Andrew Patner: The View from Here

My (radio) guest tonight -- Pierre Boulez on Ligeti, Janáček, and Szymanowski

Tonight from 10:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. CST (one half hour later than usual) on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com my guest (in the second of two new programs recorded on October 15) will be the legendary composer-conductor Pierre Boulez, Helen Regenstein conductor emeritus of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, discussing the music of Ligeti, Janáček, and Szymanowski, composers on his most recent and current CSO programs and his most recent CD. 

Boulez leads Schoenberg's Transfigured Night and Janáček's Glagolitic Mass with the Chicago Symphony Chorus and soloists December 2, 3, and 4.

You can read my Chicago Sun-Times review of his CSO concert of Ligeti Debussy, and Ravel this past weekend here.

The program will then be posted Tuesday at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast/download/streaming.

See you on the radio!

CSO and Boulez: Chen's remarkable Ligeti, Debussy and Ravel with haunting authority

Here is my Saturday November 27 suntimes.com and Monday November 29  Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday November 26, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez and concertmaster Robert Chen.  

 

Boulez's passion shines in launch of two-week CSO series 

Concertmaster Chen is remarkable soloist in Ligeti concerto 

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.

Pierre Boulez has become such a familiar part of Chicago's musical life over the past 20 years that some might have taken for granted his flying to Chicago last month from Europe to step in with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for an ailing Riccardo Muti.

As those concerts of Mahler's Seventh Symphony -- subsequently televised on PBS's Great Performances -- made clear, even at 85 Boulez is never about merely filling time or adding a check mark to his conducting catalogue.  And after spending several weeks here working on his own projects and attending an unusual range of CSO programs as a listener, Friday night he launched the two-week series of major concerts that he was actually scheduled to lead this season.

Boulez and his contemporary György Ligeti, a Romanian-born Hungarian Jew, led parallel lives as compositional investigators that crossed with some regularity from the early 1990s until Ligeti's death at 83 in 2006.  A key work in their late-career collaboration was Ligeti's sole Violin Concerto written from 1990 to 1992, with Boulez leading his Ensemble Contemporain and its dedicatee Saschko Gawriloff in the first recording just after its première. While Ligeti had opposed the formal nature of Boulez's structural idea of composing, the two men each greatly admired the originality and integrity of the other's work.  If Chicago had to wait almost two decades to hear this half-hour masterpiece, at least we are hearing it with Boulez at the helm.

And with the CSO's own concertmaster, Robert Chen, as the remarkable soloist.  The five-movement work is unlike any other in the repertoire, and the solo part rises from and falls back into the chamber-sized orchestra sometimes in ways that are initially indiscernible.  One could even argue that the soloist should be an ensemble's leader as his or her role is to push both audience and musicians to hear music in an entirely different way: Odd sounds from a strangely tuned violin and viola.  Ocarinas and slide whistles and instruments reaching for the extremes of their range.  Rhythms derived from the chants of African Pygmies and cross-ticking clocks.  And a real or imagined folk melody that made its way into works throughout Ligeti's lifetime.  Ligeti usually shunned electronics but was fascinated with the ways people heard things simultaneously and in layers in computer and digital eras, and the beautiful and lyrical Violin Concerto and Chen's total and never show-boating involvement brings this fascination to life.

Boulez placed the Ligeti in the midst of French works that also questioned accepted forms and ideas about sound of their time.  The four haunting Symphonic Fragments from Debussy's 1911 music for a very strange stage spectacle, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by the poet-provocateur Gabriele d'Annunzio, opened the concert sounding almost like a space exploration.  Ravel's own 1911 Mother Goose Suite and Debussy's 1903-05 classic La mer made up the second half in performances that seemed subdued only in the sense that they were never overwrought.  Boulez, a connoisseur of visual art, particularly modern prints and works on paper, guided everything with an eye for subtlety that only brought out the richness and careful assembly of these four remarkable creations. That Chen returned to his concertmaster's chair after intermission only underscored the committed playing by the orchestra.  English horn Scott Hostetler was most prominent among numerous fine section leader solos.

