Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Risør report -- part one

Well, between outstanding weather, a concert schedule that goes from 10:30 a.m. (or earlier) to 12 midnight (and beyond) most days, meals from some of Norway's top chefs and bakers, and a temporary computer that swallowed my first draft (hence not only the lateness of this dispatch but why there will be no photos until I insert some when I get back to Chicago), our hopes of breaking this year's five and a half day, 22-program (!) festival down into timely chunks were dashed.

But the news stays news and the highlights still have us buzzing.  Herewith some of the latter, in chronological order:

Tuesday night's opening concert, complete with a thoughful and hilarious speech from the President of the Norwegian Parliament Thorbjørn Jagland (left, and Labour, too) -- let's see how Nancy Pelosi or Dennis Hastert would do with Darwin, Einstein, and Co. and their relation to composing, playing, and listening to music! -- got off to its musical start with the beephorn (thank Harpo Marx) prelude to György Ligeti's 1974-77 opera Le grand macabre and continued with the composer's 1987 extract/adaptation for soprano and chamber players Mysteries of the Macabre with the marvelously over-the-top yet ever in control young Norwegian soprano, Eir Inderhaug, our Discovery No. 1 here. 

Discovery No. 2 followed quickly with the Swedish-Finn Jan-Erik Gustafsson (left) as soloist in Haydn's C Major 'Cello Concerto with the increasingly mature (in age, they have always been phenomenal in execution) Risør Festival Strings, the one that was lost for 200 hundred years but aged delighfully during its disappearance.  What a pleasure it was to hear this burly built performer and his deep, rich, and dark singing tone.  Two helpings of Ives from 1906 -- the Largo Risoluto No. 1, "as to the Law of Dimishing Returns" and "Halloween" from Three Outdoor Scenes led into a reminder (they can never be too frequent) of the perennial wonder of Bartók with his 1939 Divertimento for Strings. 

Wednesday noontime started with Discovery No. 3, the Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, b. 1932, author of another beephorn work, this a duo with 'cello from 1970, Plateaux pour Deux, with Gustafsson as Bjørn Rabben's excellent straight man.  Christian Tetzlaff's violin and Nikolai Lugansky's piano formed the bases of the triangle with the clarinet of another Swedish-Finn Bjørn Nyman at the apex in Bartók's 1938 Contrasts.  (Again, these are highlights only!)  

Early evening brought a concert-length suite of miniatures and excerpts all in 3/4 time from a late 17th century ciaconna of Georg Muffat with Danish harpsichordist Allan Rasmussen to dance movements from Bach and Ligeti  for co-director Lars Anders Tomter's powerful solo viola to two-piano Rachmaninoff and Ravel from Russian pianists Vadim Rudenko (left, Discovery No. 4) and Lugansky.  Rudenko looks like a truck driver but pours out a lyrical stream of sound that he makes seem effortless.  Late night had more Rudenko-Lugansky Rachmaninoff, the 1900-01 Second Suite for Two Pianos, Op. 17, and Leif Ove Andsnes and Canadian Marc-André Hamelin in a two-piano version of Stravinsky's four-hand transcription of his own Vårofferet, er, Rite of Spring.  Phew!

Thursday morning's tradition of a free concert for Risør's fine townspeople in a simple downtown prayer hall started with something different, a piece developed by a group of students at a nearby high school, the Dahlske videregående skole, with Risør's Frode Larsen and conductor-composer Christian Eggen, and played by the students along with a quartet from the Strings, some recorded sounds, and a music box or two.  Called "Det lekende menneske" after this year's Festival theme (Norwegian for homo ludens, or man the player), the work was both whimsical and captivating in the manner of some genre-stretching pieces by Björk or Feist.  Tetzlaff (above left) and Gustafsson then appropriately ripped and roared through Kodály's 1914 Violin and 'Cello duo, op. 7.  Noontime found the Festival navigating around a few bends in the coast to the local Hødnebø furniture company's waterfront offfices and showroom with a backdrop of nature through the building's glass walls.

Thursday evening?  Works dealing with time from Swedish-American Leroy Anderson's 1950 ka-chinger The Typewriter -- with the added twist that the World's Finest and Most Revered Page Turner Endre Rahke Warholm was the soloist on a Royal manual while Leif Ove Andsnes attempted to do the page turning honors -- to Haydn's "Clock" Symphony, No. 101 in D, to Andsnes with George Antheil's 1923 Sonatine -- Death of the Machines (sufficiently fast and brief: no page turner required) and Ligeti's still rather astonishing Poème symphonique for 100 Metronomes, 46 years old this year and still ticking.

