Andrew Patner: The View from Here

CSO: capstone to the Haitink Years: Symphony No. 9 and a "Voyage" -- Beethoven Festival concert 5

Here is my Saturday June 19 suntimes.com and Sunday June 20 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday  June 18, 2010 fifth and final program  of the three-week Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beethoven Festival with principal conductor Bernard Haitink.  The concert repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.  

Haitink wraps up CSO tenure with revealing Beethoven's Ninth

Revealing capstone of the Haitink Years

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

"I really don't have much interest anymore in doing single symphonies by Beethoven," Bernard Haitink said last month, speaking from his home in Lucerne, Switzerland.  "And while I recognize that it makes things bigger and seems more difficult, it's really doing the whole set of nine that is so fascinating."

Haitink brings his astonishingly clear and subtle survey of the full series of Beethoven's symphonies with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to a dramatic close this weekend at Orchestra Hall with the last of them, the great and still revolutionary Ninth (1822-24), the so-called "Choral" Symphony.  And while he will continue to visit Chicago -- he is slated to conclude the CSO's next season with two weeks of concerts -- these performances also bring to an end his four seasons as principal conductor here.  And just as Friday night's concert  -- almost like a revealing X-ray of a piece that almost everyone thinks he already knows --  helped us to see the symphonic Beethoven whole, so this summing up allows us to observe a period in the orchestra's history that can now deservedly be called the Haitink Years.

Concert and tenure alike are and have been marked by inquiry and an almost quiet upsetting of expectations.  There is the 81-year-old maestro's combination of gentle politeness with steely determination.  His dry and wry Dutch wit.  His small but highly individual catalog of physical gestures.  All of these, along with his characteristic 8:04 p.m. concert start time, will be sorely missed.

But the gift of his time here will resonate beyond yearning.  While we may have heard more emotional performances of the Ninth -- think of Daniel Barenboim's last concert as CSO music director exactly four years ago, or Leonard Bernstein's commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall telecast from that city in 1989 -- none was as revealing as this one.  None made you think more than this one.

This became fully apparent with the slow, third movement where Haitink showed the webs that Beethoven is weaving -- and, we now understood, was always weaving -- in this work and came to full flower in the finale where every part of the orchestra, the massed and expert Chicago Symphony Chorus, and the four American soloists -- soprano Jessica Rivera, mezzo Kelley O'Connor, tenor Clifton Forbis and bass-baritone Eric Owens, the latter particularly fine -- were heard as a part of a complex whole, not merely more rocks in a sonic avalanche.

As with the brief, beautiful and almost never performed 1814-15 choral song setting of Goethe verses, A Becalmed Sea and A Prosperous Voyage, that opened the evening, Haitink gave us a Beethoven full of surprises.  It's clear he's still curious about every measure of these works.  Conductor, orchestra, and audience were all deeply moved by the long and loud ovation.  How privileged we have been that he has shared his own voyage and spirit with us.

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The Festival, and the CSO season, concludes with these concerts.  Tickets are sold out but turnbacks may become available. Both concerts are preceded by a chamber performance by CSO performers curated by Haitink -- including, on Sunday afternoon June 20, the Grosse Fuge, op. 133 -- and a talk by Princeton musicologist Scott Burnham.  Burnham, the author of the landmark Beethoven Hero (1995), will also give a talk entitled "Beethoven the Hero," Saturday at 12 noon at Orchestra Hall, followed by a performance of the early Wind Octet.  Admission is free.

Grant Park opening night: mixed performance doesn't dim lights for great season ahead

Here is my Friday June 18 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Wednesday June 16, 2010 opening night concert of the 2010 Grant Park Music Festival with principal conductor Carlos Kalmar and guest violinist Elina Vähälä. Concerts are always free and continue through August 21.

Kalmar is on a mission

Conductor builds on long-running hit in Grant Park

BY ANDREW PATNER

This summer marks the 76th season of the Grant Park Music Festival, its 10th under the musical leadership of principal conductor Carlos Kalmar, its sixth full summer at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, and its first concert series since Elizabeth Hurley took over as executive director.

