Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Ravinia's 'Tosca' -- Terfel, Racette, and CSO lift the evening

My Sunday July 31 suntimes.com and Monday August 1 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Saturday  July 30, 2011 Ravinia concert performance of Puccini's Tosca with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Bryn Terfel, Patricia Racette, and Salvatore Licitra, conducted by James Conlon.

 

Bryn Terfel sang the sadistic Baron Scarpia and Patricia Racette was the opera star Floria Tosca in the Ravinia program.

Bryn Terfel, Patricia Racette stay on top of ‘Tosca’ at Ravinia with the CSO

By ANDREW PATNER July 31, 2011 8:32PM CDT

Concert opera in the Pavilion and semi-staged productions in the Martin Theatre have been highlights of James Conlon’s run as music director at Ravinia. A hardworking conductor who loves the art form -- in addition to a long European career, he’s music director of Los Angeles Opera and the Cincinnati May Festival and has conducted more than 250 performances at New York’s Metropolitan opera -- his focus is on supporting his singers.  Coupling this with the visible honor he displays at working with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Conlon’s given us Highland Park nights that were both crowd-pleasing and genuinely involving.

This year’s Martin performance is offered August 11 by San Francisco’s acclaimed Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra led by Nicholas McGegan in Handel’s Orlando. Saturday night, though, Conlon and the Ravinia administration pulled out two big vocal guns for a surprisingly satisfying concert performance of a work that defines staged theatrical melodrama, Puccini’s 1900 Tosca. Keeping things moving appropriately and reveling in the luxury casting of the CSO as an onstage pit band, Conlon set the musical context for an outdoor take on a claustrophobic story of love, hatred, sex, patriotism, betrayal, and vengeance.

That world-beating Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, making his first Chicago area appearance in seven years, was the twisted and cold-blooded Baron Scarpia, and American soprano Patricia Racette, a particularly emotionally effective Floria Tosca, elevated the evening and made for drama, excitement, and psychological insight.  Chicagoans have known what Terfel is capable of vocally since the early 1990s when, not yet 30, he became a fixture at Lyric Opera of Chicago.  It was not only wonderful to have him back (and he will give his first area recital in a dozen years Tuesday night in the Martin with pianist Brian Zeger), but a whole new audience saw what an actor he can be, expressing Scarpia’s venality and perverse nature (the Marquis de Sade would have been proud of his sense of the Roman police chief's sadism) almost with his face alone in what was otherwise a too-undirected “park and bark” presentation.  Suave and slimmed-down at 45, the 6-foot-4-inch singer has a whole catalogue of visual snarls on top of his rich top-to-bottom voice and refined technique.

Terfel and Racette, along with German tenor Jonas Kaufmann (not, alas, a part of this cast), were credited with resurrecting a new, dead-on-arrival Tosca at the Met last season in its remount. While Racette, Terfel’s almost exact contemporary, often divides opera fans, her sense of holding the stage and projecting character without setting or props and in an open, outdoor, and cicada-”enriched” environment was remarkable.  Her comic asides in Act One tickled, and her famous scenes with Scarpia in Act Two and as she confronts her destiny in Act Three sizzled.

Italian tenor Salvatore Licitra, in his early 40s, is a puzzlement. He tends to need warming up in performance, and after you are wishing he might disappear following his first missed notes and vocal cracks he usually starts to come back by his final number. He held to form Saturday; an almost wholly uninteresting painter and patriot Mario Cavaradossi in the first two acts, he somehow became compelling as he faced probable execution in Act Three.

American bass Morris Robinson (who will be Joe in Lyric’s Show Boat this coming season) was a theatrically powerful fugitive Angelotti, and Lyric mainstay bass-baritone Dale Travis has owned the role of the Sacristan for years.  Scarpia’s henchmen have an odd time without staging, but Filipino tenor and Ryan Center alum Rodell Rosel found some appropriate creepiness (and a rather astonishing hairdo) as Spoletta.  Eleven-year-old Henry Griffin was a show-stealer in the Act Three Shepherd Boy’s song. Keep your eye out: He’s one of the finest boy sopranos you’ll ever hear. Griffin’s colleagues from Josephine Lee’s Chicago Children’s Choir animated the Act One “Te Deum,” but continued Ravinia penny-pitching meant that the power and authority of the professional Chicago Symphony Chorus were replaced instead by the earnest but different-league efforts of the volunteer Apollo Chorus of Chicago, Stephen Alltop, music director.