Note: The originally announced 1993-94 In Cauda II by the late Italian composer Franco Donatoni will be rescheduled due to the delayed delivery of the score.  The Ravel proved an unexpectedly moving and effective replacement.

Lyric Opera of Chicago's 'Un ballo in maschera': Stephanie Blythe tells the future

Here is my Wednesday November 17 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the opening night performance Monday, November 15, 2010 of Lyric Opera of Chicago's latest production of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball).

Amelia (Sondra Radvanovsky) pleads with her husband Renato (Mark Delavan) to grant her permission to say goodbye to their son.  From an image by Dan Rest/Lyric Opera of Chicago.

‘Ball’ invites best guests

Lyric sticks close to Verdi’s intent, and Blythe shines

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Through December 10

In an eclectic season of new productions and unusual works, Lyric Opera of Chicago is offering one Italian repertory staple rolled right down the middle.  Verdi’s 1859 Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball) opened Monday night at the Civic Opera House in an absolutely traditional production, down to the powdered wigs and chandeliers. Fortunately, the straightforward story (king loves best friend’s wife, etc.) defies much additional interpretation. The work is best when it’s all about the singing.

This is the opera’s 12th run at Lyric since its first performance here in the company's second season in 1955. Its earlier casts were a who’s who of great singers: Björling, Gobbi, Di Stefano, Nilsson, Tucker, Vickers, Crespin, Bumbry, Milnes, Arroyo, Bruson, Carreras, Ricciarelli, Pavarotti (twice in the ’80s), Scotto, Cossotto, among others. While we don’t live in a world of such Verdians today -- although the last time Ballo was in the Ardis Krainik Theatre eight years ago Dmitri Hvorostovsky was the king’s friend and assassin, Renato -- we are fortunate that Lyric was able to recruit an all-American cast well above the merely adequate ones seen elsewhere.  And in the much-belated Lyric debut of mezzo Stephanie Blythe as the gypsy Ulrica, we have the chance to see a major figure of the contemporary opera stage.

[The king (Frank Lopardo, center) greets his subjects in  Verdi’s A Masked Ball at Lyric Opera.  John j. Kim/Sun-Times]

Most operagoers know that Verdi’s initial libretto, based on the actual 1792 assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden at a masked ball at the Stockholm Opera House (!), had to be shifted around to various locales and cultures so as not to encourage regicide in Italy. These changes really make no difference; although the Lyric production is allegedly back in Sweden, I’m sticking with the familiar Italian names here to avoid additional confusion.

Blythe has great stage presence and a clarion voice.  She may settle in to the part’s lower end as the run continues, but either way, she will clearly be a Katisha not to be missed in The Mikado up next at Lyric. Chicago-area native soprano Sondra Radvanovsky likewise should make her part more her own over time but she communicates the pure-hearted Amelia at every moment and delivers fully in her third-act plea to her anger-blinded husband, “Morrò, ma prima in grazia.”

The male leads are serious in their efforts, and as the foolhardy king, Riccardo, tenor Frank Lopardo was clear in voice and style throughout. Baritone Mark Delavan had the persona of the vengeful Renato down, but his voice was not full enough to make the great “Eri tu” solo scene all that it should be.

Ryan Center alum soprano Kathleen Kim takes the sporty role of the page Oscar, so memorably given by Harolyn Blackwell and Kathleen Battle in the ’80s, and runs with it. If director Renata Scotto, who sang Amelia here opposite Pavarotti in 1980, pushes Kim’s mugging, it’s all in good fun. And current Ryan singers Paul La Rosa (especially, as the sailor Silvano), Sam Handley, Craig Irvin, René Barbera, and James Kryshak must have had great experiences working with the veteran artist.