Enumerating these things is worthwhile as they are all important and they are all good. No other U.S. city has a free, municipally funded, top-level, outdoor classical music festival.  The Uruguayan-Austrian Kalmar, who also heads the Oregon Symphony Orchestra and soon will take over Spain's Radio and Television Orchestra, has been both a creative dynamo and a true orchestra builder.

[Conductor Carlos Kalmar leads the Grant Park Orchestra in an Italian-flavored program Wednesday night at the Pritzker Pavilion. Scott Stewart/Sun-Times]

The Frank Gehry-designed pavilion, which opened in July 2004 in what has become the most popular corner of Chicago, has proved a magnet for audiences in the tens of thousands  -- last year’s Festival drew over a third of a million people.  At a time of economic constraint, Hurley, a veteran top administrator and fund-raiser of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and New York's Metropolitan Opera, is just the steady and determined hand the organization needs.

Hurley's visionary predecessor, James W, Palermo, now the president of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, left an important legacy in Kalmar, the brilliant chorus director Christopher Bell (starting his ninth season here), and the varied and original programming that Kalmar now continues.

While Highland Park's Ravinia Festival seems to think of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as an afterthought and classical music as just part of its "mix," Grant Park remains committed to its core missions, which include presenting American works and neglected repertoire, and showcasing its accomplished professional chorus.

There's no reason that such things can't be done in a popular fashion, as Kalmar and the Grant Park Orchestra showed Wednesday night at the Pritzker Pavilion before whatever the free-admission equivalent to a sold-out crowd -- seats and lawn -- is called.  After a spirited "Star-Spangled Banner," with a healthy presence of enthusiastic singers in the audience, the Italian-flavored program began with Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture.  Kalmar made structure and ingredients clear without sacrificing the increasingly lively Neapolitan dance rhythms.  English horn Judith Kulb received a deserved ovation.

I wish I could have been more excited by Finnish violinist Elina Vähälä making her Chicago debut in Vivaldi's much-loved The Four Seasons.  Clearly both focused and energetic, she brought little new to a work so often heard that it requires a more personal touch or a very high level of virtuosity to bring it off.  Kalmar and the orchestra seemed dutifully to follow her manner -- neither modern nor period, German, Russian or Italian.  The always-reliable David Schrader was the harpsichordist.

Life and color were restored in Ottorino Respighi's 1928 Feste Romane, the sometimes gaudy also-ran to The Fountains of Rome and The Pines of same in the composer's Roman trilogy.  From trumpets to extra percussion, every section matched the Technicolor requirements of the score.

Friday and Saturday hold heavier work for the GPO and introduce the chorus for the season with Haydn's Te Deum, Hindemith's Nobilissima visione, and Beethoven's rarely heard Mass in C Major.

CSO: Haitink's panorama: Symphonies 1 and 7 and "Leonore" 3 -- Beethoven Festival concert 4

Here is my Thursday June 17 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Tuesday  June 15, 2010 fourth installment  of the three-week Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beethoven Festival with principal conductor Bernard Haitink.   

Beethoven's First and Seventh get due respect from Haitink, CSO

Conductor knows you can't mess with perfection

BY ANDREW PATNER

One of the many things that makes Beethoven unique among composers is that he and his music have maintained their intense popularity for two centuries.

That popularity has not varied much in kind, either.  Audiences in the early 1800s and in our 21st century each find the same power, humane insight, and sense of inspiration and hope in his compositions.

[Bernard Haitink leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven's First Symphony on Tuesday at Symphony Center.  Todd Rosenberg Photography]

These factors might seem to make putting on a survey of all of Beethoven's symphonies an easy task: Everyone's going to like them anyway, right?

In fact, it makes the challenge for conductor and orchestra even greater.  Falling into habit or rote can dull or routinize any work, no matter how great.

Wednesday night at Orchestra Hall with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, principal conductor Bernard Haitink demonstrated that there has been no danger of this in the CSO's three-week Beethoven Festival. After a lifetime spent with these pieces, as both player and conductor, Haitink's current perspective is capping a set of three recent cycles intentionally given with three different orchestras.  Having immersed himself in the new set of complete performing editions from the German music publisher Bärenreiter, Haitink has also looked deeply into his own musical experience to emerge with a general perspective that allows listeners -- and players -- to hear each symphony anew and in the context of all nine entries.