You read it here first: Muti focuses future opera work on Rome and Chicago

Photo: © Silvia Lelli

With Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director, longtime Salzburg Festival(s) fixture, and former La Scala m.d. Riccardo Muti about to turn 70 (!) tomorrow -- 28 July 2011 (in Salzburg) -- major Italian and Austrian publications are running "exclusive" interviews and stories discussing, among other things, Muti's desire to cut back on conducting operas at Salzburg and other houses/festivals and to limit his leading staged productions to Rome and concert versions to Chicago.  

You read it all here first five weeks ago, on June 16 in my June 19, 2011 Sunday Chicago Sun-Times interview with him from Salzburg.

Grant Park Music Festival: chorus director Christopher Bell hits another peak with 10th anniversary

My Saturday evening July 23 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Friday July 22, 2011 Grant Park Music Festival concert of the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus with vocal soloists in music of Bernstein, Bach, and Fauré all led by chorus director Christopher Bell .

Christopher Bell guides Grant Park Chorus to its peak in requiem program

BY ANDREW PATNER 

 We are spoiled in Chicago with three major professional choruses of the highest level. Those of the Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera are of course widely known, but the summer-only ensemble of the Grant Park Music Festival also has both a distinguished history and a vivid, sometimes shockingly good present.

Credit Christopher Bell, the chipper, Scotland-based Irishman marking his 10th anniversary as chorus director at Grant Park, along with principal conductor Carlos Kalmar, who has a strong interest in and skill with choral works, and Jim Palermo, the festival’s former general and artistic director who hired both men and paired them.

Friday night at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, Bell showed the current peak that his chorus has reached in just the right way with a serious and varied musical program devoid of gimmickry or showing off.  (The program was repeated Saturday night.)

Choosing works that require both power and gentleness, rhythmic drive and flowing lyricism, and featuring two members of his group as soloists, Bell opened with Leonard Bernstein’s 1965 Chichester Psalms, which also, like the late-19th-century Fauré Requiem which closed the evening, ultimately views belief, and even death, as comforting rather than coldly abstract or fear-inducing. In between, Bell offered a 1726 Bach cantata without choir, Vergnëgte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust (“Pleasant rest, beloved delight of the soul”), with an alto solo that rages and despairs against the sinfulness and failure of the world.

Young countertenor Ryan Belongie, a Northwestern University alum and a current Adler Fellow at San Francisco Opera, was the soloist in the demanding parts of the Bernstein and the Bach. While Bernstein’s work is written for a boy singer, the more recent custom of using a counter-tenor can pay off if the soloist maintains enough boyishness and innocence in his performance; Belongie did this while adding an appropriate sense of urgency in the central setting (in Hebrew, as is the whole 20-minute piece) of the 23rd Psalm.  (A part of the Bernstein miracle is that this section, which feels so right and natural, almost as if the melody arises out of the Hebrew text, was actually written around the same time with Betty Comden and Adolph Green as “Spring Will Come Again” for a never-realized musical theatre adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth.)

While Belongie still has growing to do -- and plenty of time to do it -- in Baroque repertoire, his work in the Bach was courageous, especially considering that this is not a work normally given outdoors.  The central recitative, “The world, that house of sin,/Breaks out with songs of Hell” was chilling, and unavoidably contemporary as well.  Guest organist Richard Hoskins, flute Mary Stolper, and oboe d’amore Judith Kulb also brought a period and sacred sense to an outdoor secular evening.

Gabriel Fauré’s 1887-89 Requiem (not charted for full orchestra until 1900) is a test for a chorus and choral director as much as it can be a treat for its listeners. This is not Verdi’s frightening “Dies irae” or any of the (intentionally) creepier passages of Mozart’s own mass for the dead.  (In fact, Faure, like those two giants, a non-believer, omitted the “Day of Wrath” section altogether .)  To achieve a level of childlike wonder without straying into kitsch and to keep much of the 40-minute work highly contained both for its own sake and in order to bring out the occasional burst of sound from brass, male voices, or organ, is a challenge.