Ever the traditionalist, Scotto kept everyone moving and standing appropriately against the indifferent 2006 sets of an uncredited (at his request) Zach Brown of San Francisco Opera, John Conklin’s costumes, and Christine Binder’s rather dark lighting.  Donald Nally’s chorus maintained its expected excellence.  The very fine Israeli conductor Asher Fisch supported his singers to the hilt and made the score and orchestra dance throughout, which is, of course, what Verdi wanted. 

(Lyric head of musical staff Philip Morehead conducts the final performance, December 10.)

My (radio) guest tonight -- Alex Ross, on his new book "Listen To This"

Alex Ross

Tonight from 11 p.m. to 12 midnight CST on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com -- an hour later than usual due to the live broadcast of Lyric Opera of Chicago's new production of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera.

My guest is New Yorker music critic, award-winning and best-selling author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, MacArthur Fellow, and music weblog pioneer with therestisnoise.com, Mr. Alex Ross, discussing his new book of essays and profiles, Listen To This.

From bass lines to Björk, Marian Anderson to Radiohead, Bob Dylan to Brahms, Alex brings together topics from his acclaimed New Yorker pieces, mixes in a new essay and lots of great notes and references, and places them elegantly between two hard covers.  We talk about them and even play some music.

Our radio broadcast will then be posted later this week at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast/download/streaming.

See you on the radio!

CSO and Pappano and Biss: orchestra's bar too high for guests

Here is my Saturday November 13 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday November 11, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Antonio Pappano and pianist Jonathan Biss.  

CSO bar is too high for guest artists

Pappano, Biss can’t live up to standard of excellence

BY ANDREW PATNER

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

Repeats Saturday at 8.  

The Mendelssohn is also repeated as the subject of Beyond the Score Sunday at 3 p.m.

In this month’s program book for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Armstrong, a bass player, answers the question, “Best part of being a member of the CSO?” His reply: “We work to be the best orchestra in the world.  I'm among players who work to be the best players in the world.  So I feel justified in seeking the same, and it’s a fascinating quest.”

Such an attitude helps to drive the CSO to its many accomplishments and keep it among those orchestras at the top.  But it also reminds the listener of the difference between great and good, as illustrated by this week’s program, heard Thursday at Orchestra Hall, and led by guest conductor Antonio Pappano, with pianist Jonathan Biss.  Both are highly intelligent, thoughtful, curious, and personable. They are obviously passionate about what they do.  But at least at this point in their careers, they are not great artists, and their contributions are not up to the CSO’s standards.

Antonio Pappano

The Italian-British-American Pappano, 50, who cut his teeth in part at Lyric Opera of Chicago and is music director of London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, also has chosen an especially light and brief program: a minor, nine-minute Mozart symphony from the composer’s teenage years, with a lovely oboe solo by Michael Henoch; Beethoven’s B-flat Major Piano Concerto, Op. 19, known as No. 2 but actually his first of five; and the Mendelssohn A Major Fourth Symphony, Op. 90 (Italian), the subject of this week’s Beyond the Score programs.

It amounts to just about an hour of music that might have counted for more if more memorably played.

Pappano seemed to have nothing to add or bring out in any of these works, except speed in the Mozart, overly-stretched slowing down in the Beethoven, and arbitrary shifts of tempo in the Mendelssohn (a work whose tempos as marked by the composer are an integral part of this alternately chipper and biting piece). Sad to report, but unfortunate sounds came from the principal horn at key moments in this work.

Biss’s rapid rise has mystified many listeners.  Technically able and an articulate writer and speaker about his repertoire and preparation, as a performer he rarely offers any sense of style or of a line created by the individual notes played.  He has a tendency, too, to say much more with his body and expressions than with his fingers.

