Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Gergiev in Chicago -- 2

Here is the full text of my Saturday Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Thursday's first performance (of just two, both, alas concluded now) of the second of two weeks of Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concerts with Valery Gergiev conducting and Vadim Repin as soloist.

Exotic colors in CSO's 'Firebird'
Haunting effects from soloists, but no steady thread

Igor Stravinsky's 1910 Firebird ballet score is not exactly a tabula rasa. But it allows major conductors working with a virtuoso ensemble such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to place a variety of emphases in their interpretations of the piece.

For Carlo Maria Giulini, it was a work of melodic invention and even delicacy. For Pierre Boulez it foreshadows the rhythmic and other revolutions of The Rite of Spring just three years later. For Charles Dutoit, it is so very French. For many a Russian conductor it is so very . . . Russian.

Whether Valery Gergiev has made a conscious choice to highlight even more than usual the Orientalist origins and fragrance of the fairy tale story or whether his own origins in the Ossetian lands of the Caucasus Mountains make this a natural connection for him, this was the tack he took with the piece Thursday night with the CSO. (The program was repeated only once, on Friday afternoon, due to Gergiev's impossibly overbooked U.S. and international schedule.)

Last week, the peripatetic Gergiev brought us a stunning complete Roméo et Juliette of Berlioz. This week his focus was more Russian and ex-Soviet and the complete Firebird was the program's capstone. But where he had both a sharp focus and a sense of the grand drama in R and J he seemed this week to get wrapped up in the exotic colors and sound effects -- wonderful as they are -- in the Stravinsky without finding the steady thread that runs through the work. Section soloists, though, gave him the haunting colors that he wanted, none more so than principal horn Dale Clevenger in the work’s final scene.

Guest soloist Vadim Repin took the 1916-1917 Prokofiev D Major Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 19 and spun it out before both orchestra and audience as if it were his and his alone. I have watched and listened to Repin since his Chicago area debut at Ravinia in 1994 and in the last two years he has been fulfilling the exceptional promise that he showed then at 23. He is both totally musical and a technical wizard.

His complete command of his instrument and the concerto banished any concerns about the banality of Prokofiev's orchestration. As with the concerto, the feat of his 10-minute encore of the Paganini G Major Introduction, Theme and Variations on "Nel cor più non mi sento" from Paisiello's La bella molinara, showed Repin as an heir to the great Nathan Milstein.

To hear Mathieu Dufour play the flute solo in Debussy’s Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun is to hear the sound of heaven. Nothing more need be said.

Gergiev in Chicago -- 1

Here is the full text of my April 5 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the April 3 first performance (of just two) of the first of two weeks of Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concerts with Valery Gergiev conducting.

Gergiev makes his presence felt

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

He is here. He is there. He is everywhere.

Valery Gergiev logs more miles than any conductor in history. Major posts in St. Petersburg, London, Rotterdam, and New York, plus regular appearances in Israel and Japan, keep him moving, and a tendency to double-book keeps his fans guessing.

Even this month, when he is leading two rare sets of concerts here with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, his schedule also has him conducting Prokofiev's The Gambler at the Metropolitan Opera and presiding over performances -- and leadership turmoil -- of his Kirov Ballet and Orchestra elsewhere in Manhattan.

But when the man is on, he is on. And so he was Thursday in the first performance of the 1839 "dramatic symphony" by Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, Op. 17. Gergiev made his name with Russian repertoire, but the mad Frenchman speaks to him as well in his combinations of excess and detailed focus, intellectualism and romanticism, innate understanding of orchestration and dazzling experiments in sound.

In this presentation of the complete R and J, only the third in the CSO's history, conductor and composer are in complete sync and sympathy with each other. Gergiev understands implicitly Berlioz's revolutionary move to let the orchestra tell the story of the young lovers and also that Berlioz was telling a story about telling a story -- and retelling a story we all know.

To this Gergiev and his weird fluttery hand and arm movements bring crackling energy, a sense of drama that can grow out of the quietest pianissimos, and a way of using detail to shape flow. The three fine vocalists are making CSO debuts, although tenor Michael Schade is an established international artist. The real find here is mezzo Isabel Leonard (at left), who will appear in Chicago Opera Theater's Don Giovanni -- as Zerelina! -- later this month and next. French bass-baritone Laurent Naouri (Mr. Natalie Dessay) navigated the more conventional final part of the work with firm dignity, and the Chicago Symphony Chorus was a full participant in the triumph.

