Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Lang Lang's latest incarnations

Here is my Tuesday, July 22, 2008 suntimes.com review of Sunday evening's Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Lang Lang at the Ravinia Festival.

Lang Lang shows serious artistry in performance with CSO

BY ANDREW PATNER

The international piano phenom Lang Lang was all of 17 when he caught the world's attention as a last-minute stand-in for André Watts at Ravinia's centennial concert in 1999.  Though he is just 26 now, he has had several lifetimes of experience in the intervening eight years: Regular performances in every music capital, awards, riches, films, a new autobiography (presumably the first of several) -- even his own black and gold Adidas sneakers.

But those who would write him off as a globalist Liberace or classical rock star miss the seriousness that is mixed in with the glamor, the artistry that can cut through the hype.  Sunday evening at Ravinia with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Chinese-born pianist played both the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto, Op. 18, and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (an announced Chopin work was dropped without explanation) in performances that demonstrated the complexity of this audience conqueror.

Pianist Lang Lang proves his artistry at Ravinia. 

It was Daniel Barenboim who tamed Lang Lang and cured him of many of the piano bench antics that had been encouraged by earlier mentors.  But critics also would say that Barenboim steered him to focus at times on sound alone and a soloist-centered style of exploration while playing.  Certainly his Gershwin found a way to combine the work's immediate exuberance with almost academic demonstrations of harmonic nuggets in the jazzy score.  

If you were ready to surrender to Lang Lang's adventures -- and I bet Gershwin himself would have done so --you were richly rewarded.  If you wanted a historic re-creation of the composer's 1936 performance of the piece at Ravinia, well, it's unlikely you bought a ticket anyway.

The Rachmaninoff again showed a performer stripped of his external theatrics but overly indulging his dreamy side, especially in the work's famous slow movement.  Conductor James Conlon could not or would not build the necessary tension in the orchestral accompaniment, which further fed Lang Lang's tendency toward dissipation.

Conlon's important contribution in recent years has been his focus, first in Germany and now at Ravinia, the Los Angeles Opera (where he is also music director) and the Juilliard School, on European composers whose lives and work were disrupted or destroyed by the Nazis.  This summer's focus is on Franz Schreker (left), an opera composer whom historians see as a "missing link" between Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.  The Austrian-born Schreker, who died just shy of 56 of a stroke in Berlin in 1934 induced by his professional persecution in Germany, had a marvelously open ear that led him to incorporate French and other ideas into the German Romantic idiom.  He even made song settings of poems by Walt Whitman.

While his operas are too huge and difficult to stage here, Conlon had programmed the lovely 1900 string orchestra Intermezzo, Op. 8, at the annual Ravinia gala Saturday. The concert Sunday opened with Schreker's 1916 Chamber Symphony for 23 solo instruments, including harp, celesta and harmonium.  Schreker was searching -- in this 22-minute piece and in his other works -- for ways of capturing unique sounds, much as Debussy did in his late works.  Beneath the surface of the beautiful score is a rhythmic and tonal complexity that requires the expertise of a conductor such as Peter Eötvos and was missing in the Ravinia performance.

The festival continued its successful experiment with simultaneous video projection to screens on the lawn and on either side of the Pavilion stage. With WTTW-Channel 11's Michael Lorentz at the production controls, the opportunity to see Lang Lang and CSO soloists in closeup was fascinating and never distracting.

Kay Ryan -- a little-known work discovered

Although Kay Ryan will not receive her laurel wreath and keys to the poets' washroom at the Library of Congress until September, scholars are already hard at work searching for clues about what the Ryan Era might mean for poetry and writing in general in the United States.

Professor Andrzej Rentap of East of Kishinev University, a longtime student of ephemera, today brought to our attention the following review of the Krups FEP4B 4-Slice Toaster (Black) by Ryan, writing under her legal name of "Kay P. Ryan."  Professor Rentap believes that this brief essay first appeared in an English language Brazilian publication with which he was not previously familiar, "amazon.com."