Bell’s achievement was so total, in pacing, nuance, and detail, that he even succeeded in having his adult soprano and baritone soloists, Grant Park Chorus members Lindsay Metzger (an unassailable “Pie Jesu”) and baritone Kevin Keys (beautiful and never overpowered delivery of the “Hostias” and “Libera me”) come across with rare lightness and no vibrato.

The main marking of the seven-section work is andante moderato, followed by simple andante and moderato each alone, and Bell shaped an offering of constant rocking warmth and, if one can say this about a musical performance, kindness. Often, having performed a work makes a listener too critical or parochial in hearing others do it. Nothing of the sort happened here for these ears.  This was a perfect performance of a tricky and only apparently simple masterwork, the cap to a splendid evening and a rich decade of Bell and his colleagues’ continuing gifts to Chicago.

 

Lang Lang sets a night at the (Chicago Civic) opera (house): Can Wrigley Field be far behind?

I'm out of the office today tending to family matters but posting this as it appeared today on suntimes.com.  Additions/revisions to come!

Chicago Sun-Times, Wednesday, July 20, 2011 11:24AM

Pianist Lang Lang sets a night at the opera (house)

BY ANDREW PATNER

 

 Lang Lang Lang (pictured in 2009) will play a May recital at the Civic Opera House. | Odd Andersen~AP

Can Wrigley Field be far behind?

In the latest indication of a new team moving into the executive suite at the Civic Opera House, Lyric Opera of Chicago announced Wednesday morning that the company will present international piano superstar Lang Lang on May 12, 2012, the Chinese performer’s only Chicago area appearance next season.

And, no, the flashy keyboard player and classical music advocate won’t be singing or accompanying singers.  He won’t even be featuring transcriptions of opera or vocal music.  The solo program holds Bach’s first partita, Schubert’s last, B-Flat Major, sonata and 12 Chopin etudes.

In a statement, Lyric’s incoming new general director Anthony Freud, who officially takes up his duties October 1, said such events were a part of a “larger vision” for the 57-year-old opera company. Lyric owns its own theatre and other sections of the Civic Opera House and from time to time has presented vocal concerts and rented out the venue to other presenters.

Piano recitals are not regular fare in opera’s larger homes.  The Opera House seats 3,563, more than 1,000 more than Orchestra Hall’s 2,522. New York’s Metropolitan Opera has presented two such recitals -- Vladimir Horowitz in 1983 and Daniel Barenboim in 2008.

Freud and Fleming are following other houses and companies in presenting non-operatic events both as a means of boosting their venue’s profile and increasing off-season income. 

New audiences definitely are part of the agenda for both guest artist and presenter.  Rather than the now traditional supertitles projected above the stage of the Ardis Krainik Theatre, a large screen will show the view of Lang Lang’s hands from an overhead camera.

Lang Lang, 29, came to international attention 12 years ago when he made a last-minute debut at a Ravinia gala concert in Highland Park, substituting for an indisposed Andre Watts. Since then he has become a global phenomenon, conquering everything from ticket and album sales to soundtracks for films and the multi-million-selling video racing game Gran Turismo 5. In addition to Ravinia, where he appears regularly, Lang Lang also has played locally and in Berlin with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, given recitals at Orchestra Hall, and appeared as soloist at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park and in educational programs in the area.

Lang Lang’s performance at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 was seen by more than 4 billion people worldwide and is said to have inspired more than 40 million young Chinese -- and presumably their parents -- to take up the piano.

Imagine what the late, legendary Lyric press agent Danny Newman could have done with this?

Tickets for the Saturday evening recital, priced from $25-$125, will be offered first to Lyric subscribers beginning Friday, with public online and telephone sales starting August 1. Box office sales begin September 19. A package including a post-concert reception with Lang Lang will sell for $500, and a limited number of onstage seats will be available for $95 and $125 by telephone sale only.

Voigt leaves Strauss for Wagner, and Wagner steps in for Strauss: Amber Wagner replaces Deborah Voigt in Lyric Opera of Chicago's "Araidne auf Naxos"

I'm out of the office today tending to family matters but posting this as it appeared today on suntimes.com.  Additions/revisions to come!