And that's just the first two and a half days . . . .

The view from WAY over here -- in Norway this week

The View from Here staff and household has decamped to the annual Risør Chamber Music Festival in a little fishing/sailing village on the southeast coast of Norway, a few hours southwest of Oslo.

Directed by pianist Leif Ove Andsnes (at left with mackerel) and violist Lars Anders Tomter, Risør has been our "Midsummer" home for the last nine years.

Not sure how intricate or colorful our posts will be from here, but in addition to Andsnes and Tomter, artists we're excited about seeing and hearing here include Christian Tetzlaff, Marc-André Hamelin, Nikolai Luganksy, Fredrik Ullén, Håkan Hardenberger, the Orion Quartet, and Thomas Quasthoff.  Featured composers this year range from Haydn to Bartok to Ligeti, Ives, Antheil, Varèse, and a pile of Russians.

We eat well, soak up the long daylight (people were painting their houses as late as 10 p.m. last night), and enjoy seeing old friends and making new ones.

Grant Park Music Festival -- c'est ouvert!

Here's my Friday June 13 Chicago Sun-Times review of Wednesday June 11's opening night concert of the Grant Park Music Festival.

Grant Park concert season opens on a winning note

Ehnes's performance reflects what series does best

By Andrew Patner

It’s not downplaying anything to say that no news is good news at the Grant Park Music Festival.

When you have a festival that's consistently excellent artistically, in one of the world's greatest open-air concert settings, continually able to attract 10,000 people and more to its free concerts, and with solid and excited artistic leadership, who needs change?

Wednesday night's opening of Grant Park's 74th season of summer concerts was another page out of the winning playbook of general and artistic director James W. Palermo and principal conductor Carlos Kalmar.  A lesser-played gem with a strong young soloist and a vibrant and thoughtful performance of a beloved masterwork without bells or whistles and with smiles all around the full seats and lawn at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park (above left).

Canadian-born James Ehnes (left) was the fine soloist in Samuel Barber's wholly-winning 1939 Violin Concerto, Op. 14.  Ehnes is just 32, but plays with a maturity and thoughtfulness beyond his years.  His rare focus on neglected 20th-century Romantic concertos netted him this year’s best instrumental soloist with orchestra Grammy Award for his recording of the Barber, Korngold, and Walton concertos with Bramwell Tovey and the Vancouver Symphony.  As with this CBC Radio Music CD and his recent appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Ehnes showed that  he has the goods, continues to grow and can't come back to Chicago soon enough.  He's just the sort of musician Barber had in mind in writing this both wistful and virtuosic work.

After eight years as Grant Park’s principal conductor, the Uruguayan-Viennese Kalmar (left) continues to show his appetite for American works, an area of the repertoire that, remarkably, he first encountered here, with this orchestra, in 1988.  He is no slouch with the core rep either and the orchestra that he has helped build and shape was with his buoyant take on the Brahms D Major Second Symphony, Op. 73, every springing step of the way.

Friday and Saturday evenings bring Kalmar and his orchestra, along with vocal soloists and Christopher Bell's superb Grant Park Chorus, in Beethoven's genre-stretching late triumph, the Missa Solemnis.  Not to be missed.

YSL: 1936-2008 -- A view from there

Knowing that my younger brother Joshua (left) had been greatly influenced by Yves Saint Laurent and given that, after co-founding the fashion house Tuleh, Joshua now writes on fashion and style (as Josh Patner), I asked li'l bro' if he would contribute a few words on the great designer who died on June 1 at 71.  Herewith his reflections.

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"Every man needs aesthetic phantoms in order to exist. I have hunted mine out, pursued them and tracked them down. I have grappled with anguish and I have been through sheer hell. I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober.

"It was Marcel Proust who taught me that 'the magnificent and pitiful family of the hypersensitive are the salt of the earth.'  I, without knowing it, was part of that family."

Yves Saint Laurent, on his retirement from the world of fashion

Paris, 07 January 2002

He was a freak, a homosexual, different from men, too beautiful for the world, and so he invented his own, informed by art and music and the true greats Picasso and Matisse and Diaghelev and Africans . . . .

