Andrew Patner: The View from Here

CSO wraps up Dvořák Festival lacking only dancing bears.

While I am in Norway, I'm afraid that my posts will have pretty minimal formatting.  In any event, here's my Saturday June 20 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday night June 18, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Sir Mark Elder, soprano Patricia Racette, baritone Philip Cutlip, violinist Rachel Barton Pine, and the Chicago Symphony Chorus.

CSO's Dvořák fest windup is not for completists only

BY ANDREW PATNER

 

RECOMMENDED

Friday night the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had a "greatest hits" program scheduled as a capstone to its three-week Dvořák Festival -- the Carnival Overture, the Cello Concerto, and the Symphony No. 9, From the New World.

Thursday night, however, in a program that will be repeated tonight as the festival's final performance and the last CSO concert of the season, rarities and excerpts were the agenda.  So many of them, and so disparate a lot, that a friend suggested before a single note had sounded that the program looked like a variety show.  And, despite a number of glorious moments, I'm afraid my friend was right.

Now we've been in festival mode.  And one of the goals of guest conductor Mark Elder and CSO leaders in curating these events was to show the overlooked variety as well as the underestimated depth of the output of the great Czech composer.

Ideally, this might have been achieved with a concert staging of the wonderful 1900 opera Rusalka, such as the Cleveland Orchestra did last season.  But Cleveland also had bankrolling for a superb fully staged production last summer, while CSO leaders could not see a prudent way to bring off such a concert performance here.

Instead we got the title character's well-known "Song to the Moon."  And the opening scene of a much less known and quite wondrously strange earlier opera, The Jacobin.  And another soprano aria, from the oratorio Saint Ludmila.  And three of the second set of Slavonic Dances.  And an all-but-forgotten overture, My Homeland.  And the F minor Romance for Violin and Orchestra.  And the evening's big news, the first-ever CSO performance of Dvořák 's grand yet highly personal setting of the Te Deum, which he wrote for its 1892 New York premiere to introduce himself to American audiences.  And all of this in just two hours, including intermission.

If that sounds like a lot to digest, let alone to form a coherent impression from, it was.  Still, a number of things stood out.  The Chicago Symphony Chorus was stupendous in both the Jacobin excerpt and the very Czech Te Deum.  Patricia Racette sang the "Song of the Moon" as if it had words -- and Slavic words at that -- unlike some more famous sopranos who turn it into a senseless fantasy.  The young New York baritone Philip Cutlip was her able counterpart in the two works with the chorus.  And Rachel Barton Pine gave us the muscle plus the tenderness in the violin Romance.

But the great achievements of this excellent festival came on other nights.  Dvořák wanted the world to know him as a maker of full-length works, be they symphonies, concertos, chamber works, or operas.  And Elder, the CSO, and their guests demonstrated consistently this month that the Czech master's ambition was fulfilled.

"Studs Terkel in the Hall"? Give us a break

 

With Studs Terkel safely dead since Halloween, the absurd folks at the Chicago-based, self-styled "National Radio Hall of Fame" announced today that Studs, as one of three "radio giants of historic proportion," has "been selected for posthumous induction into America's only [!]" such pantheon.

What little seriousness the "NRHOF" (hey, that's what they call it themselves!) had left was exhausted last year when it missed its last chance even to nominate Studs -- he was never nominated, in any category, since the "inductions" began in 1992 -- but had no problem enshrining "freedom from homosexuality Dr." James (Focus on the Family) Dobson alongside such reigning NRHOF luminaries as Rush Limbaugh and Paul Harvey.  In fact, as Chicago Reader media columnist Michael Miner carefully reported back in May, the "Hall"'s board members and nominating committee were not even aware that Studs Terkel, a legend for his nearly 45 years of daily programs on Chicago's WFMT, was a radio broadcaster! 

Now NRHOF guru Bruce DuMont says that Studs and the even more recently deceased Harry Kalas, the voice of the Philadelphia Phillies since 1971, were "two icons of Philadelphia and Chicago radio who left their mark on two great cities."  Phew!  The NRHOF website even tells us that "Terkel was also an inspirational figure and mentor to a younger generation of journalists and literary figures until his death at age 96."  How about that.  Now we know.  Maybe they never let him in while he was alive because they were waiting to see if he might stop being inspirational before he died.

