Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Hither and yon 3

1 -- Listening now on WFMT to the delayed from this morning [Pyongyang is 15 hours ahead of Chicago] but "live" broadcast of the New York Philharmonic's North Korean concert, I recall that my lifelong friend [OK, he's two days older than I am, but that still makes him my lifelong friend] and percussion whiz Erik Charlston joined the Phil's tour for the Beijing and North Korea concerts in his role as regular supplemental player. I'll be very curious to hear Erik's impressions as well, of course, of those of the orchestra's artistic administrator, another former -- and much missed -- Chicagoan, Matías Tarnopolsky (on the left in the photo).

2 -- Just back from interviewing Tom Hayden for the Sun-Times in conjunction with the upcoming release of the new and rather brilliant documentary on the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the 1969 Chicago Conspiracy Trial, Chicago 10 by Brett Morgen (2002's Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture). Watch this space for notice of the article, but I wanted to mention now that Hayden is a very youthful 68 (he's exactly 20 years older than I -- a lot of people born in mid-December in years ending in "9" in this post) and was not only well-spoken, but deeply thoughtful, very funny, generous, and remarkably self-deprecating. He also has a new book (one of many he's authored, edited, or contributed to) coming out of 50 years of writing, Writings For A Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader, from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's still indispensable City Lights Books in San Francisco's North Beach. It was also good meeting Sun-Times photog Chris Sweda.

3 -- Scheduled WFMT tapings today for this week with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, now appearing as Rosina in The Barber of Seville at Lyric Opera of Chicago, and with University of Chicago-based composer Howard Sandroff and piano hero Abe Stokman discussing Sandroff's works and career. We''ll keep you posted on these.

Hither and yon 2

1 -- Last night's Critical Thinking on 98.7WFMT and wfmt.com should be posted soon at wfmt.com for streaming. Our guest was Matti Bunzl, associate professor of anthropology and history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, discussing his recent pamphlet Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe published by University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's Prickly Paradigm Press in conjunction with The University of Chicago Press. A "coffee and" at Julius Meinl to anyone who can successful identify the musical selections we chose.

2 -- As we get the hang of this, we've begun adding features to this site, including the recommended weblogs you'll find on your right. Additional ideas and suggestions are always welcomed.

3 -- Not only did Jean-Yves Thibaudet show off his new Vivenne Westwood tailoring (and an odd new combed-down hairstyle) Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall, he also shared in the Academy Award for Music (Score) that night when Italian composer Dario Marianelli won for Atonement. Thibaudet was the pianist for the soundtrack as he had been for Monelli's Oscar-nominated score for Joe Wright's earlier adaptation, Pride and Prejudice. I hear that it sounds like movie music. ;-] Oh yes, Thibaudet also played book 2 of Debussy's Préludes and the Third Sonata, D minor, of Brahms, Op. 5. More on that anon.

4 -- WFMT producer Mark Travis is with the New York Philharmonic in Pyongyang on their controversial visit and spoke live from there with Carl Grapentine on the Morning Program today. Mark is producer and host of tonight's broadcast -- 7 p.m. Chicago time, 98.7WFMT and wfmt.com -- of the historic concert given at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater. Mark is the broadcast producer of The New York Philharmonic This Week, produced and syndicated 52 weeks a year to more than 250 radio stations by the WFMT Radio Network. Go, Mark! Night after Night's Steve Smith is also traveling with the Phil for Time Out New York and the League of American Orchestras' magazine Symphony  and has some entries here.

5 -- The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is in New York this week with Pierre Boulez, Susan Graham, and Mitsuko Uchida for concerts at Carnegie Hall last night and tonight. This is the first CSO tour, overseas or domestic (excluding regional run-outs), I've had to miss in ten years. I trust that they'll do fine without me. I reviewed the two programs here and here when they were played in Chicago this month.

