepad, which used to be so user-friendly that a four-year-old child could use it, recently upgraded itself so that one needs to be a rather tech-savvy four-year-old child to put posts together. Until Zeppo runs out and gets me a tech-savvy four-year-old child, there may be more than the usual design and layout confusion hear at The View from Here. 

Department of shout out acknowledgments: In her Iron Tongue of Midnight weblog, the East Bay's Lisa Hirsch finds a kindred spirit working in my review of A Flowering Tree.  And classical weblog king Alex Ross tosses his two cents into the Muti/CSO fountain here at The Rest Is Noise. 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. Here's a second batch: 

John Power wrote on May 5 to propose that Los Angeles scored the hotter property in snaring Gustavo Dudamel as music director compared to the more established Riccardo Muti signed by Chicago.  I say we'll still see plenty of Gustavito and let him ripen in the SoCal sun for a few years anyway.

Isabella wrote on May 7 all the way from Athens (Greece) to say that Riccardo Muti also has a home in Pantelleria, a small volcanic island belonging to Italy that is the southernmost European spot on the map (left).  I pointed out to her that the Mutis regard this as the project of Signora Muti, Christina.

^{John Wellborn Root (welcome back from the dead, John!  And we still love yr Rookery building!) wrote on May 20 to endorse our reflections on Teddy Kennedy at the moment of his being stricken with serious illness: "}Edward M. Kennedy has been the rock centering the advance of the progressive agenda across five successive decades." John also builds on the role EMK has played within the U.S. Senate itself.

Chicago painter Leon Krejci also voted for Teddy, on May 21, and cites comparisons with Edwin O'Connor's 1956 political novel, The Last Hurrah, and its Boston-ish Irish Catholic hero, Frank Skeffington.

^{Young Cleveland-based pianist Zsolt Bognar also wrote today to say that he liked our take. Through back channels, though, Holden Redbone gave a big anti-Kennedy-family thumbs-down.}

(Interestingly, and also through back channels today, Chicagoans Steve Robinson, Geoff Posner, and Timothy Stewart-Winter all wanted it known that they were born in Brookline!)

Thanks! And keep them coming!

EMK -- The underappreciated

_{^{Edward M. Kennedy has been the too-easy butt of too many dismissive comments for too much of his career. The runt of the litter of the most complex, compelling, and complicated family in American public life, Kennedy found himself with leadership, if not greatness, thrust upon him in a clan where a father and three elder brothers either achieved or were born to it.  And, with one major black mark, and that perhaps, when the full scorecard of his life is toted up, the deciding chapter, Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, he has carried the better flag of American liberalism against all attacks and when too few others have been willing to do so.}} 

_{^{Living in an overlapping set of spotlights, many of them particularly unpleasant, and living through and speaking for his family during a continuing series of tragedies that would have broken many of us long ago, Teddy Kennedy has emerged as a man of strength, eloquence, thoughtfulness, and a historically-based consciousness of the meaning and purpose of the American experiment.}}

^{I was raised in a family that was agnostic about the Kennedys, and often critical of them.  My parents were Adlai Stevenson folks, even at his third run in 1960, and Eugene McCarthy supporters in 1968. Wealth and an East Coast sense of entitlement did not make the best impression on many others I knew who were from immigrant Jewish families who wound up in the Midwest and the South.  I was just on the cusp of four years old when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and eight and a half when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered, so my own life was fairly free of the “Camelot” business.} 

^{Living in Chicago, over the years I’ve met a number of Shrivers and Smiths -- posted to Chicago to run the family's longtime cash cow, the Merchandise Mart -- and their offspring, and I know Christopher Kennedy, Bobby's son and the current  head of the Mart (no longer owned by his family), casually and think quite highly of him.  I've met Teddy several times in Washington and Chicago, each time without any advance plan to have done so.  Nevertheless, I think I've viewed them all more as a disinterested observer than as an acolyte or star-gazer.  (The exception here certainly was and is Caroline Kennedy. When I was introduced to her in Chicago in 1998 at the opening of an education center at Orchestra Hall [since closed, alas] that her husband, Edwin Schlossberg, had designed, I was sure that I was going to pass out.)}

^{So I think that my positive view of Ted Kennedy, his contributions, his consistency, his role in American politics, is one I've come by legitimately and even objectively.  Much of it probably began when he took on the smug and sanctimonious Jimmy Carter in the Democratic Presidential primaries in 1980.  While some said that the wounds Carter suffered in this primary challenge to a sitting President were a factor in his defeat by Ronald Reagan in the general election, I never bought that.  And I thought Kennedy’s speech at the 1980 Democratic Convention (see photo above) in New York was an excellent challenge to a President and a party without a soul or a purpose.}

^{Of course Kennedy has had his weaknesses and he’s sometimes painted things with a broader brush than necessary as in his positions on and grilling of some nominees to the Federal judiciary.  But he’s been right much more often than he’s been wrong and he’s done hard work over decades, living a life devoted to public service when plenty of others of his class and wealth -- and age: he’s 76 -- have done much less -- or much worse. Long after it was fashionable to do so, he has never compromised on civil rights, women’s rights, and the rights of other minorities, including gay people.  He has been a regular reminder of what the legitimate role of a U.S. Senator should be.  He might seem an easy target of criticism for many, but I can’t imagine that anyone has ever wanted to trade places with him.}

^{As he and his family now face the dire nature of an extremely serious illness, he is certainly in my thoughts and prayers.}

^{Here are the last lines of Tennyson’s 1833 poem “Ulysses,” one often quoted from by John and Robert Kennedy and again by Edward Kennedy at the end of his 1980 Democratic Convention speech:}

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

 

A Jerusalem peace pipe in Chicago

Here is my Tuesday May 20 suntimes.com piece on Sunday afternoon May 18's chamber program in Chicago. 