As [his longtime business and life partner Pierre] Bergé said, YSL was like Chanel in this century and her alone -- they rose above fashion to social movement, to revolution. YSL, like Chanel, sought sedition -- to bring the walls down. Kinky and elegant and passionate.  And fearless.

As with "everyone," he was an idol to me from the first time I encountered his work. It was at Vreeland's Met exhibition, I was in high school, and I poured over the catalogue for years. I was working at Bergdorf's the first time I actually saw him, on his Paris runway, and I confess I cried.  He was no longer influential in any immediate sense by then, but something about the times he had lived in and the way he affected them moved me. 

Once I saw him at Tong Yen, the chic Chinese restaurant in the 8ème in Paris that he frequented. He was sitting in the window booth with his dog, one of the many Moujiks, and across from his breathtaking Nordic chauffeur, who sliced the meat from the spareribs and passed the plate to Saint Laurent who proceeded to feed Moujik with chopsticks. It was the most remarkable, fashionable moment I have ever seen, and I'm happy to have the memory of it.

Ohlsson and Scriabin -- les grands

Here is the full version of my Thursday June 12 Chicago Sun-Times review of Garrick Ohlsson's Tuesday June 10 recital at Ravinia Festival in Chicago's North Shore suburb of Highland Park.  I had hoped to catch Monday's program as well but seasonal allergies had felled me.

Pianist displays rare virtuosity

Ohlsson brings vigor to an evening of Scriabin

By Andrew Patner

Garrick Ohlsson is incapable of being uninteresting.

The American piano virtuoso recently turned 60 but he still plays with the enthusiasm of someone less than half his age and with corresponding curiosity about every corner of the repertoire.  That he combines these characteristics with decades of experience and both technical and musicological study makes any appearance by him an opportunity for fascination.

Ohlsson (left) opened the Ravinia Festival’s classical season with back-to-back Martin Theatre recitals Monday and Tuesday nights centered on the prophetic and half-mad Russian Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). Tuesday’s program focused on the final works of this ecstatic pioneer of structure and tonality and Ohlsson delivered rarely-played pieces in an unforgettable manner.

The piano was a means to Scriabin’s proposed end of expressing feeling and universalism in sound and even light and pageantry.  A contemporary of Rachmaninoff, Scriabin (below at left) went in almost exactly the opposite direction from the popular performer-composer.  Rachmaninoff showed the lush and rhythmic possibilities of what could be done with the modern piano.  Scriabin used the piano as a launching pad to see how close he could come to express in music the unconscious psyche and the mysteries of nature..

Central to Ohlsson’s selections were Scriabin's two final sonatas, No.’s 9 and 10.  Single movement works they present extraordinary technical challenges while simultaneously asking us to forget the pianist’s technique and focus on their essentially spiritual messages.  Ohlsson, a very large man, not only can be counted on for precise jackhammer rhythms but in moments of mystical softness his long fingers seemed like delicately choreographed spaghetti.

Other brief works, from 1907’s Désir and 1911’s Two Poems to the final collection of preludes, Op. 74 of 1914, saw Ohlsson somehow combine a trancelike state with flawless articulation.  But it was the program closing Vers la flamme (Towards the Flame), Op. 72, and the three etudes, Op. 65, which even Scriabin cited for their experimental nature, that saw Ohlsson reach technical and interpretive heights that might have astonished the composer himself.

The program opened with four works by Prokofiev (1891-1953) from his youth and mid-career French years.   They provided historical context but could not measure up to the visionary nature of the Scriabin. Ohlsson’s own venturous spirit had him playing on a recently and painstakingly restored 1883 Steinway “D” made of beautiful Brazilian rosewood.  It might be the oldest fully extant modern piano and there was no better person to play it.

Tonight at 10: Talking with the producers of "Out & Proud in Chicago"

My guests tonight on Critical Thinking on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and wfmt.com are Alex(andra) Silets and Dan Andries of our brother-sister television station WTTW/Channel 11 where they were responsible for the excellent new documentaryon Chicago's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community -- Out & Proud in Chicago which premièred had its première broadcast -- kicking off a pledge drive! -- earlier this month.

You can see the 90-minute documentary tonight at 8 p.m. or this Sunday June 15 at 6 p.m.  A two-hour DVD version has been prepared as well and a companion book is on its way.

Tonight Alex and Dan talk about how the program came together and we play some audio clips and music as well. 

You can hear my WFMT "Critic's Choice" commentary on the program here.

And the program will be available for podcast and streaming anywhere beginning tomorrow right here, or at The Sound from Here box just over there on your right.