Matthias Pintscher -- . . . und Osiris

Here's the full version of my Saturday Chicago Sun-Times review of Thursday night's Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert.

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Music that stirs the imagination
CSO instantly masters new piece

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeated Saturday at 8 p.m.

Contemporary orchestral composers these days usually run in or near two gangs.

The Complexity Gang turns out thick scores for large, augmented ensembles. Sometimes, though, all the concurrent instrumental activity leads to a kind of brown soup without much individual character. Audiences are often left scratching their heads wondering if they are attending an analysis class or a concert.

The Faux Naive Gang, in contrast, follows the American Mavericks of the last century. Lots of melody, major keys, and open chords. Too often, though, this crew forgets that the original mavericks were innovators who wrote what they liked. The posturing, imitation, and repetition of many of their would-be successors can grow tiring.

Fortunately, each camp has inspired some real individuals who take the best from the gangs but dig deeper.

Thursday, Chicago Symphony Orchestra audiences got their first taste of the music of Matthias Pintscher, 37, one of Germany's most important young composers, who understands complexity but also knows how to streamline it and wed it to the theatrical and the imaginary visual.

For Osiris, a co-commission of the CSO, Carnegie Hall, and the London Symphony Orchestra, Pintscher begins with the scattered pieces of a 1970s artwork by postwar German bad boy Joseph Beuys and the Egyptian myth behind it of a god torn asunder by his angry brother yet brought back to physical unity by his wife's love and the flapping of her wings.

We have no problem thinking or seeing this way when it comes to myth or visual art, Pintscher wonders. Why can’t we do the same with music? And so in the 23-minute piece, dedicated to CSO conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, he tells the story of Osiris instrumentally but also acts it out in musical figuration. High muted trumpets and a deep contrabass clarinet offer lines like dialogue while heavily divided strings (every player has a different part) create a kind of tightly regulated set of watery tides below.

Pintscher is an astonishing colorist. He makes the players work in strange ways, but the results are both gently captivating and brilliant. The world première audience Thursday night gave the work an ovation normally reserved for a favored warhorse.

Who else but Boulez could have pulled off this world- premiere performance in the limited rehearsal time of U.S. orchestras? He approached this new work with total seriousness and utmost care. The virtuoso members of the CSO responded in kind.

Mitsuko Uchida took us to Mozartean heights as conductor-soloist in two piano concertos last week. This week she digs into another signature work, Bartók's final completed score, the Third Concerto of 1945. She and Boulez gave this beautiful musical stepsister the sort of drive that normally characterizes the vigorous Nos. 1 and 2. But they balanced this drive with chamber-sized moments of night music by the wind chairs and this great collaborative soloist.

Closing the program, Debussy's complete Images for Orchestra, 1905-12, surely suffered from rehearsal focus on the Pintscher and Bartók. It will improve by tonight and certainly by the CSO's trip next week to Carnegie Hall where the orchestra will play two programs.

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Hither and yon 1

A few notes from your humble host.

1 -- Think of it as a live edition of Critical Thinking . . .

For those of you in Chicago, my good friend, journalist and professor Laura S. Washington is hosting a "salon" Wednesday night, 20 February, at Yoshi's Café, her home away from home, 3257 North Halsted Street, where I will be in conversation with Toni-Marie Montgomery, accomplished concert pianist and the Dean of the Northwestern University School of Music.

Montgomery, who came to Northwestern in 2003, is Northwestern's first African American woman dean.

Northwestern plans a major announcement regarding the future of the School of Music [no, I don't know what it is, but I smell a big financial gift] tomorrow afternoon, Tuesday 19 February, and Toni-Marie also hopes to bring the new director of the School's jazz program, Victor Goines, with her to the salon. The virtuoso clarinet and saxophone player was until recently the director of the Institute for Jazz Studies at The Juilliard School in New York City.

Cocktails 6:30 p.m

Dinner 7:00 pm

Conversation all around that. I believe that each person just orders off of Yoshi's menu.