"Jagged Icebergs and Open Pit" -- Just what would the intrusion in Grant Park look like?

The ever-intrepid Lynn Becker, architecture writer and urban watchdog (grrrr!) finds two planning pictures -- thanks, too, to FOX News Chicago -- (at left and below left -- click on them for larger images) and offers a critique of the proposed design for the Chicago Children's Museum in Grant Park.

Full disclosure: I am both a great admirer of the work of Krueck + Sexton Architects, including their new Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and a friend of the firm's principals, Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, and their families. They are aware of my opposition to this project, and the views expressed here are mine and not necessarily theirs. I think that they would do a superb job with this project -- if they could design it as an above-ground building for another site. In Grant Park, they are trying to solve a problem, and a problem that need not be addressed at all. At another site, they could create a building.

Save Grant Park!

I'll have more to say here about this topic soon, but a number of people have asked me about how to hear my WFMT radio commentary on the attempt by the "Chicago Children's Museum" and Chicago's Mayor-for-Life Richie Daley to grab up public parkland downtown to build a $100-million semi-underground (!) building in the park. It's here.

For more information on this controversy -- including the views of "the other side" -- the excellent Save Grant Park group's website is here.

Above is a picture postcard of A. Montgomery Ward (1844-1913), not only the founder of the mail-order catalogue and of the retail firm that bore his name, but the man who, during the the last years of his life, fought single-handedly to keep Chicago's lakefront "Forever Open, Clear, and Free."

Marc Geelhoed -- "ex"-journalist -- journalistic hero

Our dear friend Marc Geelhoed, first classical musical and opera critic/editor at Time Out Chicago and now manager of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's record label, CSO Resound, writes here for himself and under his own name on his own excellent weblog, Deceptively Simple, all that needs to be said about the Chicago Tribune's abdication of any claims to human decency, civility, and journalistic standards, let alone excellence, in sponsoring, posting, and publicizing 171 most almost entirely anonymous comments -- most of them ludicrous and nasty and a number of them libelous -- on its recent Sunday Magazine story on Chicago-based violinist Rachel Barton Pine 13 years after her horrific and disabling train accident.

It is must reading for anyone who still thinks that journalism, publishing, and broadcasting are moral enterprises and vocations whose practitioners should behave in a thoughtful, intelligent, and ethical manner.

[Robert Niles, editor of the USC Annenberg School's Online Journalism Review and, as it happens, proprietor of the "online community" Violinist.com, also posted a rather prolix essay here with important observations on this case and issue buried inside.]

Charlton Heston, 1924-2008: One never knows . . . .

I met Charlton Heston once when in 1997 he was making a tour for a book he had done on the Bible and sites in the Holy Land. As Heston had strong local connections and, at least in his later life, politics quite different from mine, I thought that it would be interesting to talk with him on the radio as I was then working at Chicago's National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate.

When we called the publisher we made it clear that we were calling from an NPR station and that we would want to talk with Mr. Heston about his book but also about his early life and about his varied political activism and his role as a gun rights advocate. (He was not yet president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and his infamous "cold, dead hands" speech did not take place until 2000.) The publisher said that that was no problem and that Mr. Heston was always happy to talk about any subject as long as we did discuss the Bible book.

Heston was born in Evanston, Illinois, just on the northern border of Chicago, in 1924 and grew up there and in St. Helen, Michigan, and later in Chicago's North Shore suburbs, where he attended New Trier High School. Active in both high school and community theatre, he returned to Evanston to study at Northwestern University's School of Speech on a scholarship from the Winnetka Drama Club -- the photo at left shows him in an NU production of Hedda Gabler -- before leaving school in 1944 to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. That year he also married a fellow Northwestern thespian, Lydia Marie Clarke, who was a student of Alvina Krause.

Heston proved to be a remarkably open guest, eager to share stories of his Midwestern roots as well as his participation in the Civil Rights Movement at a time when such public involvement was significant and not without costs. At left is a picture of Heston with James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier at the 1963 March on Washington. Before I could even ask him if he might record a membership spot announcement for our station he volunteered on air that he was "a great fan of NPR" and found it "one of the few places that took issues and debate seriously." The spot he recorded was clever and excellent and he did it in one take.

Another reminder that people are complex things.

The King

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

-- from the sermon text, "On Being A Good Neighbor," Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963

"The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."

-- Jeremiah 8:20