Chicago Sun-Times, Monday, July 18, 2011 10:00AM CDT

Deborah Voigt withdraws from Strauss revival at Lyric

BY ANDREW PATNER

 

Deborah Voigt | Scott Stewart~Sun-Times

 

 Voigt leaves Strauss for Wagner, and Wagner steps in for Strauss.

Or something like that.

In a surprise move that could portend other changes in upcoming seasons at the Civic Opera House, Lyric Opera of Chicago announced Monday morning that star soprano Deborah Voigt, who has figured prominently in marketing for the company’s 2011-12 season, has withdrawn from the revival of “Ariadne auf Naxos” by Richard Strauss.

The demanding title role in this combination comedy-fantasy long has been a signature part for the star American soprano who turns 51 next month.

Lyric said that Voigt, who opened a run in the very different title role of Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun” at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y.. Saturday night, wants to focus on her upcoming debuts in the lead role of Bruennhilde in the third and fourth installments of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

The six November-December “Ariadne” dates in Chicago fall between the Met’s performances of “Siegfried” and “Goetterdammerung.”

The choice was Voigt’s, Lyric said, but the Illinois native made no mention of this plan in a backstage conversation after her July 9 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert at Ravinia in which her Strauss numbers were the highlight.

A number of industry observers have said that Voigt has been losing the lyric sound that was a trademark of hers for years and that she is shifting to roles calling for a more dramatic style such as Wagner, or lighter work such as musical theater. New management led by general director-designate Anthony Freud and artistic consultant Renee Fleming takes over at Lyric on Oct. 1 and has been examining all short- and long-term commitments the company has made.

A request for a direct comment from Voigt or her publicist had not been returned by press time.

In her place, a true rising star, Amber Wagner (no relation to the composer) will make her full-run major role debut at Lyric. Wagner received raves when she was a last-minute substitute in the part for the opera’s opening night this spring at Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company. Lyric music director Andrew Davis conducted that production as he is to do at Lyric.

Wagner, 31, an alum of Lyric’s Ryan Opera Center, has been a standout since her first days in the training center. A winner of the 2007 Met National Council auditions, and numerous other awards, Wagner was featured in the 2009 hit documentary on the Met competition, “The Audition.”

In her scheduled closing night performance as Elsa in Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at Lyric in March, the singer “achieved a total triumph,” the Sun-Times’ Laura Emerick wrote.

“Throughout the evening Wagner displayed the presence and command of an artist of twice her experience,” Emerick observed. “Her voice poured forth rhapsodically in exquisitely phrased lines while she more than matched the intensity” of her “formidable” fellow cast members.

Wagner is scheduled to be the soprano soloist in the closing weekend performances of Verdi’s “Requiem” with Carlos Kalmar conducting at the Grant Park Music Festival Aug. 19 and 20.

 

Cornell MacNeil, 1922-2011: enviable American baritone with wide range and long career

La Cieca reports the death of the great American baritone Cornell MacNeil on July 15 at age 88.

Before his lengthy career (nearly 30 years) at the MET began in 1959 (as a substitute, also the year and means of his La Scala début), he sang in musical theatre, for Gian Carlo Menotti, creating the role of Sorel in The Consul in 1950, the now much-beleaguered New York City Opera for several years, San Francisco Opera, and then had a cavalcade of roles at Lyric Opera of Chicago in the 1957 and 1958 seasons, all with all-star casts, including Puccini's Lescaut, Alfio in Cavalleria rusticana, Silvio (with the Prologue) in Pagliacci (all fall of 1957); Ford in Falstaff, Sharpless in Butterfly, Silvio again, and sharing a two performance run of Rigoletto with Tito Gobbi, opposite Jussi Björling and Anna Moffo (and with future impresaria Ardis Krainik in the cast as Giovanna!), all in the fall of 1958.  

He returned to Chicago in Rigoletto in 1965 with Alfredo Kraus and Renata Scotto, in 1976 in Gobbi's staging of Tosca with Pavarotti and Carol Neblett, and for the last time at Lyric, in Pagliacci, this time as Tonio, with Jon Vickers as Canio, in 1982, at 59.