(The third member of this trio of "giants of historic proportion"  is Don Cholito [José Miguel Agrelot, 1927-2004], "the Puerto Rican Bob Hope."  In an additional delicious irony, the Hall announced that Agrelot is "the first Hispanic ever inducted" into the group.  I guess Hispanics just entered the field, in English or Spanish.) 

Last summer DuMont said that Studs and his many fans should just accept that Studs was the Ron Santo of Radio Hall of Fame exclusion.  Maybe someone should call up the great former Cub in the Wrigley Field broadcast booth and let him know that if he would just die Cooperstown would surely suspend its rules and hurry him right in.  

And let's hope that after the 2008 apotheosis of "Dr." Dobson and the 17-year exclusion of Terkel, the "Hall" will go all the way and "induct" Father Coughlin, certainly one of the most significant figures in the entire history of radio.  An unapologetic anti-Semite and admirer of Hitler and Mussolini throughout the 1930s, Coughlin would put the two-bit gay-hater Dobson in some perspective.  If you are going to put together a team, why not go with the best the game has seen?

I wish Studs were alive for so many reasons.  One of them is so that we could all hear how he would respond to this latest insult to general intelligence by the Hall of Shame.

Catching up with the CSO's Dvořák Festival II -- Emersons in the house and a 136-year-old symphony premieres

Allergies have knocked me about this last week, so catching up with posts of reviews, etc., Here is my Tuesday June 16 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Saturday June 13, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Sir Mark Elder and the Emerson String Quartet with violist Paul Neubauer.

This Dvořák Festival program is repeated tonight, Tuesday June 16, with the Emerson substituting the E-Flat Major Slavonic Quartet, Op. 51, for the Op. 97 American Quintet in the chamber portion of the concert.  The Emerson gives a free performance today, Tuesday, at 12 noon at The Art Institute of Chicago's Fullerton Hall of Cypresses and the American String Quartet, Op. 96.

Thursday June 18 and Saturday June 20 bring both a wide array of vocal selections and the Romance for Violin and Orchestra with Rachel Barton Pine among other works. Friday June 19 holds a repeat of the Cello Concerto, the Ninth Symphony, From the New World, and the popular Carnival Overture.  See my reviews of the Cello Concerto and Symphony No. 9 below.

Dvořák expert Michael Beckerman of New York University speaks an hour before each remaining CSO concert as well as in a special additional free lecture at 3 p.m. on Saturday afternoon.

 

CSO's Dvořák celebration builds case for composer from ground up

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

The Saturday CSO program is repeated tonight, Tuesday June 16, at 7:30 p.m. with the Emerson substituting the E-Flat Major Slavonic Quartet, Op. 51, for the Op. 97 American Quintet in the chamber portion of the concert and, alas, without the Wind Serenade postlude. 

Dvořák again?  

Perhaps the greatest success thus far in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Dvořák Festival is the way those words have been transformed from an uncomfortable question into an enthusiastic statement. Yes, Dvořák again!

This weekend saw a packed hall Saturday night for a highly unusual CSO program and a deeply focused Sunday afternoon crowd for the Symphony Center Presents chamber music installment of the combined celebration/investigation of the great Czech composer.

Who would have thought before this festival that a program of a little-heard string quintet (without orchestra), a 136-year-old symphony having its Chicago première, a late bit of spooky atmospherics, and a post-10 p.m. performance of a wind serenade would be a near-sellout?  If you've been to any of the CSO's Dvořák Festival programs, you could see why people have become believers.  Guest conductor Sir Mark Elder (above) has found a bond with the CSO and audiences that makes a case for Dvořák as musical prophet and humanist as much as folk-infused craftsman.  To hear the edges of his repertoire as well as his central works has come to feel like a privilege.

The Emerson String Quartet (above) is known for giving 110 percent, and sometimes that extra 10 percent puts a chrome plate on its performances.  Not here.  Joined on Saturday by violist Paul Neubauer, its performance of the 1893 E-Flat Major American Quintet , Op. 97, was sensitive and idiomatic in ways that would have pleased Dvořák and the residents of Spillville, Iowa, who were hosting him that long-ago summer.