While his Beethoven was a step ahead from some of his earlier appearances here, Biss, 30, a Bloomington, Indiana, native, still has not made a case for being on the CSO’s guest roster ahead of many more interesting and convincing players. The glacial pace that he and Pappano chose for the slower movements only underlined his interpretive limits.

My (radio) guests tonight -- CSO 'cellist Katinka Kleijn and Chicago Humanities Festival artistic director Matti Bunzl

Tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CST on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com my guests are Chicago Symphony Orchestra 'cellist Katinka Kleijn and Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF) artistic director Matti Bunzl.  

We'll preview the CHF program that Matti and Katinka came up with a few months ago and which Katinka will be presenting at the Festival this Sunday afternoon, November 14: a new work for solo 'cello, Oil-Free Blush, made up of world première CHF-commissioned pieces by each of seven younger composers.

Netherlands-born and -trained, Katinka joined the CSO in 1995 and has enough additional interests and activities to make for several other careers, including sponsorship an direction of a competition and instrument loan program for young string players and membership in several types of performance groups including jazz, acoustic duos, progressive rock, and the dynamite New York-Chicago International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).  

The composers, who were given an unusual challenge and context which we'll save for the broadcast, are an international lot all with strong connections to Katinka, ICE, and/or Chicago: Marcos Balter, Megan Beugger, Phyllis Chen, Pablo Santiago Chin, Nomi Epstein, Sebastian Huydts, and Du Yun.  Several of them will join Katinka for Sunday's CHF performance and yours truly will moderate a discussion with them.

Matti Bunzl is the academic and in-person force of nature who was appointed this year to lead the artistic side of the venerable CHF.  In a short period, he's helped to move the Festival in exciting directions and turned a spotlight on much that already goes on right here in Chicago.  A professor of anthropology, history, Jewish studies, gender studies, and everything but the deep blue sea at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he's also been a guest on Critical Thinking in the past.

The recital and discussion is a ticketed event, this Sunday November 14 from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. at the Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park on the North Side of Chicago and all details are here.

Our radio broadcast will then be posted later this week at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast/download/streaming.

See you on the radio!

Lyric Opera of Chicago's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream': living up to its name

Here is my Monday November 8 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the opening night performance Friday, November 5, 2010 of Lyric Opera of Chicago's new production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

 

David Daniels as Oberon (above) with Anthony Lanzillo as the Fairy Sentinel, in A Midsummer Night's Dream at Lyric Opera.  (Dan Rest/Lyric Opera of Chicago)

How cool these mortals be at Lyric

REVIEW | Dream set of singers takes on Britten's 'Midsummer'

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Through November 23

It all comes off as simple, seductive, and beautiful as breathing.

From the first sounds arising from the strings in the orchestra pit, to the undulating moves of a stage-wide veil under dim green light, to the scampering little fairies, to their king descending silently from the sky, to the tosses and turns of sleepers, to nimble Puck's return to the shadows at evening's end, Lyric Opera of Chicago's first production of Benjamin Britten's 1960 A Midsummer Night's Dream has everything right and natural about it.

David Daniels as Oberon (standing) with Esteban Andres Cruz as Puck, in A Midsummer Night's Dream at Lyric Opera.  (Dan Rest/Lyric Opera of Chicago)

And that includes not only the interweaving stories of a spat between a supernatural royal couple, two confused pairs of human lovers, and the nuptials of an earthly pair of monarchs.  The weaver who is turned into a donkey and then somehow wins the fairy queen's love, and a purposefully "bad" production of a sentimental mythological tale make us laugh freely and honestly at our own lives and delusions.

Britten's adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy, the ninth of the English composer's 15 operas, is often cited by critics and historians as among his best.  Now Lyric has put together a production, a (mostly American) cast, and a young, Scottish conductor, Rory Macdonald, that make this case for a wide public.  Australian director Neil Armfield and designers Dale Ferguson (sets and costumes) and Damien Cooper (lighting) staged the work last year with co-producers Houston Grand Opera and Canadian Opera Company, but not with a cast like this.  Countertenor David Daniels has been the Oberon for years, combining mystery, coolness, and sexual allure.  And soprano Anna Christy as his willful queen Tytania is his match at every turn.