A native of Minneapolis, MacNeil started out in craft school to be a machinist. He then studied voice on scholarship at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut, and eventually joined the remarkable line of American Verdi baritones that started with Lawrence Tibbett, and came to include Leonard Warren, Robert Merrill, MacNeil, and Downers Grove-native Sherrill Milnes. Another example of how opera, with dance, is perhaps the most democratic of the fine arts.

I heard him sing in his late career but met him only in passing and for backstage congratulations. I admired him greatly.

The Internet holds many clips of MacNeil singing.  Here's just one example of how he held his legato line over his unusually wide range well into his 50s, a 1978 performance of Iago's "Credo in un Dio crudel" from Verdi's Otello.

 

Penderecki at Grant Park: respectful, pleasant but one hoped for more

My Saturday July 16 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Friday July 15, 2011 Grant Park Music Festival concert of the Grant Park Orchestra with guest conductor Krzysztof Penderecki and three cello soloists.

Composer-conductor Krzysztof Penderecki backstage at the Pritzker Pavilion. | Jean Lachat~Sun-Times 

Penderecki respectful, pleasant at Grant Park in his own work and Beethoven

Grant Park Orchestra with Krzysztof Penderecki

and three cello soloists

♦7;30 p.m. Saturday

♦Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park

♦Free admission

♦grantparkmusicfestival.com

BY ANDREW PATNER 

RECOMMENDED

Comparing this weekend’s programs on paper, the Grant Park Music Festival had Ravinia beat: a much-admired senior composer, with a strong additional following from Chicago’s large Polish population, conducting one of his own works as well as Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, vs. a stern, elder statesman German conductor and a beloved American pianist in more standard-appearing, all-Brahms programs in Highland Park.

But a paper program can tell you what’s on the schedule, not how it will go over. Thursday night at Ravinia, Christoph von Dohnányi and Emanuel Ax played the first Brahms Piano Concerto together brilliantly and then Dohnányi, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra topped the performance with a deep and rolling Second Symphony. Multiple reports of Friday’s program, with the Second Concerto and the Third Symphony, had it even better.

I won’t object to “too many” concerts on Chicago’s summer schedule. I also certainly think that thousands of people turning out to salute and listen to a composer, Krzysztof Penderecki, 77, whose most famous works, earlier in his career, are initially tough and challenging to many listeners is a wonderful thing.

But the repeat of Penderecki’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 for Three Cellos and Orchestra (2000), given just this March by the CSO with Charles Dutoit and its own cellists John Sharp, Kenneth Olsen, and Katinka Kleijn, did not reveal much new about the work and made it no more interesting to this listener.  

At Grant Park, three young international guest performers, Julie Albers (American), Kira Kraftzoff (Russian), and Amit Peled (Israeli) -- international in given names, too: both Kraftzoff and Peled are male -- played the repetitive and interwoven passages of the 35-minute pause-free piece with passion and skill; Albers especially was someone I’d like to hear more from.  But little happens in this work, and there is neither thrill nor peace.

Many composers, even major figures of High Modernism such as Pierre Boulez and the late Ralph Shapey, put Beethoven in a unique position of authority and perfection.  Penderecki also holds this view.  So one was very curious to hear what he would have to say with or to the Eroica.  Again, alas, not too much. Respectful, straightforward, pleasant, but neither very striking nor individual, perhaps because of that sense of Beethoven’s untouchability, perhaps because of limited rehearsal time?  There were times when certain rhythmic cells -- and there are many in this piece -- seemed to grab the composer-conductor’s additional attention.

Penderecki also has one of the most unusual conducting styles I’ve ever seen: A rare left-hander in the podium world, he uses no baton and gives the appearance, at least, that he conducts with one arm alone until he gives that arm a break and then uses the other one for a similar amount of time before starting the alternation again.

A pre-concert onstage salute to Poland, a free country now for only a little more than 20 years, as it takes the six-month Presidency of the Council of the European Union, was moving to the audience’s Poles and non-Poles alike.

 

[Reposted for technical reasons] A chat with Krzysztof Penderecki: Composer-conductor plays Grant Park this weekend

[This is a REPOST of one of yesterday's posts due to some computer glitches.]

My Saturday July 16, 2011 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com feature on Krzysztof Penderecki, appearing at Grant Park.