The F major Op. 96 Quartet itself came on Sunday, and with the context of music just before and after it still in our heads, the work was even richer than usual.  The discovery Sunday was the too-rarely given G Major Quartet, Op. 106, the first music that Dvořák wrote after returning to his native Bohemia in 1895, though not until after a nine-month break from composing to let his American experiences settle in.  Though the piece is structured normally, each of its four movements contains marvelous subtleties and intricacies.  Pianist Jeffrey Kahane was the additional guest for a rousing run through the 1887 A Major "pre-American" Piano Quintet.

The centerpiece Saturday night was the first CSO performance of the Third Symphony, written in 1873 when Dvořák was just 31 but not known until well after his death in 1904.  In the thrall of both Wagner and Czech folk music, the work's three movements seem to be different pieces, but it gives a sense of what would become the composer's building blocks and lifelong passions.  The CSO played it as if it was an old and much-admired friend.

One of Dvořák's late folk-tale tone poems, the 1896 The Midday Witch, Op. 108, is perhaps a too literal setting of yet another Central European child killed by a too restrictive society story.  It was the after-hours offering of the Op. 44 Wind Serenade that had the audience grinning until 10:45 p.m.  What a pleasure it was to hear this wind band staple with a dozen CSO players, led by principal oboe Eugene Izotov.

Catching up with the CSO's Dvořák Festival I -- Alisa Weilerstein, yes!, and an 8th with modern murmurs

Allergies have knocked me about this last week, so catching up with posts of reviews, etc., Here is my Saturday June 13 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday June 11, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Sir Mark Elder and 'cellist Alisa Weilerstein.

Dvořák Festival programs continue today, Tuesday June 16, with the Emerson String Quartet 

in a free performance at The Art Institute of Chicago's Fullerton Hall of Cypresses and the American String Quartet, Op. 96. The Emerson opens tonight's CSO concert at 7:30 p.m. with the E-Flat Major Slavonic Quartet, Op. 51, followed on the orchestral portion of the program by a repeat of the late tone poem, The Midday Witch, and the early E-Flat Major Symphony No. 3. See my review of these works from the Saturday June 13 performance above. 

Thursday June 18 and Saturday June 20 bring both a wide array of vocal selections and the Romance or Violin and Orchestra with Rachel Barton Pine among other works. Friday June 19 holds a repeat of the Cello Concerto, the Ninth Symphony, From the New World, and the popular Carnival Overture.

Dvořák expert Michael Beckerman of New York University speaks an hour before each remaining CSO concert as well as in a special additional free lecture at 3 p.m. on Saturday afternoon.

  

New CSO soloist finds Dvořák insights

Cellist Weilerstein takes daring approach

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Cello Concerto is repeated in the Festival concert on Friday June 19 at 8 p.m.

The goal of a composer-themed festival is to dig deep and try to find lessons, patterns, and connections through immersion in a single creative voice that might not be apparent in the occasional performance or listening.

When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced a festival of the works of Antonín Dvořák, there were probably many who thought that this might be pushing the festival concept a bit much.

But under conductor Sir Mark Elder's passionate leadership, with Chicago debuts of two extraordinary string soloists, and with key chamber music and vocal components still to come, the Dvořák Festival already has more than made its case for the Czech composer as an artist of depth and range as well as popularity and nationalism.

Thursday night at Orchestra Hal, the CSO began with a once staple and now mostly unplayed overture, In Nature's Realm, Op. 91, written in 1891 just before Dvořák moved to the United States.  In it, he's heard working on the evocations of Bohemian forests and spirits that he would perfect several years later in his great operas.

One would think that the B minor Cello Concerto, Op. 104, would, in contrast, be wholly familiar, so popular has the work been almost since its composition in New York in 1895.  But so daring was the playing of soloist Alisa Weilerstein (above) and so committed the partnership of Elder and the CSO that Dvořák's genius for complex creation as well as spinning out winning melodies was almost palpable.

With a huge, almost athletic sound, Weilerstein, 27, somehow combines intense physicality with a deep intellectualism.  Old and much loved tunes seemed to be being written on the spot and there was real excitement in the air.