Slatkin, Zukerman, and Hindemith -- night of the invisible men

Here is the full version of my Saturday June 7 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday night June 5 Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert.  (I was attending a wedding in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, this weekend so was unable to post this while the performances were ongoing.  The last was a matinée on Sunday June 8.)

CSO fails to paint masterpiece in lackluster finale

Friedman piece is the best of an otherwise empty lot

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

with Leonard Slatkin
and Pinchas Zukerman, viola

By Andrew Patner

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

It was the night of the invisible men.

After a season of outstanding, even sublime, concerts by Riccardo Muti, Bernard Haitink, Pierre Boulez and Valery Gergiev, among others, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is ending its 2007-2008 calendar with a whimper this week.

Fortunately there is also one bang, literally, on the program -- the Chicago premiere of young American composer Jefferson Friedman's Sacred Heart: Explosion,  a musical response to the work of venerated Chicago outsider artist Henry Darger.  Darger (left), who died at 81 in 1973, had secretly created an entire world in paintings, collages, and a 15,000-page typed manuscript involving a group of pre-adolescent victim-heroes he called the Vivian Girls.  

The discovery of this trove on Darger's death by his landlords, photographer-designer Nathan Lerner and his wife Kiyoko, helped launch the mania for works by naïve and intuitive artists and many members of the community of collectors, dealers, and scholars devoted to this field were present at the Thursday night performance.

Composed in 2000, when Friedman (left, with a buzz cut) was 26 and a student of John Corigliano's at Juilliard, Friedman revised the work extensively for its professional premiere earlier this season by Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra.  Slatkin's greatest claim is as an advocate for American music and he has promoted Friedman's explorations.  

The composer tries here both to get into Darger's head and provide a musical analog to his imagery in a diptych of the Girls surrounding the Sacred Heart (left) and fleeing from an explosion.  Friedman is a fine orchestrator and creates a rhythmic energy that drives the work to its anticipated conclusion.  We're involved while listening but no ground is broken.

Darger chose to keep himself and his work unknown.  But the rest of the program was more about emptiness from marquee names.  German composer Paul Hindemith (at far left in 1929) spread himself thin with his idea of "music for use" and his overture to his 1929 opera News of the Day is a light carbon of the more biting cabaret-style work from this period of Kurt Weill and others.  His 1936 Trauermusik for viola and strings is an almost cynical attempt at generic funeral music, written the day after the death of England's King George V.

The only time in recent years I can recall seeing or hearing Pinchas Zukerman engaged in a piece of music was when he conducted the CSO in a program featuring Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.  Otherwise his m.o. is ever the same -- he comes to the soloist's spot on the stage, stares at the tops of his shoes or a score on the music stand, ignores conductor and orchestra, and offers an unrivaled tone and technique without either thought or feeling.

So it was both in the Hindemith and in Berlioz's monumental 1834 viola-driven Harold in Italy.  That Slatkin, a utility conductor who has come to the rescue of the CSO and many other orchestras in times of cancellations and other crises, has little to add musically meant this was 42 minutes of humdrum.

As a part of the dubious push for Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, the concert ended with a tag-on of the generic 1896 "Olympic Hymn."

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"Mr. Obama's Neighborhood" -- another view

I am quoted in the not-bad cover story on Barack Obama and Hyde Park of, of all places, the new (June 16, 2008 dated) issue of The Weekly Standard. 

The author, Andrew Ferguson, a fine writer (Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007; out now in paperback from Grove Press) and thoughtful person (See his February 2007 essay on Obama's two books, The Literary Obama: From eloquent memoir to Democratic boilerplate), took time with a number of people in and around the neighborhood.  He grew up in Hinsdale and later lived on the North Side before decamping for the East Coast and his career as a writer and journalist.  Admittedly these places are far from Hyde Park, but I think he did bring a sense of context.

As with any reporter, I should have asked to have my own quotes read back to me, but c'est la guerre!

For those who might have missed it, here's my March 19, 2008 post Obama and Rev. Wright: A view from the South Side of Chicago that got the national press tracking me down in the first place.

And here's a small postscript post from May 1, 2008.

4 months, 76 posts, 17,053 page views

_{^{Just a quick post to say thanks to all who have stopped by, written, quoted, linked to, and otherwise supported The View from Here.}}

We look forward to the next arbitrary chunk of time and having some time to learn how to better use all of these Typepad features.