Every score marking -- Beethoven of course introduced these works as conductor as well as composer -- is observed, whether for dynamics, emphasis, color, or tempo.  Every marked repeat is taken: "They are in the score. That settles it for me," Haitink said recently.  And since he knows that every player and most listeners have a picture and set of memories and expectations coming into this immersion, he is able to play off of those and create additional excitement and healthy tension.

And so this week's concerts, the festival's penultimate program, came off less as a marathon of three distinct works that took us from 1799 to 1812 than a climb up a mountain of Beethoven's design and accomplishment.  The First Symphony, the calling card of a 29-year-old genius, filled with subtle and not-so-subtle transformations of Mozart and Haydn's earlier creations, was followed by that opera in an overture, the 1804-05 Leonore No. 3.  The program's second half held the nonpareil Seventh from 1811-12 with its outbursts of joy, its solemn meditations, and its lessons in harmony that can sweep up any listener.

Haitink's understanding of Beethoven's sense of structure was underlined by bringing three works with slow and deceptive introductions together on the program.  His insight that the coda of the Leonore No. 3 relates to and ties together all parts of the piece showed that it is much more than a thrill ride.  And his reassembling the basic elements of the famed second movement of the Seventh resulted in a performance of the Allegretto like none I've ever heard and, I'm prepared to say, surpassing any others played here.

And what playing!  Every section, from first violins to basses, horns, trumpets (Christopher Martin again the offstage Leonore hero) and timpani and the now signature fabulous winds.  Flute Mathieu Dufour and oboe Eugene Izotov play almost as a heavenly union, and clarinet John Bruce Yeh, bassoon William Buchman and all of their seconds made an unbelievable choir.  And it is the human choir, the chorus that closes the titanic Ninth Symphony, that we await in the last orchestral concerts Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

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The orchestral portion of the Festival concludes with the Ninth Symphony on June 18, 19, and 20.  Tickets are sold out but turnbacks may become available.  Each remaining concert is preceded by a chamber performance by CSO performers curated by Haitink -- including, on Sunday afternoon June 20, the Grosse Fuge, op. 133 -- and a talk by Princeton musicologist Scott Burnham.  Burnham, the author of the landmark Beethoven Hero (1995), will also give a talk entitled "Beethoven the Hero," Sundat at 12 noon at Orchestra Hall, followed by a performance of the early Wind Octet.  Admission is free.

My (radio -- and on recording) guests tonight -- Zimmermann, Wernick, Rakowski,

Tonight on Critical Thinking on 98.7WFMT:

I'll be playing new recordings from the Avie and Bridge labels of music by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and LIVING composers Richard Wernick, and David Rakowski performed by violinist Augustin Hadelich, horn player William Purvis and the Juilliard String Quartet, and Chicago's own, pianist  Amy Briggs.

That's  tonight from 10 to 11 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT and via free streaming over wfmt.com.

See you on the radio!

CSO: Haitink finds opera's spirit in Symphonies 4 and 6 and "Leonore" 2 -- Beethoven Festival concert 3

Here is my Saturday June 12 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday  June 10, 2010 third installment  of the three-week Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beethoven Festival with principal conductor Bernard Haitink.  The orchestral portion of the Festival resumes on June 15 and runs through Sunday June 20.

CSO conductor Haitink shows operatic touch with Beethoven symphonic works

Sense of vocal presence in instrumental evening

BY ANDREW PATNER

We have been fortunate in the four seasons that Bernard Haitink has graced the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as principal conductor to see and hear him in a wide range of music -- large-scale symphonies from Bruckner, Mahler, and Shostakovich, 20th century works from Britain, France and Poland, new work, Classical period work, choral and instrumental pieces, and those featuring both piano and vocal soloists.

But we've missed out on a big part of his long career by never hearing him in opera, even in concert form.  Time, money, and other legitimate priorities all played their parts.  But this week's installment in the CSO's ongoing Beethoven Festival, heard Thursday, gives more than a small taste of what Haitink brings to the world of opera and song, and not only because it opened with a commanding performance of the often raucous and lesser-played Leonore Overture No. 2, written in 1805 for Beethoven's sole opera, Fidelio.  In fact, the thought really wouldn't leave my head during the quicksilver playing of the Fourth Symphony, a work that is too often seen as merely occupying the space between the composer's signature Eroica and Fifth Symphonies.

[Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal conductor Bernard Haitink.]

In Haitink's experienced hands, we hear Mozart echoing through the half-hour-plus 1806 work -- but fortified and expanded upon.  Beethoven scaled back his instrumentation to a Mozart/Haydn ensemble and length for this entry after the mighty Third Symphony. But he didn't limit his curiosity.  In many ways, he successfully spins out and develops more moods and story lines in this work than he does in the one he actually wrote for the theatre.  With great economy (and Haitink is made for economy), Beethoven gives us the equivalents of arias, ensembles, and accompanied recitatives (by instruments taking solos).  And as he did in the overture, where a listener always wonders if the players will accidentally make a move from the more frequently played Leonore No. 3, Haitink made sure that Beethoven's thrill in the unexpected underscored the pulse of the final movement. Christopher Martin's offstage trumpet sent shivers down the spine.

It's the Sixth Symphony, the 1807-08 Pastoral, that we're accustomed to thinking of as storytelling, what with Beethoven's own descriptive movement names -- "Merry Gathering of Country Folk," "Thunderstorm," and so forth.  But Haitink knows that how the tale is told musically is what matters here, not a lot of acting out or trying to create a film score before its time.  It was as if we were hearing a fine opera company in the gardens of a country house, except our singers were flute Mathieu Dufour, oboe Eugene Izotov, bassoon David McGill, and guest clarinet Patrick Messina of the Orchestra National de France -- blending with his colleagues as if he lived here -- with horns Daniel Gingrich and James Smelser supplying brilliant atmospherics.  Haitink gave us a "slow" movement taken at an almost brisk pace that worked sublimely.  A good word for the whole evening: sublime.

CSO: Pacing remains the key for Haitink in Symphonies 2 and 3 -- Beethoven Festival concert 2

Here is my Monday June 7 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Saturday  June 4, 2010 second installment  of the three-week Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beethoven Festival with principal conductor Bernard Haitink.  The Festival runs through Sunday June 20.

Pacing remains the key for Haitink

In Beethoven as well as life

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeats Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

Structure in music was something Beethoven both knew a great deal about and exploded for all time over the course of his prolific career.

So it's also interesting to note the structure of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's first-ever Beethoven Festival with its principal conductor Bernard Haitink.  To present the nine symphonies requires choices in order and pairing, and they can be instructive.

[Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal conductor Bernard Haitink.]

On Wednesday and Thursday, Haitink kicked off the three-week survey with an underestimated entry, the Eighth, and then the work -- when not in the right hands -- most overexposed, No. 5.  The match was a reminder that all of these works have something to say, and we need to give each of them careful hearing.

The program Saturday also brought a giant, No. 3, Eroica, and a lesser-heard opus, No. 2.  But here we had back-to-back earlier creations, from 1802 and 1803, and playing them chronologically offered building blocks, points of expansion, and components given what might be called creative destruction in the larger, later composition.

Again, Haitink commands our listening.  Pedants love to pick over Haitink's Beethoven; if you've heard and read a few things, you obviously must know more than this elegant musician, who has lived with these works for 60 years.  But the meticulous Dutch conductor never makes claims to definitiveness, especially with Beethoven, whom he has revisited in full cycles three times with three different orchestras in just the last three years.

Nor does he want us to hear the symphonies piecemeal -- "I think we all need to really spend time together with Beethoven to begin to get close to what he is doing," he told me in a recent interview.

Pacing is key for Haitink -- to his career as well as to each piece.  His intense study and re-study of Beethoven scores -- particularly their tempo markings -- has brought him to perhaps the most illuminating set of choices before audiences today.  Fleet, without being rushed, Haitink's tempi are about the inner sense of urgency in these great works, not about whipping up sound for effect.  If some mistake this for caution, that's their loss.