In rehearsing the Civic Orchestra earlier this week, Elder suggested that Dvořák's much-played From the New World Symphony No. 9 would "sound better if you played it as if you had never heard it before."  Surely the same concept was at work with the CSO and the preceding 1889 G Major Symphony No. 8, Op. 88, which closed the program Thursday. Without losing any of its infectious and buoyant spirit, we could also hear dark moves in directions that would be extended later by Sibelius.  Principal flute Mathieu Dufour led all winds in tremendous parts and solos.

Grant Park launches 75th anniversary season -- Stephen Hough soars (as always)

Here is my Friday June 12 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of  the Wednesday evening June 10 Grant Park Music Festival 2009 opening night concert with principal conductor Carlos Kalmar and pianist Stephen Hough.

Free Grant Park concerts continue most Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays through August 15.   Daytime rehearsals are also free and open to the public.  

Friday June 12 at 5:30 p.m. [note early start time] features a rarely performed 1949 Communist propaganda cantata by Shostakovich, The Song of the Forests, Op. 81, and Bernstein's Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront (1954).  

Saturday June 13 at 7:30 holds a repeat of the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures and the Bernstein suite.

 

                                                                         Gehry Partners LLP

Grant Park Music Festival opener doesn't miss a beat

With Hough at the piano, orchestra gives every sign of memorable summer to come

BY ANDREW PATNER

At the launch of its 75th anniversary season, the Grant Park Music Festival is riding high.

With its fifth full summer at Frank Gehry's ever-enchanting Jay Pritzker Pavilion and trellised Great Lawn (the festival moved to Millennium Park mid-season in 2004), the classical concert series easily draws 10,000 people even on a cool weekday evening, as it did at Wednesday's opening night.  On weekends, the numbers multiply.

Often transition periods expose an institution's weaknesses.  When the festival's highly respected and very hands-on general and artistic director, James W. Palermo, left in the spring to head the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, it was reasonable to wonder how things would fare in his absence and with a search for a successor just begun.

At Grant Park, Palermo's success, and that of his musical partners principal conductor Carlos Kalmar and chorus director Christopher Bell, resonates in an organization that continues to fire on all cylinders and musical results that put Grant Park at the top of outdoor summer programs.

Kalmar has worked so closely with the Grant Park Orchestra for the last nine seasons that it really remains his home ensemble despite the plum position he added five years ago as music director of the Oregon Symphony.  Closing Wednesday's program with the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (to be repeated Saturday evening) clearly demonstrated the uniform strength and quality that Kalmar and Palermo built up together across sections and principals' chairs.  New assistant concertmaster Ilana Setapen, just 26, made a memorable debut in the first chair Wednesday. In September, she also starts as associate concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra -- a fine addition to Midwest rosters.

Is there a more elegant and unflappable pianist than Stephen Hough?  In any setting, in any repertoire, the British player can make the greatest concertos of the Romantic tradition full of life and power without even a whiff of vulgarity.  And from the first bars of the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor first concerto (complete with evening ambulance-siren obbligato) to the last (complete with return of the ambulance theme), Hough gave the festival a standard that it will surely work diligently and happily to meet over the next 10 weeks.

CSO scores with Dvořák's 'From the New World' -- in analysis and performance

Here is my Tuesday June 9 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Sunday afternoon June 7 Chicago Symphony Orchestra "Beyond the Score " program on Dvořák's Ninth Symphony, From the New World, with Sir Mark Elder conducting, Gwendolyn Brown, contralto, and Gerard McBurney, creative director.

Dvořák's best-loved work gets CSO royal treatment

BY ANDREW PATNER

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra hit a long double Sunday afternoon.  It both wound up its annual "Beyond the Score" series with one of its best offerings yet and presented another outstanding installment in its ongoing three-week Dvořák Festival.

The subject of analysis and demonstration Sunday was Dvořák's most familiar and loved work, his E minor Symphony No. 9, Op. 95, (From the New World), written in 1893 during the composer's 2½-year stay in the United States.

As he does each time in the series, creative director Gerard McBurney and his colleagues have gathered a wonderful set of period film clips and photographs as well as readings from letters, diaries, reviews and recollected conversations.  And as he does when the series is at his best, he offered a script that was informative, convincing and never over-reaching.