At left, a favorite early-ish (1875) Degas, Uncle and Niece (Henri Degas and His Niece Lucie Degas), a portrait of two of the artist's Neapolitan relatives -- a bachelor uncle and his recently orphaned niece, now his ^ward.  

^{_{In the early 1980s, when I worked at}Chicago _{magazine downtown, I used to visit this painting every Thursday night at The Art Institute before the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert.  It's on vacation now, awaiting the redo of the main galleries of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, but I often still think of it, and my two "friends" in it, on Thursdays.}}

Muti meets the press: 'A musician is judged not by promises'

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Muti says performances will speak for him

CSO | 'A musician is judged not by promises'

By Andrew Patner

"I am only a musician, I am not a politician."

So Riccardo Muti showed himself to be both Monday at his first public meeting since his appointment as the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra's new music director Riccardo Muti talked to the media on Monday. 
(John H. White/Sun-Times)

Speaking at Orchestra Hall, the Italian maestro, a youthful 66, displayed charm, wit and a bashful yet confident demeanor. Muti, who will become CSO music director designate in January, deflected almost any potential criticisms of his style, repertoire or focus with humorous and thoughtful arguments for the importance of music in everyday life and the need to "bring music to more and different people."

"Before an election, a politician will make a lot of promises -- 'I will do this, I will do that, I will reduce taxes.' A musician is judged not by the words or the promises, but by the facts of the music that he makes," he said.

Muti, who has led annual concerts for international understanding in places of conflict as Sarajevo, Beirut, Armenia and Turkey, said that he wants to bring music to Chicago communities that, "for several reasons have been distant from the world of the music that we make." He called such work "a moral imperative."

Muti's predecessor, Daniel Barenboim, had made similar statements when he was appointed to succeed Georg Solti in 1988, but after saving the Civic Orchestra and conducting several community concerts, he largely backed off and devoted his energy in such areas to projects in the Middle East and in his adopted home city of Berlin.

Muti emphasized, however, that he had been a music director in the United States before, and unlike Barenboim, he had gained an appreciation for the U.S. system of volunteer boards, individual donors and community service.

"At my age, and in this late part of my career, I have made a decision to come here to serve the community," said Muti, who will begin his term as the CSO's 10th music director in the 2010-2011 season. "After I leave Chicago after a number of years, I would like to be judged by the work I did in these areas."

Muti was circumspect about details, but specifically mentioned schools, hospitals, prisons and neglected communities and neighborhoods as places that he hopes to visit and work with. "We must go them," he said. "We cannot ask them only to come to us."

As to the rounds of dinners and other fund-raising events that Barenboim disdained and that Solti could rely on his wife, Valerie, to manage, Muti observed to much laughter, "If the food is good, then why not?"

With a long connection to opera and other Italian repertoire, Muti used his prepared remarks to lay his diverse musical interests on the table: "My repertoire ranges from the Baroque to the contemporary. This is known to everyone except the blind and the deaf." Muti also said that he would fill his seasons "with the greatest soloists and surround [my subscription weeks] with the greatest conductors."

Responding to a question about his departure from Milan's fabled and tempestuous La Scala opera house in 2005 after 19 years, Muti said that if he "told the whole story, [he] would be late for [his] rehearsals in Vienna in two days" and that one would need "to truly understand the aspect of Italian attitudes" to comprehend the politics and factionalism that led to his resignation at La Scala.

Some of his legendary fire did appear when he observed that "one hundred ushers voted against me at [La Scala]. One hundred ushers!"  He also suggested that "mediocre people who do not understand demands for quality" were behind his ouster there.

He added that he maintains good relationships with many Milan players and choristers and that "every other orchestra I have led -- Florence, London, Philadelphia -- they love me." He pointed also to his 38 years as a guest conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, "known as one of the most difficult orchestras in the world," as "a love affair that only grows deeper."

He used the highest praise to describe the CSO in both technical and artistic terms. Recalling a passage in Prokofiev's Third Symphony that usually requires extra rehearsal time with most orchestras, he said, "[The CSO] played it perfectly and without questions the first time. So I tested them again just to see if it was an accident. And they played it perfectly again and at every performance."

Muti also confirmed that he has no computer or iPod and does not even know how to work either one. He said that he almost never listens to recordings -- his own or others, except for some historic recordings by "great conductors," giving the example of Fritz Reiner's renowned recordings with the CSO. "I find these astounding."