We agree with Professor Rentap that this discovery, "best toaster I ever had," demonstrates the same lightness, clarity, curiosity, and openness in Kay Ryan's prose that we find in her poetry and hope that its publication here will bring this side of Ryan to a wider public. 

 best toaster I ever had, January 3, 2007

By	Kay P. Ryan

The toaster is very well designed. It accomodates an unusually wide range of bread shapes and thicknesses, toasts excellently, and has a toast-elevator feature that gets little pieces up to where you can get them out without burning yourself. I've never seen that before and it's really handy. The toast-elevator also allows the finished toast to wait for you down deeper in the toaster, so it doesn't cool off so fast. The removable metal top surface is handy for warming up things; I always looked for metal toasters so that I could do this, but Krups had the good sense to add the feature to a plastic toaster. The only change I'd make would be to move the "stop" button out from under the lever; it's hard to see, though no problem once you figure it out. I have never written a product review before, but I feel obliged to pass on the good news to others frustrated by shoddy toasters.

Kay Ryan -- distinguée

We've had the great good fortune to interview most of the U.S. Poets Laureate and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winners over the past 15 years or so -- from Donald Hall to Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks to Robert Hass, to name just a wonderful four -- but few have given us the pleasure we got from meeting and talking with Kay Ryan when she was in Chicago in the spring of 2004 to receive the Lilly Prize (and a check for $100,000!) from The Poetry Foundation, publishers of Poetry magazine.

^{_{Last week Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced that Kay Ryan (left) would become the next U.S. Poet Laureate, the 16th in the modern numbering and titling of the position.}}

^{We're not reproducing any of her poems here just now -- rights issues, etc. (We hope that Marin Independent Journal photog Alan Dep won't mind us using his lovely portrait here -- it is so much finer than other available images.) But we'll tell you that you should seek them out and that they won't take long to read -- the first time. Brief in terms of word count, they are packed tightly like gemstones. Avoiding highfalutin language, they still go deep. Quick across the eyes, they last in the mind.}

We're rebroadcasting (and streaming) that 2004 interview, as well as a recording of Kay Ryan reading her poems with guitarist-composer Reed Maxson, tonight on 98.7WFMT and wfmt.com from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. Chicago time. As of tomorrow/Tuesday you'll be able to stream it or download it at a podcast right here (see The Sound from Here over there on the right) or at wfmt.com.

On Sunday's NPR Weekend All Things Considered the abysmal interviewer blurted out "But you teach remedial English at a [community] college in Northern California." Kay Ryan nearly jumped: "Why do you say 'But'?!" "Well it just seems that a poet of yr stature, teaching remedial English . . . . " "I think it's distinguished work. They know what they want. And they're there to get it."

We think Mr. Billington has made, to use Kay Ryan's turn, a distinguished choice and we look forward to watching, listening to, and reading what she does when she moves into her Washington, D.C. office in the fall.

Bravo, Haitink! But whither Ravinia?

Here is my Friday July 18 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Wednesday night July 16 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert at Ravinia.

Haitink, CSO match high standards

Conductor’s reading of Mahler’s Sixth is deep, intimate

By Andrew Patner

When Bernard Haitink led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in astonishing 

performances of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at Orchestra Hall last fall, he did so even though he and the orchestra he now leads as principal conductor were still getting to know each other.

Wednesday night, Haitink, 79, made his much belated Ravinia debut with a one-time-only reprise that confirmed the unique nature of this partnership and Haitink’s role as one of the finest Mahler conductors in the world.

Indoors in October, Haitink achieved levels of transparency and delicacy that seemed almost impossible in a work too often played for bombast or, worse yet, has bombast added to it.  Somehow in the outdoor Pavilion with cicadas humming he found even greater intimacy with this enormous work making it sound even like chamber music and deeply affecting chamber music at that.

In a small conducting master class at Tanglewood in Massachusetts last week a friend reports that Haitink, who prefers not to talk much about music, demonstrated how minimalism in technique can achieve the greatest communication when coupled with authority.  Knitting the 85-minute four movement A minor symphony into a whole that eludes many, Haitink gave his large Highland Park audience an additional object lesson.  The conductor and orchestra will take this work to Europe in September and last fall’s dates are captured on a CSO Resound CD.