RSVP by Feb. 19 to l[email protected]

2 -- Boulez and Carter -- together again tonight

The broadcast and webcast version of Critical Thinking airs/streams tonight at 10 p.m. Chicago time. It's the second part of a new conversation I had last month with Pierre Boulez, this part on the music of 99-years-young Elliott Carter. I'll also play in full performances of two works that bracket a half-century of Carter's output -- Joel Krosnick and Gilbert Kalish's 1995 recording of Carter's 1948 Sonata for Cello and Piano and the 1999 recording of the 1996 Clarinet Concerto with soloist Michael Collins and Oliver Knussen conducting the London Sinfonietta. Enjoy!

3 -- Surely you have better things to do . . .

Somehow, this baby weblog topped 235 page views today -- more than double any of its previous single-day highs. Thanks to all! And links to recommended blogs and other exercises of weblogian etiquette to come.

Il barbiere -- integrale

Here is my Monday Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Saturday's opening night performance of Il barbiere di Siviglia at Lyric Opera of Chicago.

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The Lyric's 'Barber' gets freshened up
Tidied-up score, DiDonato shine

RECOMMENDED

There was much news from the Wacker Drive Rialto Saturday night when Lyric Opera of Chicago opened its 12-performance revival of Rossini's ever-popular The Barber of Seville.

The first reports must be academic. But don't be afraid. By using the new full critical edition of this 1816 comedic masterwork, Lyric has let Rossini be Rossini fully, in many ways for the first time. No, no one digging in an ancient library found a missing scene or discovered that Figaro's hair cuttery was in Berwyn and not southern Spain.

Rather, editor Patrcia B. Brauner, a member of University of Chicago professor Philip Gosset's international musicological team, has used the widest availability to date of original manuscripts and the best set of editorial tools to clean up the score and its instrumental scoring. Her work takes us back to Rossini's intentions and preferences while giving the singers appropriate leeway -- a part of the operatic game in the composer's day -- rather than having them rely on encrusted, but unsupported, "traditions."

You hear this from the first bars of the correctly reduced orchestra in the famous overture and the way that its tensions build through a careful rhythmic structure. And you hear it especially in the final scene when, lo and behold, Count Almaviva sings a major aria, "Cessa di più resistere," that was not in the version you grew up with.

This is where the second bit of news, relating to personnel, comes in. In the most freakish cancellation in this season of one Lyric singer withdrawing after another, Peruvian megatenor Juan Diego Flórez suffered a throat infection after swallowing a fishbone. The revival of the 1989 John Copley-John Conklin Magritte-tinged production, complete with critical musical edition, was planned in part for Flórez. Iowa-born John Osborn steps in here and offers meritorious service. His acting and characterization are fluid, his voice a warmer, more rounded version of another American Rossini specialist, Rockwell Blake. That there is only one Flórez is no mark against Osborn. Even if Osborn's "Cessa" does not knock our socks off, it does give the opera greater symmetry and reminds us that the work was originally to be called Almaviva and not Il barbiere.

And what of that Figaro who wound up as the title character? Downstate baritone Nathan Gunn is just fine, thank you -- quick and fresh, if lacking much of a dark side. And, yes, we get a topless -- and more, or less -- scene as the opera opens with Gunn in only his briefs for a sort of striptease-in-reverse to "Largo al factotum."

The real musical news comes from the singer portraying Rosina in a belated Lyric debut, American mezzo Joyce DiDonato. All reports are absolutely true: Here is an open, honest, captivating singing actress who somehow combines youthful freshness with mature knowledge and control. After the seductive purity of her singing, you will want tickets to New York, London and Paris to see the Kansas product again soon.

Local veteran baritone Philip Kraus, who has just two more performances, pulls off a Doctor Bartolo who's cranky but with a heart. Wayne Tigges is a bit underpowered in Don Basilio's ode to slander, "La colunnia," but so are many these days. Ryan Center alum Lauren Curnow gives a near-perfect turn in Berta the maid's comic aria.