We've always known that the piece, Dvořák's greatest success not only in America but around the world, reflected encounters he had in New York with African-American musicians -- his patron and host, Jeannette Thurber, was far ahead of her time in creating a conservatory open to all regardless of race, gender, or background.   And we know of the fascination that he and other Europeans had with Native Americans, whether through actual connections, or more usually, imaginative depictions.

McBurney, though, gave us perhaps the most clear and sensible account of what came when and in what order in Dvořák's planning out this major 40-minute work, including his fascination with Wagner as a "religious" composer. With Nicholas Rudall portraying Dvořák and Steppenwolf's Francis Guinan taking other roles, McBurney's focus was on Dvořák  as great-souled man and curious and respectful listener and watcher -- whether to or of people, birds, or locomotives.  

With superbly selected and timed excerpts performed by the CSO under Sir Mark Elder's direction, points were clear, insightful, and with plenty of "a-ha!" moments.  Elder's leadership of the full work after intermission was all the richer for the opening hour of analysis and background, but was also one of the finest performances I've heard of the piece since Carlo Maria Giulini's here 30-odd years ago.

Sunday also marked a wonderful breakthrough for Chicago contralto Gwendolyn Brown (above), an alumna of Lyric Opera of Chicago's training program and a regular at Lyric as a cover and in small roles.  Her interpretations of Negro spirituals, with ever-dependable pianist Elizabeth Buccheri, were deeply moving, even stirring. She also absolutely captured the harmonic, narrative, and dramatic qualities of this music that spoke so directly to Dvořák. Stunning.

So is From the New World ultimately a European work?  A Czech one?  American?  Folk-inspired?  Romantic?  Wholly invented?  Indebted to other traditions?

None of the above.  And all of the above.  That is the magic of this piece; demonstrating that was McBurney's achievement Sunday.

Ravinia's 'Camelot' -- a few bright, shining moments

Here is my Monday June 8 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Friday June 5, 2009, concert performance of Camelot at Ravinia Festival's 2009 season opening night.

Merry, unnecessary 'Camelot'

REVIEW | Singers stellar, but thin musical unworthy of a Ravinia revival

BY ANDREW PATNER

There's no doubt that Ravinia's Music Theater Initiative has been one of the great successes of Welz Kauffman's eight years as chief of the Highland Park festival.  With five stunning Stephen Sondheim revivals, Patti LuPone's first outing in Gypsy, and a brilliant remounting of Frank Loesser's operetta The Most Happy Fella in 2007, Ravinia has been the Chicago area place to see top-flight live performances of Broadway's best with full orchestra and top casts and conductors.

Perhaps because of this success, Ravinia's been hard pressed to top or match its presentations to date, taking a breather last summer and spreading its offerings over several nights this summer with LuPone returning August 8 for a Kurt Weill evening with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, David Hyde Pierce heading a Cole Porter night August 16, and the original stars of Lincoln Center's smash remount of South Pacific in a Rodgers & Hammerstein tribute on September 6.

Sylvia McNair sings Guenevere to George Hearn's Arthur during Ravinia's opening-night performance of the musical Camelot.
(Oscar Lopez/For the Sun-Times)

The concert staging of a musical this year seemed almost an afterthought, then, even if it launched the whole Ravinia season on Friday night and brought back the three excellent leads from Fella: George Hearn, Sylvia McNair, and Rod Gilfry.  This year's show was a one-night-only, non-costumed, non-decorated presentation of Camelot, an inferior work that owes much of its fame to its posthumous identification with President John F. Kennedy and his 1,000 days in Washington.  Presumably it was chosen this year at least in part because of the arrival of an idealistic young Hyde Park couple in the White House.

In the arts, non-artistic reasons for fame are as poor as non-artistic reasons for a revival, and while the excellent cast made every song sound its best and Broadway whiz Paul Gemignani, a last-minute sub for an ailing Erich Kunzel, had the Ravinia Festival Orchestra playing beautifully, Lerner and Loewe's 1960 retelling of the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table has been an imperfect work since before its troubled launch almost 50 years ago.  Lawn attendance was sparse despite a beautiful evening, and the Pavilion crowd lacked the variety of ages previous efforts have drawn in.