In the decades of James Levine’s music directorship at the CSO’s summer home, this was the sort of standard to be expected at Ravinia.  Since that time, indifferent administrators have put this jewel of an orchestra into the hands of second-rate orchestral conductors and shifted the CSO into the shadow of a burgeoning schedule of weekend pops acts at the not-for-profit venue.  

With Haitink, Pierre Boulez and Riccardo Muti downtown, the failure to provide a similar level of leadership for the CSO in the off-season is scandalous.  The rush of principal players to thank Haitink in his backstage dressing room after the powerful performance spoke with as much volume as the most heart-stopping of Mahler’s  fortissimos.

Critical Thinking Playlist -- 07 July -- American Music for Summer

As I was out of the country for two weeks and then out of Chicago for the Fourth of July weekend (wonderful wedding, Jennifer and Casey!), my Monday night Critical Thinking this week on 98.7WFMT Radio and wfmt.com was a disc program entitled American Music for Summer.

Herewith the playlist:

Jazz Sonata by George Antheil -- Marc-André Hamelin, piano, in a state of jazz, Hyperion CDA67656, 2008

"Make Believe" -- John Raitt and Barbara Cook (left), Show Boat, 1962 Columbia Studio Cast Recording

"Why Do I Love You?" -- Barbara Cook and John Raitt, Show Boat, 1962 Columbia Studio Cast Recording

"After the Ball" -- Barbara Cook and Merrill Staton Choir, Show Boat, 1962 Columbia Studio Cast Recording

"Bill" (from Show Boat) -- Helen Morgan, 1932 Brunswick recording, from above Show Boat Studio Cast CD re-release

"It Might As Well Be Spring" -- Barbara Cook, Oscar Winners: The Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, 1997

"The Gentleman Is a Dope" -- Barbara Cook, Oscar Winners: The Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, 1997

"All the Things You Are" -- arr. Ward Swingle, The Swingle Singers, Mood Swings, 2003

"Summertime" -- Eileen Farrell, 1958, from Opera Arias & Songs CD re-release, Testament SBT 1073, 1996

"Village Ghetto Land" - Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, 1976

"Sir Duke" - Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, 1976

Footnotes:  1.  I played these last two songs after reading Jann S. Wenner's surprisingly good cover story interview with Senator Barack Obama in the new July 10 dated issue of Rolling Stone magazine wherein the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee waxes rhapsodic about Stevie Wonder, Dylan, Springsteen, and the Stones. While I'm two years older than the Senator, our musical upbringing sounds similar -- at least on the Black music side: I was no rocker and growing up had no friends who were either.

I'd be happy to play any of Senator John McCain's musical selections if anyone wants to send me a list from the Republican candidate.  And I've invited both gentlemen to come into the studio and spin some discs with me -- equal time and all that.

2.  I recorded the program midday on Monday not knowing the set list  for Miss Cook's wonderful Martinis at the Martin cabaret performance at Ravinia's Martin Theatre a few hours later, so it was an especial pleasure to hear Miss Cook sing "It Night As Well Be Spring" there last night and then "again" on the drive home

Herewith the playlist:

Jazz Sonata by George Antheil -- Marc-André Hamelin, piano, in a state of jazz, Hyperion CDA67656, 2008

"Make Believe" -- John Raitt and Barbara Cook (left), Show Boat, 1962 Columbia Studio Cast Recording

"Why Do I Love You?" -- Barbara Cook and John Raitt, Show Boat, 1962 Columbia Studio Cast Recording

"After the Ball" -- Barbara Cook and Merrill Staton Choir, Show Boat, 1962 Columbia Studio Cast Recording

"Bill" (from Show Boat) -- Helen Morgan, 1932 Brunswick recording, from above Show Boat Studio Cast CD re-release

