You can approach works of art with a checklist, as many aficionados who fill halls for ballet, song recitals, or opera performances do. Or you can have an open mind and eyes and ears to match. Of course experience and expertise come in handy in forming evaluations. But when they stand in the way of understanding how artists create interpretations as a means of drawing closer to a work, they are little more than gateposts to pedantry. These thoughts come to mind during Matthias Goerne's performances of the three great song cycles of Franz Schubert this week at Ravinia's Martin Theatre -- a week to be capped with Goerne's collaboration Sunday with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Ravinia's pavilion in orchestrated versions of seven other Schubert songs. What Goerne is sharing with his audience here -- the only U.S. venue for these programs -- is no how-to guide for singing German lieder nor any kind of a model for other aspiring vocalists. Rather, it is an argument for a full encounter with a masterwork, an encounter that goes beyond technical choices (important as they are) and decisions about minute-by-minute presentation and comes instead to a meeting with the work's creator and a sharing of the soul that has been transformed by that meeting. Schubert's greatest song cycle, Winterreise ("Winter Journey"), performed Wednesday night at the Martin, is a work of madness, the madness of its narrator, a survivor of some sort of failed courtship, and the insights that Schubert had even at age 30 into the mind of someone who becomes unhinged over the end of a love affair. Goerne, who first recorded this 80-minute, 24-song work in 1996 when he was not yet 30, knows that he is showing us a lost soul; his performance is like that of a great stage actor who has wholly assimilated a monodrama of Samuel Beckett and then allows his narration of those lines to carry him and his audience away. That Goerne rocks and sways and sometimes seems to fall into a trance onstage is nothing artificial and never done for effect. It's where he's found himself after more than a decade of living with and digging deeper into this material. The tether here is the piano partnership of Schubertian master Christoph Eschenbach. If Goerne can take us to inner places of desperation in such songs as "Der Wegweiser" ("The Road Sign"), then Eschenbach can play the piano so softly and with such a sense of hushed yet always lyrical sound in that song or the famed, closing "Der Leirmann" ("The Hurdy-Gurdy Man") that it mystifies even the professional pianists in the audience. The two offer the posthumous Schwanengesang ("Swan Song") today; Eschenbach also gives a too-rare-for-him solo performance of Schubert's last sonata, in B-Flat Major, D. 960, to close what is sure to be a most memorable week.Here is my Friday July 31 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Wednesday July 29, 2009, performance of Schubert's Winterreise, D. 911, by Matthias Goerne and Christoph Eschenbach at Ravinia's Martin Theatre. The don't-miss recital series wraps up tonight with Schwanengesang, D. 957, and the B-Flat Major piano sonata, D. 960, at 8 p.m. Goerne and Eschenbach then join with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Sunday at Ravinia's pavilion at 5 p.m. for a program of seven Schubert songs orchestrated by Brahms, Reger (including Im Abendrot and Erlkönig), Webern (including Der Wegweiser from Winterreise -- see below -- and Tränenregen from Die schöne Müllerin), and Anon E. Mous ("An Silvia"), along with some Johann Strauss, Jr. waltzes and polkas.
Goerne's Winterreise goes beyond the norm
Baritone reads Schubert's mind at Ravinia
BY ANDREW PATNER
Here is my Friday July 10 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Phil Grabsky's new film In Search of Beethoven, which has its U.S. prémière tonight at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then has a special and exclusive four-week run there through August 6. Phil Grabsky will make personal appearances at the prémière tonight at 6:30 p.m., at the 2:30 and 8:15 screenings on Saturday, and at the 2:30 p.m. show on Sunday. As a part of a benefit for WFMT Radio, I'll be leading an audience Q-and-A with Grabsky after that Sunday screening. And the filmmaker's 2006 In Search of Mozart will have an encore run of four performances from July 25 to August 1.
'In Search of Beethoven' gives genius his due
BY ANDREW PATNER
Three years ago, British filmmaker Phil Grabsky upended the creaky models of movies -- documentaries or features -- about great composers with In Search of Mozart. With portable and hand-held cameras, and without actors or re-enactments, Grabsky followed the steps and carriage rides of the boy and then adult genius using only actual musical performances and interviews with players, conductors, and musicologists to tell his story.
After returning something close to the "real" Mozart to viewers and listeners, it was perhaps inevitable that Grabsky would turn to the miraculous artist's successor and more human-seeming counterpart Ludwig van Beethoven for his next subject. And now we have the U.S. première run of the similarly formatted In Search of Beethoven.
The contrasts between the lives and works of these two migrants to Vienna, Europe's musical capital for so much of the 18th and 19th centuries, must have been both a positive and a complicated challenge to Grabsky. Mozart's public life as a performer began when he was a tiny child and was well documented until his early death at 35 in 1791. He was dragged back and forth from capital to capital for his early years, providing a filmmaker with a steadily changing landscape. His story was also that of his father and mother, his sister, wife, sister-in-law, and children. And with so much of his output given over to opera, his life provides multiple opportunities for spectacle and other stage scenes.
Beethoven (1770-1827), however, was almost perpetually alone. Leaving and losing his parents in Germany early, he lived in Vienna essentially permanently from age 21 and began to lose his hearing already by 25, forcing him to withdraw from the more public life of a piano virtuoso. For whatever reason -- Grabsky gives reasonable weight to class issues -- Beethoven neither married nor had any serious relationships. The only relative with whom he had much interaction was his nephew, Karl, whose troubles consumed much of the composer's time.
Grabsky's solution to this more limited narrative material is to follow Beethoven more in time than in place. This often proves ingenious as we are reminded by the film's talking heads and performing fingers (many shots are of various hands on various types of keyboards) that so much of Beethoven's accomplishment was to restructure the way time and structure worked in music. While Mozart, whether an angel or something like a space alien, worked almost effortlessly, he still worked with the formats that were well-known in his day. Beethoven exploded these structures, whether in solo piano works, string quartets, symphonies and concertos, or even in his one mixed bag of an opera, Leonora, later renamed Fidelio. He did so with a great deal of real and artistic thinking aloud, ever conscious that, although he had a gift "from the Deity," he was all too human and so was his daily struggle to make art. If politics and history were far from Mozart's interests, Beethoven was keenly aware of the tumult of his times and the movement from structured societies with powerful kings and churches to democratic, humanistic experiments.
Grabsky therefore takes us more into Beethoven's head than onto his footpaths. He is well-served by the articulate and wonderfully insightful music professionals he's recruited. The running commentary and performance excerpts of Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda make his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra next season something to be anticipated. Pianists Emanuel Ax, Paul Lewis, Leif Ove Andsnes, and Hélène Grimaud do wonderful jobs illustrating Beethoven's revolutions in sound just by demonstrating and commenting on "simple" passages, as does frequent Grant Park guest 'cellist Alban Gerhardt.
There are some strange omissions, chiefly the great Diabelli Variations that occupied Beethoven so much for four years in his late 40s and early 50s and which were the subject of an entire captivating Broadway play this year, 33 Variations, starring Jane Fonda. But Grabsky makes his larger points well here, for aficionados and for newcomers, no more so than when German bass-baritone Albert Dohmen passionately observes that "living in a world of so much video bombardment and so much trash," Beethoven's life and work show us how much greater a thing it is to be concerned so totally with life and joy and humanity and true creativity.