Poland’s Krzysztof Penderecki keeps eyes on past, present, future

Renowned composer-conductor brings his music, Beethoven's to Grant Park this weekend 

BY ANDREW PATNER 

Concert repeats Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

 

Composer-conductor Krzysztof Penderecki backstage at the Pritzker Pavilion. | Jean Lachat~Sun-Times 

‘So much of what a Polish artist has done reflects the unique conditions of the Polish people and Polish history.”

Though he is talking about a history that contains, in his own lifetime and memory, the modern partition and remapping of his country, World War II, the Holocaust, the deaths of millions of his countrymen, an imposed communist dictatorship, the Solidarity uprising, martial law, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a rough-and-tumble contemporary democracy, Krzysztof Penderecki shares this observation in a quiet, almost avuncular way.

“Music is a response to its time -- the time of the composer’s own life and the time around him.”

At 77, the bearded, gentle-eyed Penderecki is his nation’s most revered and accomplished composer with a career of international successes stretching back half a century. And he is always conscious of the past and future as well as the present. In Chicago to lead concerts this weekend at the Grant Park Music Festival, he is thinking about Beethoven -- whose Third Symphony, the Eroica, closes his program -- his own work for three cellos and orchestra from 2000, as well as new pieces he is composing.

As with many composers and conductors, Penderecki sees Beethoven as a universal standard.

“There is no one else in music who creates and recreates anew each time like Beethoven,” he says. “No one else wrote nine symphonies -- nine! -- where each of them is new and different.”

His own new works are also always on his agenda. “Throughout my life, I have always planned projects for 10 years ahead of me,” he says. “I always have something to do.”

Right now, he is working on “several” solo concertos (“There are examples: Paganini wrote 200 or so for violin!”) and a new opera, his fifth, based on the ancient Greek story of Phaedra and her independence as a lover.

His career as a conductor, not only of his own music but of other large-scale symphonic works from Beethoven to Shostakovich, also keeps him before world audiences “as often as 50 engagements a year,” he chuckles, as if he himself is not sure how he keeps up such a pace.

Born in 1933 in the southern Polish town of Debica, also known as Dembitz by its historic Jewish population, destroyed by the Nazis when Penderecki was a boy, he has composed across a wide array of genres and styles beginning during his studies in Krakow. His early works were both major contributions to the avant-garde and hard-hitting responses to world events, including Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshimaof 1960, and his 1967 take on the Dies Irae prayer, a memorial to those murdered at Auschwitz.  (“Remember that Auschwitz is only 30 miles from Krakow" he observes.)  His operas, fromThe Devils of Loudun in 1969 to the Lyric Opera of Chicago commission Paradise Lost (1975-78) to musical translations of the theatre of the absurd, The Black Mask (1984-86) and Ubu Roi (1991), are reminders of his strong literary sensibility and love of written texts.

Meanwhile, his instrumental music in recent years, such as the Concerto Grosso No. 1 being heard at Grant Park, has been increasingly tonal, melodic, and inspired by earlier classical musical styles.

When asked in conversation in the Pritzker’s sunlit backstage Choral Room to characterize his broad range of styles and focus, he at first replies with a wry smile, “chaotic.” But then he adds: “My music comes from me and has to be written to give me pleasure.  In any other [field of the arts], an avant-garde lasts for three or four years and then is replaced by the next avant-garde.  Only in postwar modern music did an avant-garde last for three, four decades.  I was beyond it.  I was not part of a group.  Other music was coming out from me.  I had been a violinist; this had an effect on what interested me.  I lived in history. This had an effect.  I was interested in setting sacred and literary texts.  This was different.”

Conducting also came to fill more of his schedule, including with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2000 in his own choral Symphony No. 7, Seven Gates of Jerusalem, and Schubert’s Symphony No. 5.  The CSO actually presented his three-cello concerto this past season with three of its leading members taking the solo parts under Charles Dutoit. “Grant Park is an excellent orchestra, too,” Penderecki says. “We were really able to just play the Beethoven straight through in rehearsal.  We understood each other very quickly.”

And what of his Paradise Lost, based on John Milton’s epic poem, having had its world première at Lyric in 1978 when the company was in difficult financial straits?  Penderecki is philosophical. “This is what happened,” he says.  “But it had a life elsewhere: It went to La Scala, to the Vatican.”