"It Might As Well Be Spring" -- Barbara Cook, Oscar Winners: The Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, 1997

"The Gentleman Is a Dope" -- Barbara Cook, Oscar Winners: The Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, 1997

"All the Things You Are" -- arr. Ward Swingle, The Swingle Singers, Mood Swings, 2003

"Summertime" -- Eileen Farrell, 1958, from Opera Arias & Songs CD re-release, Testament SBT 1073, 1996

"Village Ghetto Land" - Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, 1976

"Sir Duke" - Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, 1976

Footnotes:  1.  I played these last two songs after reading Jann S. Wenner's surprisingly good cover story interview with Senator Barack Obama in the new July 10 dated issue of Rolling Stone magazine wherein the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee waxes rhapsodic about Stevie Wonder, Dylan, Springsteen, and the Stones. While I'm two years older than the Senator, our musical upbringing sounds similar -- at least on the Black music side: I was no rocker and growing up had no friends who were either.

I'd be happy to play any of Senator John McCain's musical selections if anyone wants to send me a list from the Republican candidate.  And I've invited both gentlemen to come into the studio and spin some discs with me -- equal time and all that.

2.  I recorded the program midday on Monday not knowing the set list  for Miss Cook's wonderful Martinis at the Martin cabaret performance at Ravinia's Martin Theatre a few hours later, so it was an especial pleasure to hear Miss Cook sing "It Night As Well Be Spring" there last night and then "again" on the drive home

Risør Report -- part three

Home for a few hours today after flying back from Copenhagen last night and a couple of days with our dear friends in Malmö, Sweden, Birdie and Marc and their wonder children Isaac and Inez and heading back to O'Hare in a few hours to fly to a wedding weekend in Richmond, Virginia, so time to fill in some more highlights from the world's most jam-packed chamber music festival!

Last year, the Festival sponsored an outdoor evening concert (remember that evenings are illuminated like late afternoons here) on the picnic island of Stangholmen (above, at a later evening hour), a short boat ride away from Risør.  It was such a huge hit that the Festival organizers not only decided to make it an annual feature, they also went about building a permanent outdoor stage for the island that can be used for all sorts of concerts and the many other festivals held in the town (including those of wooden boats and, we kid you not, bluegrass music).  

Securing $2.5 million Norwegian kroner (crowns), about $500,000 U.S., from the recently established DnB NOR Savings Banks Foundation, Festival Director Turid Birkeland, a firecracker former Minister of Culture in Norway, and her colleagues got the thing designed, built, and up and running just in time for Friday night's 9 p.m. show after dealing with town debates over Plexiglas versus wood (wood won), weather delays, and resulting cost increases.  I'll get some pictures up here of the crowd of 100s of (silent as ever here) listeners in the natural bowl facing down to the stage to take in, among others, Andsnes and Tetzlaff, trumpeters Håkan Hardenberger and Mark Bennett, the Norwegian Soloists choir, and, for dessert, Thomas Quasthoff singing Schubert songs with Marc-André Hamelin at the piano.  "Im Frühling" never sounded, felt, or looked quite like this!

Saturday's concerts started at 12 noon, but first we took in a delightful presentation at the local Baptist Church from a marvelously deadpan curator of several centuries of music boxes on loan for the Festival from the Vest-Agder region Fylkeskommune Museum in Mandal. The noon concert turned around collage, with the Scherzo from that one-man German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters's Merz-based Ursonate (1921-1932). The connection with Norway -- as well as the music -- is direct here as Schwitters (left, chanting) was a refugee there from 1937 to the early 1940s (even building a Merzbau in Lysaker and a half a Merzbau on the island of Hjertoya).  Eir Inderhaug intoned the syllables with appropriate Merz-ness.  Hardenberger was the consummate soloist/interpreter for the trumpet version of Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre and if Tetzlaff should exhibit any technical difficulties in upcoming months, blame it on his definitive and impossibly motoric animation of Antheil's almost-never played 1923 First Violin Sonata with Hamelin as his similarly charged piano partner.  Once again, the uniqueness of not only hearing this repertoire at all but of hearing it by some of the greatest musicians in the world cannot be overemphasized.