Senior Italian conductor Donato Renzetti's reading of the edited score moves crisply but lacks crackle. This is the second Lyric revival in a row where the original director, Copley this time, has come back to make sure things are tight and alive in the performance. That's good news, too.

Mitsuko Uchida -- la belle

My Saturday Chicago-Sun Times review of Thursday night's Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Miutsuko Uchida as soloist and conductor appears in full below.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Performances through Tuesday, February 19

Since its founding in 1891, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has played so much music hot off the presses and composers’ desks that it’s fascinating to see how late it was that Mozart’s piano concertos entered the standard repertoire of the CSO and other major ensembles. Of the two on this week’s concert program, the now-much loved A Major, No. 23, K. 488, was not presented until 1920 (with soloist Harold Bauer and Frederick Stock) and the C Major, No. 13, K. 415, now considered one of Mozart’s first adult works in the genre, did not get a CSO date until William Kapell performed it with Rafael Kubelik in 1951.

Most scholars and mainstream performers did not start taking these 27 works for piano and orchestra seriously until around the Second World War with additional big guns such as Daniel Barenboim and Charles Rosen weighing in on record and in print in the 1960s and 1970s. And throughout his lengthy tenure with the CSO, Barenboim made leading these pieces from the keyboard both cornerstones and highlights of his years here.

Mitsuko Uchida, Japanese born and European-trained, is playing the conductor-soloist role this week and she shares much in common with Barenboim philosophically.  They see these as masterworks, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.  They both build bridges from them to the future -- reveling in the sound of a Steinway concert grand and modern instruments in the orchestra -- and to the past -- finding a basis, especially in the heartbreaking Adagio of the A Major, in the music of Bach.  

Uchida, an ever youthful 59, has no aspirations to make the podium a central part of her career, however.  But she is an artist focused more than almost anyone on collaboration -- in chamber music, with vocalists and living composers, leading small and large orchestras, and teaching and sponsoring young artists.  She recently completed a highly-regarded double-duty survey of all the Mozart concertos with the Cleveland Orchestra.  The attention that she pays to colleagues was clear here in the responses of principals Mathieu Dufour, flute, Larry Combs, clarinet, and David McGill, bassoon. These are three of the finest wind players in the world and they played together for Uchida as for a visiting queen.

As such, her conducting style is really an extension of her deeply musical keyboard role, finding a way for players to breathe with her and offering them empathetic encouragement.  Despite the modern instrument, she goes for delicacy and lyricism but she is always thinking harmonically as well.  And when there is joy in the music we all know it, the same when there is sorrow -- a technique that appears effortless is her means not her end.  While she has greater -- and appropriate -- refinement, Barenboim has her beat in the energy department: In K. 488, the wild Rondo that follows the time-stopping F-sharp minor Adagio needs full abandon.  

The very early Divertimento for Strings in D Major, K. 136, is one of Mozart’s most popular pieces but it’s almost never programmed by symphony orchestras, perhaps because music directors see no need for pieces that don't require a conductor.  Concertmaster Robert Chen and 22 of his colleagues played it with relish and great affection.

After these four performances, Uchida stays around as soloist in Bartók’s Third Concerto with Pierre Boulez next week, Thursday to Saturday, in a program that also includes Debussy’s Images for Orchestra and the world première of a commission, Osiris, from young German composer Matthias Pintscher.

Marc Geelhoed -- onward and upward

Last week Marc Geelhoed, the first, and, until now, only classical music and opera editor and critic at Time Out Chicago announced that after three years at TOC he was leaving the magazine and -- at least for now -- music criticism to run the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's estimable record label and recording dissemination branch, CSO Resound.

Here is the link to my recorded commentary, "In the Ticket Line," on how I first met Marc seven-some years ago and our friendship since then. It's being broadcast this week on 98.7WFMT and wfmt.com as my weekly "Critic's Choice" feature.