English bass Peter Rose is to Bottom, the hammy weaver, as Zero Mostel was to Tevye -- in performances all over the world the rich-voiced singer knows that his character's over-the-top-ness is tied intimately with his real humanity.  As carpenter Peter Quince, ringleader of the tradesman who would present to the courtiers in Athens "a tedious brief scene of young Pyramus/And his love Thisby," third-year Ryan Center bass Sam Handley carries this sense of comedy as serious business to the rest of his team of rustics: tenor Keith Jameson as Flute, the bellows-mender (did anyone else notice that Ferguson dresses him as his modern equivalent, a heating and air repairman, before his switch to quasi-Elizabethan drag as Thisby?); first-year Ryan Center tenor James Kryshak as Snout the tinker, who takes up the role of Wall standing between the lovers and their families; Paul Scholten, another Ryan Center first-year as Starveling the tailor and, in this version, dog-handler as well, and Lyric stalwart character bass Wilber Pauley as the sweet joiner Snug who plays a Lion who wishes not to scare the ladies.

Ryan alumnae soprano Erin Wall and mezzo Elizabeth DeShong as Helena and Hermia and debutant tenor Shawn Mathey as Lysander and baritone Lucas Meachem as Demetrius fit well together in their romantic woodsy roundabout manipulated by Oberon and his fixer Puck with the aid of herbs and spells.  Berwyn-born actor Esteban Andres Cruz, a former member of Lyric's ticketing staff, brings appropriate athleticism and, well, puckishness, to this non-singing role for which Britten specified a "boy acrobat."  When it comes time to tie things up, third-year Ryan bass-baritone Craig Irvin's Theseus and belated debutant mezzo Kelley O'Connor take on Kennedy-Camelot-form with O'Connor especially vocally thrilling.

Neither the play nor, especially, its musical settings, be they by Mendelssohn or Britten, will work without children who can make you believe in fairies.  And the members of Anima-Young Singers of Greater Chicago under the musical direction of their leader Emily Ellsworth do just that.  Blond-wigged and gossamer-winged, in addition to singing gorgeously, these kids run faster than valet parkers.  Their soloists, too, led by Glen Ellyn eighth-grader Kenny Lumb's Cobweb, shine.

This roll call would mean little without the big picture, and both Armfield and his staging colleagues and Macdonald, just 30, have it and believe in it fully.  Britten, who reduced and edited Shakespeare's text with his life partner, the great tenor Peter Pears, understood this play on so many levels -- poetic, psychological, personal, and political -- and made music for and with it that hypnotizes, enchants, and takes us to a dream state.  It breathes with us and we with it.

CSO and Michael Tilson Thomas: all Copland, all over the map

Here is my Friday November 5 suntimes.com and Saturday November 6 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday November 4, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra all-Copland program with guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and organist Paul Jacobs. 

Guests Michael Tilson Thomas and organist Paul Jacobs

CSO sparkles, Tilson Thomas is mixed in all-Copland program

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.  Paul Jacobs gives a pre-concert recital of Liszt and holds a q-and-a session at 6:30 p.m. both nights as well.

Aaron Copland was certainly the most widely known, played, and loved American composer of the 20th century.  Yet really to know the music of this composer of popular ballets, film scores, and anthems and mentor to two generations of U.S. and Mexican composers requires some archaeological digging.  Copland was what today could be called a shape shifter, and he sometimes buried works of earlier styles or later would heavily orchestrate superb leaner pieces from his past.

Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony and a protégé of Copland during the composer’s last active years in the 1970s, has long championed the man whom composer-critic Virgil Thomson dubbed “The President of American Music.”  He certainly has the knowledge and experience to have assembled this week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra all-Copland program, including two real rarities.  I wish that he also had shown the taste and finesse to bring off the program, heard Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, at the highest level.