Would he like to see it done again in Chicago or elsewhere in the States?  Could Paradise be revived?

“Regained,” he laughs, referring to yet another Milton poem.

 

 

A chat with Krzysztof Penderecki: Composer-conductor plays Grant Park this weekend

My Saturday July 16, 2011 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com feature on Krzysztof Penderecki, appearing at Grant Park.

Poland’s Krzysztof Penderecki keeps eyes on past, present, future

Renowned composer-conductor brings his music, Beethoven's to Grant Park this weekend 

BY ANDREW PATNER 

Concert repeats Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

 

Composer-conductor Krzysztof Penderecki backstage at the Pritzker Pavilion. | Jean Lachat~Sun-Times 

‘So much of what a Polish artist has done reflects the unique conditions of the Polish people and Polish history.”

Though he is talking about a history that contains, in his own lifetime and memory, the modern partition and remapping of his country, World War II, the Holocaust, the deaths of millions of his countrymen, an imposed communist dictatorship, the Solidarity uprising, martial law, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a rough-and-tumble contemporary democracy, Krzysztof Penderecki shares this observation in a quiet, almost avuncular way.

“Music is a response to its time -- the time of the composer’s own life and the time around him.”

At 77, the bearded, gentle-eyed Penderecki is his nation’s most revered and accomplished composer with a career of international successes stretching back half a century. And he is always conscious of the past and future as well as the present. In Chicago to lead concerts this weekend at the Grant Park Music Festival, he is thinking about Beethoven -- whose Third Symphony, the Eroica, closes his program -- his own work for three cellos and orchestra from 2000, as well as new pieces he is composing.

As with many composers and conductors, Penderecki sees Beethoven as a universal standard.

“There is no one else in music who creates and recreates anew each time like Beethoven,” he says. “No one else wrote nine symphonies -- nine! -- where each of them is new and different.”

His own new works are also always on his agenda. “Throughout my life, I have always planned projects for 10 years ahead of me,” he says. “I always have something to do.”

Right now, he is working on “several” solo concertos (“There are examples: Paganini wrote 200 or so for violin!”) and a new opera, his fifth, based on the ancient Greek story of Phaedra and her independence as a lover.

His career as a conductor, not only of his own music but of other large-scale symphonic works from Beethoven to Shostakovich, also keeps him before world audiences “as often as 50 engagements a year,” he chuckles, as if he himself is not sure how he keeps up such a pace.

Born in 1933 in the southern Polish town of Debica, also known as Dembitz by its historic Jewish population, destroyed by the Nazis when Penderecki was a boy, he has composed across a wide array of genres and styles beginning during his studies in Krakow. His early works were both major contributions to the avant-garde and hard-hitting responses to world events, including Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima of 1960, and his 1967 take on the Dies Irae prayer, a memorial to those murdered at Auschwitz.  (“Remember that Auschwitz is only 30 miles from Krakow" he observes.)  His operas, from The Devils of Loudun in 1969 to the Lyric Opera of Chicago commission Paradise Lost (1975-78) to musical translations of the theatre of the absurd, The Black Mask (1984-86) and Ubu Roi (1991), are reminders of his strong literary sensibility and love of written texts.

Meanwhile, his instrumental music in recent years, such as the Concerto Grosso No. 1 being heard at Grant Park, has been increasingly tonal, melodic, and inspired by earlier classical musical styles.

When asked in conversation in the Pritzker’s sunlit backstage Choral Room to characterize his broad range of styles and focus, he at first replies with a wry smile, “chaotic.” But then he adds: “My music comes from me and has to be written to give me pleasure.  In any other [field of the arts], an avant-garde lasts for three or four years and then is replaced by the next avant-garde.  Only in postwar modern music did an avant-garde last for three, four decades.  I was beyond it.  I was not part of a group.  Other music was coming out from me.  I had been a violinist; this had an effect on what interested me.  I lived in history. This had an effect.  I was interested in setting sacred and literary texts.  This was different.”