You can read Marc's own statement about this interesting career change on his excellent and enviable weblog, Deceptively Simple. Scroll down there to February 08. You'll even see a sweet Polaroid of Marc and Claire Chase of the International Contemporary Ensemble [ICE] at the snazzy TOC launch party in March 2005, snapped, Marc's entry reminds me, by yours truly.

Just 30, Marc is one of our best. In a relatively brief period, he's made a great and positive impact on Chicago and its music scene. We'll all miss his criticism in print and online, but, happily, we'll all still see him and continue to benefit from his passion for music, connections with young audiences, sharp mind, and Midwestern work ethic. And, oh yes, he's very funny and big-hearted, too.

Abraham Lincoln: 199

All this is not the result of accident. It has a philosophical cause. Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something, is the principle of "Liberty to all" -- the principle that clears the path for all -- gives hope to all -- and, by consequence, enterprise and industry to all.

The expression of that principle, in our Declaration of Independence, was most happy, and fortunate. Without this, as well as with it, we could have declared our independence of Great Britain; but without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity. No oppressed people will fight, and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better, than a mere change of masters.

The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word, "fitly spoken," which has proved an "apple of gold" to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple -- not the apple for the picture.

So let us act, that neither picture, or apple, shall ever be blurred, or broken.

That we may so act, we must study, and understand the points of danger.

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"Fragment: The Constitution and the Union," 1860

Proverbs, 25:11: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." [King James Version]

Radu Lupu -- le vrai

My review of Sunday afternoon's recital at Orchestra Hall appears on the web edition of the Chicago Sun-Times and below:

I once happened to sit in the same box with Radu Lupu for an orchestral concert at Milan’s La Scala opera house. Knowing that the Romanian-born and -trained pianist does not give interviews I figured that this was a rare chance to engage this uniquely perceptive performer in some conversation.

Curious about his famously narrow Austro-German repertoire, after trading some jokes -- Lupu has a sly wit -- I addressed him: “Maestro, I sometimes think that as you play fewer and fewer pieces, playing each of them better and better, that a time will come when you will play only one piece but your performance of it will be unbelievable.”

“How did you know?” he replied with a deadpan expression before relaxing his face into a smile.

As usual, Lupu, 62, did not speak to the audience or to journalists on his visit to Chicago for a Sunday afternoon recital. But he did part the curtains a bit, playing an extensive set of Debussy pieces as well as an infrequently performed sonata by his beloved Schubert, offering two encores, smiling several times at the cheering Orchestra Hall crowd and even waving to the audience.

Lupu has been before the public now for 50 years and his formula varies little. He gives about 80 performances a year around the world -- he has lived for a number of years in Lausanne in the French-speaking area of Switzerland -- and makes only the occasional recording. He shuns piano benches and stools, sitting onstage instead on an office chair. He has parted his hair down the middle for half a century and lets his now gray beard grow fairly long between trims.

But if these are signs of eccentricity then let’s have more of then from others. For Lupu is about the music and nothing else. Even when he occasionally can be heard singing along with sections of a sonata it is not a distraction but a demonstration of just how deeply one can become involved in a piece of music.

Sunday he offered two 40-minute works neither of which is tackled by many other pianists and surely no one else gives them as a pair. Schubert’s 1825 D Major Sonata, D. 850, is even less clearly structured than the Viennese genius’s other often-sprawling piano works. But Lupu made a case for it as a composition of complete inner coherence. It was as if he were saying that there’s nothing wrong with the sonata itself, just with those who do not take the time or have the talent to master it fully. And such mastery here included both remarkable power and rhythmic consistency and a delicacy in the far fingers of the right hand that was like filigree.