The 10-minute Quiet City (1939-40) for string orchestra and solo trumpet and English horn is so often heard on broadcasts and by young professional and chamber orchestras, it’s hard to believe that the CSO hasn’t played it in 30 years.  Atmospheric music that grew out of a score for a play about the isolation of urban life, it had luxury solo casting in the haunting playing of principals Chris Martin and Scott Hostetler.

The Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, composed in 1924, when Copland was only 23, for his teacher Nadia Boulanger to perform with conductors Walter Damrosch and Serge Koussevitzky, is known more for the role it played in launching the composer’s career than from actual performance.  Young organ virtuoso Paul Jacobs is also devoted to this piece in which the instrument is more integrated into the full work than it would be in a concerto, and he made a strong CSO debut as soloist.  (He’s also giving pre-concert solo performances of Liszt at 6:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday on the Armour Stage at Orchestra Hall.)  Tilson Thomas guided this unusual 24-minute work with the greatest care of the evening, keeping balances and making Copland’s rhythmic and instrumental experimentation clear and inviting.

After 80 years, Copland’s Piano Variations of 1930 remains a landmark work for the instrument and the composer. So proud did Copland remain of this astringent work that 20 years later on a visit to Paris, he played it for a young Pierre Boulez, then in his Modernist firebrand phase.  (Boulez was in the audience Thursday.)  The clear influence that this vein of Copland had on Leonard Bernstein does not help a case for the younger man’s compositional originality.  Unfortunately, the orchestrated version that Copland made in 1957 inflates the tightly wound piece physically and deflates its effect.  Tilson Thomas's own revision-expansion of the orchestration continues each of these tendencies.

The deflation of the concert itself came with the most popular work on the program, the iconic Appalachian Spring. In its initial 1943-44 form as a ballet score for an ensemble of 13 instruments, this is one of the most perfect and influential pieces of American music.  Its delicacy, imaginary reconstruction of the country’s past, and still breathtaking integration of folk tunes into classical composition, though, were largely lost in this 35-minute hybrid version of the orchestral suite and a later orchestration of the ballet score.  Tilson Thomas brought a technical laziness and schmaltzy effects to this beloved piece.  Fortunately the orchestra and soloists, highlighted by the magic of principal flute Mathieu Dufour, did their best to hold up their not inconsequential end of the bargain.

My (radio) guests tonight -- Gene Tunney and George Bernard Shaw -- OK, Gene Tunney's son Jay, on both of them

Gene Tunney and Bernard Shaw vacationing together on the island of Brioni in 1929 -- Associated Press

Tonight from the later than usual time of *10:30* p.m. to 11:30 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com my guest is author Jay R. Tunney, discussing his new book The Prizefighter and the Playwright: Gene Tunney and Bernard Shaw  (Firefly Books, Buffalo and Richmond Hill, Ontario) about the long and deep friendship between his father, the American boxer and bibliophile, and the greatest English-language playwright of the 20th century

Tunney (1897-1978) was the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world (who beat Jack Dempsey twice, in 1926 and 1927, the latter in Chicago's Soldier Field) when he retired from boxing in 1928 at age 31.  Shaw (1856-1950) had a lifelong fascination with boxing and had published an early novel, Cashel Byron's Profession (1886), on an intellectual boxer who prefigured the bookish Tunney.  

The two men met in the late 1920s and Tunney and his wife Polly Lauder Tunney spent a month of their honeymoon in 1929 together with Shaw and his wife Charlotte on the Adriatic island of Brioni.  Among others they spent time with that month?  The German composer Richard Strauss.  Tunney and Shaw remained close until Shaw's death at 94 in 1950.

It's a beautifully written book on a fascinating and little-known subject.

The program will then be posted later this week at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast/download/streaming.

See you on the radio!