Conducting also came to fill more of his schedule, including with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2000 in his own choral Symphony No. 7, Seven Gates of Jerusalem, and Schubert’s Symphony No. 5.  The CSO actually presented his three-cello concerto this past season with three of its leading members taking the solo parts under Charles Dutoit. “Grant Park is an excellent orchestra, too,” Penderecki says. “We were really able to just play the Beethoven straight through in rehearsal.  We understood each other very quickly.”

And what of his Paradise Lost, based on John Milton’s epic poem, having had its world première at Lyric in 1978 when the company was in difficult financial straits?  Penderecki is philosophical. “This is what happened,” he says.  “But it had a life elsewhere: It went to La Scala, to the Vatican.”

Would he like to see it done again in Chicago or elsewhere in the States?  Could Paradise be revived?

“Regained,” he laughs, referring to yet another Milton poem.

CSO with von Dohnányi and Ax at Ravinia: like old times in the Park

My Friday July 15 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday July 14, 2011 Ravinia concert of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with guest conductor Christoph von Dohnányi and pianist Emanuel Ax in the first of two all-Brahms programs.

CSO glistens in all-Brahms program with Ax, Dohnanyi at Ravinia

An evening like old times in Highland Park

BY ANDREW PATNER

A second all-Brahms program with both guest artists takes place Friday at 8 p.m.

Classical music holds past and present in its hand simultaneously as in almost no other art form.

Great works, not only but often, from the distant past are played live without recorded sound or, in most cases, amplification, and then are gone, save from memory. That was then becomes here and now becomes you should have been there.

Historically, the Ravinia Festival on the North Shore was a consistent place for such evenings.  The great Chicago Symphony Orchestra settled in for the summer under great conductors in fascinating repertoire and featuring serious leading and on the rise soloists.  After James Levine’s departure in 1993 after 22 years as music director, the podium talent, then the programming, and, too often, the soloists began a downward slide in quality. CSO downtown management and players were not consulted or engaged with on planning or artistic matters. Audiences in the Pavilion aged and dwindled as the free Grant Park Music Festival grew in importance under Carlos Kalmar and then blossomed in attendance at its new Millennium Park home. Pop concerts swallowed the Highland Park schedule.

Much of this sense of decline vanished Thursday night as Christoph von Dohnányi, a very spry 81, led the first of two all-Brahms programs with the much-loved and respected pianist Emanuel Ax. Thursday brought the D Major Second Symphony and the D Minor First Piano Concerto. (Friday holds the F Major Symphony No. 3 and the B-Flat Major Piano Concerto No. 2.)  Carefully drilled by a conductor of authority in this repertoire and with a pianist eager to remind people that music means little without a love of playing it, the orchestra was at its top level. “This was downtown playing,” as one of my WFMT colleagues put it after the performance.

Ax, 62, is crazy about Chicago, and Chicagoans tend to feel the same about him. On Wednesday, he also sat in with Pinchas Zukerman’s chamber players in music of Mozart and Dvořák  in Ravinia’s Martin Theatre.  In May and June 2012, he has curated and will lead a 13-event three-week CSO-sponsored piano festival, “Keys to the City.”

Thursday he offered a Brahms that was both expansive and gentle as required. There was no sense of tearing into red meat such as some virtuosos think necessary.  Nor was there any fear of the great shapes and sweeps of the music, some small finger slips in the lengthy first movement notwithstanding.  A ceiling-camera view of Ax’s hands that figured some times in the screen projections on either side of the stage underlined both flow and accomplishment.

In the concerto, Dohnányi was a thoughtful partner, appropriately letting Ax set the tone and tempos and helping to knit everything together.  Even here, though, he gave signs of the revelations to come in the Second Symphony after intermission.  With violins separated and facing each other, and cellos and basses at stage right, Dohnányi brought out clarity among parts, especially in the lower strings and woodwinds, that made for new hearing in an oft-played masterwork. Thoroughness did not preclude a sense of spirit and wonder.  As in last weekend’s concert with soprano Deborah Voigt, flute Mathieu Dufour and oboe Eugene Izotov were particularly compelling.

I hope that there were some children or younger teenagers on the Lawn or standing behind the seats.  This was the sort of perfect musical evening that made up my own early Ravinia experiences in the 1960s and ’70s, and contributed to my catching the classical bug for life. There’s no reason that the standards or performances at what was once thought of as the CSO’s summer home should ever be less.