Concert by Barenboim's associates brings sense of continuity to Orchestra Hall 

JERUSALEM INTERNATIONAL CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL 

BY ANDREW PATNER 

After two weeks of reporting on and traveling to concerts of the current and future artistic leadership of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Salzburg and New York City, there was something fitting about rounding things out with a chamber performance at Orchestra Hall by family members and close associates of the CSO's last music director, Daniel Barenboim. 

It was Barenboim, after all, who built the CSO into the position that it could retain and attract three of the world's leading conductors -- Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, and Riccardo Muti -- to major positions at its podium. And it was the mercurial Israeli musician's departure almost two years ago that created the vacancy at the top that became the focus of international attention and speculation. 

Before, during, and after his nearly 18 years in Chicago, Barenboim always said musicmaking was his only real priority. Among many other contributions here, he kept audiences supplied with a steady diet of chamber music, where he played with such high-powered friends and protégés as Maxim Vengerov, Yo-Yo Ma, Radu Lupu, and Thomas Quasthoff, as well as members of the CSO itself. He also demanded that members of the orchestra embody more of the aural and collaborative values of chamber musicians in their orchestral playing. 

So the visit Sunday afternoon by members of the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival was not only a tribute to Barenboim's artistic and political connections to the Middle East but a direct link with someone who removed himself from the local scene so dramatically in June 2006.

Founded in 1998 and led since then by Barenboim's pianist wife, Elena Bashkirova (left), the JCMF brings together both established and rising performers from a variety of national backgrounds as a means of reviving secular cultural life in Jerusalem, a city dominated in recent years by strong religious currents. Sunday's program, modified by some personnel changes and visa difficulties, still gave a good snapshot of what goes on at the Concert Hall of the International YMCA in West Jerusalem in early September each year. 

Bashkirova was joined in four rarely performed works of four key Austro-German composers by her son, violinist Michael Barenboim; Israeli cellist Kyril Zlotnikov; and East German-born clarinetist Matthias Glander, principal clarinet of the senior Barenboim's Staatskapelle Berlin. All three of these colleagues are also involved with the West-Eastern Divan Arab-Israeli youth orchestra. 

While she has her own international career as a soloist and recitalist, Bashkirova's great love is chamber music, and her versatility and humility were keys to the afternoon's success. Arrangements for trios of works of Schumann and Beethoven, as well as a 1938 quartet by Hindemith and the accompaniment of Berg's 1913 Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5, had Bashkirova as anchor and guiding spirit. Schumann's 1845 Six Pieces in the Form of a Canon, Op. 56, for the now-forgotten pedal piano, was heard in a 19th century transcription for piano, violin, and cello, and Beethoven's E-Flat Major Septet, Op. 20, in the composer's own Op. 38 Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, both from 1800. 

Glander is greatly respected technically and artistically by many musicians, and his good friend retiring CSO principal clarinet Larry Combs was in the audience. With Zlotnikov, who has a terrific CD (left) of the complete Mozart piano trios with Daniel Barenboim and violinist Nikolaj Znaider on EMI, Glander animated the Beethoven and the wholly captivating Hindemith, and on his own offered both textbook lessons and inspiration in the Berg work. 

All in all, there was a happy sense of things coming full circle in Chicago and even of a figurative olive branch being shared among musicians, audience, and members of the CSO administration as new eras are launched on South Michigan Avenue. 

Note: The 11th Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival runs from August 30 to September 12. Participants this year include star tenor Rolando Villazón in Schumann's Dichterliebe and Liederkreis, and bass-baritone Robert Holl in Schubert's Winterreise, all with Daniel Barenboim as pianist, and Emmanuel Pahud in the world première of Elliott Carter's new Flute Concerto.

Freaks -- and the accidents they have

Things have been a bit quiet here due not so much to all this travel -- fodder for posts of course! -- but to a freak accident suffered, or self-inflicted, last Tuesday in Munich. While standing in the kitchen in our friend Lothar's apartment in Schwabing, I sneezed -- hard and loud. At the same time I both felt and heard something snap and started to experience a sharp pain, like a vertical incision, in my right side.

I'll spare you the details, but I learned yesterday that it was neither a broken rib (my first suspicion) nor a problem with the old appendix (second). Rather a torn abdominal muscle. Yech!

And as I told the doc, only when I laugh . . . . or sneeze.