Years of study and performance of Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart and Schumann have brought Lupu to play Debussy in a manner that would never be mistaken for the French School. This was nothing less than an existential encounter with both the 12 sketches in Book I of the Preludes and the suite of pieces as a whole, formed here as a unity by Lupu rather than Debussy.

Or was it? By focusing so deeply on each individual portrait in sound and by pausing barely at all between them, Lupu demonstrated Debussy’s harmonic invention and substance as much as his melodic gifts and ability to create moods and document impressions. Maybe they do form a totality after all. This is certainly not the only way to play these jewels of the early 20th century but how astonishing it was to hear them offered this way.

In a rare published conversation in 1991, Lupu observed, “Everyone tells a story differently, and that story should be told compellingly and spontaneously. If it is not compelling and convincing, it is without value . . . .” Such effective storytelling continued with the encores, also by Debussy, “From a Sketchbook” and, from Book II of the Preludes, “La puerto del vino,” the first sounding almost like an improvisation, the second as if a habanera were being danced before us at the Alhambra itself.

If one could be any pianist today who else could one choose to be than Radu Lupu?
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Osvaldo Golijov -- mais pourquoi?

Below is the full version of my review of Thursday night's CSO concert from Saturday's Chicago Sun-Times.

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Golijov's work makes listeners yearn for his source material
'Ainadamar' is spectacle, not spectacular

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
To Tues., Feb. 12

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

Ainadamar, the much-anticipated 2003-05 opera-oratorio by composer Osvaldo Golijov, scored spectacle points Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, but landed artistically with a thud.

Golijov, the multiculti darling of many coastal critics, has had works played here that have ranged from the thrilling pageantry of his St. Mark Passion at Ravinia to the dull, derivative Last Round with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra downtown and on a 2007 Florida tour. Ainadamar itself had a one-night stand at Ravinia in 2006.

The CSO Mead composer-in-residence, Golijov is eclectic to the point of being voiceless in many pieces. His touchstones -- Spanish and Latin American music, Middle Eastern riffs and tonalities and Jewish themes -- are revisited so regularly and unoriginally that one is left longing for the vibrant source material rather than its sampling.

The libretto for Ainadamar packs a lot into its 75 minutes, giving many points of reference for Golijov's mixmaster musical approach. The title translates as "Fountain of Tears," the Arabic name for the site near Granada where Andalusian playwright-poet Federico García Lorca, just 38, was assassinated in 1936 by Fascist forces. The metaphor is made obvious, thanks to constant repetitions by Golijov and librettist David Henry Hwang.

García Lorca's life, loves and death could alone make a full-length opera, but in this one-act we also hear the story of 19th century Spanish revolutionary Mariana Pineda and of García Lorca's muse, actress Margarita Xirgu, who died in exile in 1969.

Redemption of this mishmash comes from the powerful singers playing Xirgu and García Lorca, soprano Dawn Upshaw and the rising mezzo Kelley O'Connor, respectively. Having García Lorca, an open homosexual in a highly conservative environment, embodied as a woman is brilliant, at least with O'Connor, the role's creator, weaving a spell of seductive ambiguity.

The pairings of the two leads, joined in brief trios by soprano Jessica Rivera, create lyrical effects.

But effects are what this piece is really about, not content. Brilliant flamenco guitarist Adam del Monte and vocalist Jesus Montoya are layered on top of an ensemble of CSO players, wasted except for the excellent percussion parts and performance. Recorded noises, sounds and speech range from the gimmicky (cries of the Fascist leaders), to the cheap (falling water), to the grotesque (a rhythmic ballet of gunshots). The solo voices are needlessly and distractingly amplified at the composer's behest. Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya kept things moving as much as possible.

Golijov has been more of a rent-a-name composer here the past two seasons than someone actually writing new compositions and/or being in residence. (He lives and teaches in Massachusetts and has lately been busy with jobs in New York and Hollywood as well.) But as the empty seats Thursday night attested, his name, and his work, belong to worlds other than great symphonic music.

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