This festival also celebrates Haitink's four years atop the CSO's masthead.  Every influence he has exerted here has been for the good, building on former music director Daniel Barenboim's reshaping of the orchestra to focus on sectional and chamber-like sound, but doing so with calm authority.

Possibly aided by the orchestra performing without stage risers, the CSO strings continue to shine and sing in ways new to the orchestra's history.  Daniel Gingrich and David Griffin led the superb horns, and Haitink waded into the CSO at concert's end to shake hands with principal flute Mathieu Dufour and principal oboe Eugene Izotov.

It's fitting, too, that each program in the series is preceded by a chamber performance by CSO players, at Haitink's insistence and with his own underwriting.  I've heard two thus far, the D Major String Trio, Op. 9, No. 2, with Qing Hou, violin, Lawrence Neuman, viola, and Brant Taylor, cello, and the B-Flat Major Archduke Trio, Op. 97, with concertmaster Robert Chen and principal cello John Sharp, joined by pianist Reiko Aizawa.  Both were winners, as was the first of three Saturday symposia on the composer's historical context and reception.  Of the reacquainting with Beethoven, there is -- and should be -- no end.

CSO: Beethoven's 5th + 8th = Haitink highlight -- Beethoven Festival concert 1

Here is the full version of my Friday June 4 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Wednesday  June 2, 2010 kick-off concert of the three-week Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beethoven Festival with principal conductor Bernard Haitink.  The Festival runs through Sunday June 20.

CSO: Beethoven's 5th + 8th = Haitink highlight

Conductor makes magic

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

From the moments Wednesday at Orchestra Hall that Bernard Haitink signaled the first notes of Beethoven's Fidelio Overture and then those of his Eighth and Fifth Symphonies with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, you knew you were in a very special place.

Perhaps you knew it even before those rippling and rhythmic measures sounded out.  For the full house was unusually attentive and palpably expectant.  In cities where Beethoven festivals are done frequently, either as money makers or due to lack of programming vision, there's not much to such an occasion.  But for one of the world's finest conductors, at 81, to lead the CSO in a survey of the nine symphonies by this most charismatic and revolutionary of all composers is something different.

This series of nine CSO concerts, many chamber music performances, three free Saturday symposia, and a free film screening Friday night also marks the end of Haitink's four years as the CSO's principal conductor.

As one longtime subscriber and I noted on exiting the hall, that means there is a lot of love in this space. Love for Beethoven and love from the audience, love from the players for a consummately professional and richly experienced conductor who gave them leadership at a time it was almost desperately needed, and love from a conductor for an orchestra "that does something very difficult," as Haitink told me.  "It allows me simply to be myself and to say musically what I might have to say."

In some ways all of the “What is there new to observe about Beethoven now?” questions are satisfied by this conjunction of deep affection and superb performances.  Beethoven is about the totality of human possibility, and this is not a subject that changes -- except perhaps for the worse -- or loses its power as time goes by. And Haitink knows -- as well as anyone active in music today -- that it is we who have to open ourselves to this great musical maker and thinker.

Haitink is as surprised and as amazed today by Beethoven’s unpredictability as he was as a young violinist and conductor in his native Amsterdam in the 1950s.  And it is this above all this is his unique way these days with Beethoven.  Of course he understands the pacing and the relationship between different and changing tempi in each piece and each movement in a way that few others do.  Of course he has a psychic-seeming way of carrying senses of dotted rhythms between himself and the orchestra without beating out every count.  Just those opening measures of each work contained as much unseen rippling as the flutter of a butterfly's wings.

But he also is so in the moment at each moment that we forget what is happening next in works that we might have heard dozens, even hundreds, of times.  Haitink draws this same watching out for the next turn from the CSO players -- from Daniel Gingrich and James Smelser's ruddy horn calls and leadership, to Eugene Izotov's heart-stabbing oboe solo in the Fifth, to trombones that are just right -- tuneful, buoyant and never too much.

It's magic.  But it's magic that comes from decades of work, of trial and error, of training and practice by everyone on that stage.  And when these master musicians turn their full attention to one another and to Beethoven in such a concentrated way, you are reminded of why you are here -- here in this hall and even here on this earth.

The festival continues through June 20. For full details, go to www.cso.org or call (312) 294-3000.