Camelot's unwieldy book can either be presented at its great and dull length or chopped, as it was here, so that the second act makes no sense at all.  None of the lyrics come close to Lerner's achievements in My Fair Lady five years earlier, and Loewe's tunes for this, his last original stage score, are much more Easy Listening than Great American Songbook.

Still, kudos to Kauffman for getting Ravinia mainstay Hearn to take up his first Arthur two weeks before his 75th birthday: from the title song and his first spoken narratives on, this was a perfect and poignant performance.  McNair gave Arthur's queen, Guenevere, all that can be given to a part already old-fashioned in 1961.  As Nathan Gunn did with the New York Philharmonic last year, Rod Gilfry sang Lancelot's songs of self-importance beautifully and nobly, and if "If Ever I Would Leave You" shaded a bit into Robert Goulet's original at times, well, isn't that part of the point?

Brit Elder, Dutchgal Jansen, and American CSO make Czech Dvořák shine

Here, with cuts restored, is my Saturday June 6 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday June 4, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Sir Mark Elder and violinist Janine Jansen.  The CSO's Dvorak Festival runs through June 20.

Elder right leader for Dvorak fest

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeats Saturday evening at 8 p.m.

One of the many fitting things about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Dvořák Festival, launched Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, is that it is being led by a conductor who is neither Czech nor American.

For one of the central arguments of Antonín Dvořák's life and music is that Western art music is both universal and multicultural. A product of a provincial riverside village in Central Bohemia, the son of a butcher who also played the zither, no one dod more than Dvořák  to integrate folk and dance music into classical music and to build bridges between the Old and New Worlds, including the musics and cultures of Black and Native Americans.

Conductor Mark Elder

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When: 8 p.m. tonight

Where: Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue

Tickets: $19-$199

Phone: (312) 294-3000

That Sir Mark Elder, the son of a dentist in a provincial riverside town in northeast England, who cut his teeth as a conductor in Australia, should prove to be such a natural and idiomatic leader of the composer's shifting and broken rhythms and adaptations of complex, joyous yet at times dark Central European folk melodies would surely allow the great Bohemian artist the chance to say, "I told you so."

When Dvořák  was at his height -- living, working, and teaching in New York City -- and visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 to conduct an all-Czech program,  Chicago had the third-largest Czech population of any city in the world after only Prague and the imperial capital Vienna. His music had already been played at the very first CSO concert, in 1891.  

And so to have this three-week exploration of once-popular but now-neglected pieces (this week’s opener, the 1883 Scherzo capriccioso, Op. 66), works recently restored to the repertoire (the 1879-80 A minor Violin Concerto, Op. 53), and accepted masterworks (the 1884-85 D minor Seventh Symphony, Op. 70),  makes sense in so many ways.  That his great-grandson and look-alike, Petr Dvořák, had journeyed here from the Czech Republic to open the festival brought much full circle.

Dvořák would certainly also have been thrilled by the belated CSO debut of Dutch violin phenom Janine Jansen, 31 (above).  Tall but imposing musically rather than physically, she jumped into the concerto, one of the most physically awkward for its soloist, with confidence and gusto, and never wavered.  Her performance of the Adagio movement backed her claim that this is a work she loves as much as Brahms.

In the familiar Symphony No. 7 and the relatively little-played Scherzo capriccioso, Elder launched himself to the higher ranks of guest conductors. He simultaneously made the case for this music's unique mixture of sensibilities and its general greatness at every moment . Strings, horns, woodwinds all played beautifully and thrillingly, none more so than English horn Scott Hostetler.

June 5, 1989 -- Twenty years ago in Beijing, twenty years of shame

This is Charlie Cole's shot of this (in)famous incident during the crushing of the student democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in Beijing by the Chinese Communist government and the "People's Liberation Army."  Cole, shooting for Newsweek, was one of four news photographers whose images, taken from balconies of the Beijing Hotel, captured this event -- an anonymous young man with nothing but a coat and two shopping bags stopping a line of PLA tanks -- and informed a shocked and disbelieving world.

The Lens weblog of The New York Times has a great set of features including e-mailed recollections of each of the four as well as the first ever publication of a fifth shot, by an Associated Press reporter taken from street level just before the tanks reached the still unidentified man.

The famous one minute and 12 seconds Chinese video clip of "The Tank Man" can also be seen here.