That concert went on with Hindemith's Kammermusik No. 1 of 1924 but again we're trying to hold ourselves to the highest if the highlights.  An early evening Haydn survey included two horn piano trios and the Nelson Mass but also the corresponding recitative and aria The Battle of the Nile of 1800 to a text by Nelson's lover, Lady Hamilton.  Eir Inderhaug (above left), spectacular again, with Andsnes at the piano treating this as he would one of Haydn's best sonatas.  The concert opened with Ligeti's 1961 Three Bagatelles for David Tudor.  Let's just say here that it needs to be seen and Hamelin is the one to see it with.

The Saturday evening concert is always held at 10 p.m., in part as a warm up for the Saturday midnight concert! Neglected Hungarian composer György Ránki's 1961 Don Quijote y Dulcinea for oboe (Christian Wetzel) and haropsichord (Allan Rasmussen) was the pleasing curtain-raiser.  Having mentioned Quasthoff's Festival debut at the island concert last night, you can probably guess where this is going. Ravel's career-closing 1932-33 Don Quichotte à Dulcinée with Andsnes at the piano gave Festival goers an intimate experience with the German baritone and his ability to set a mood almost immediately.  But it was Ligeti's 1982 horn trio with the superb Bruno Schneider in collaboration with Tetzlaff and Fredrik Ullén that took us to the next level and the 1864 Op. 32 Songs of Brahms again with Quasthoff and Andsnes that carried us to the witching hour.  I'll have more to say about Quasthoff later but even those who have been captivated by his DG recording of these pieces with his frequent piano partner Justus Zeyen were hardly prepared for the power of his interpretations, pairing with Andsnes, and the fading light outside "our" tiny wooden church. 

The midnight concert is always a favorite both for its programming and its very existence and this year's was no exception -- without intermission or applause between the works we heard one after the other, Ives's 1906 The Unanswered Question with Hardenberger rising silently out of raised carved pulpit; Ligeti's ethereal 1966 Lux aeterna with the Norwegian Soloists; two sections, one of them brand-new, from an evolving work of miniatures, Schattenlinie, by the superb Danish compositional craftsman Bent Sørensen (left), the 2005 Festival composer, with Fredrik Fors's pure clarinet and the work's dedicatees Tomter and Andsnes; the spectral wonders of Dane Per Nørgård's 1974 Rilke setting Singe die Gärten with the Norwegian Soloists and instrumental chamber ensemble; and, icing on the cake, Hardenberger in Haydn's 1796 E Major Trumpet Concerto to send us hopping out into the night, knowing that sunrise was only two hours away.

Risör Report -- part two

I still think that the height of luxury is getting up on a summer morning in Salzburg, having a nice breakfast and some good coffee, and strolling 100 metres or so to the Large Festival Hall to hear the Vienna Philharmonic play Mahler with Pierre Boulez at 11 a.m.  There's a decadent, Viennese quality to this of course.  And the Nordic version in turn has a brisker feel -- getting up on a late June morning, having a good breakfast, scrambling for some decent coffee, and walking a mile or more along the coast to a furniture showroom with a waterfront view to hear the Risör (on a Swedish keyboard today) Festival Strings play Haydn's "Morning" Symphony with Christian Tetzlaff as leader and concertmaster at 9:30 a.m.!

In a pretty ingenious move, the Festival programmed the three 1761 Haydn Symphonies No's. 6, 7, and 8, "Morning," "Noon," and "Evening" at the three called-for times Friday.  The D Major "Morning," in the morning, with Tetzlaff was a lift for more than just a day.  A musician of such a high level of ability and commitment he elevated his already excellent colleagues "simply" through his own example and inspiration.  Ligeti's 1968 Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet with the Swiss hornist Bruno Schneider, Danish bassoonist Dag Jensen, and Swedish clarinetist Fredrik Fors, inter alia, and Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata with Liza Ferschtman accompanied by Nikolai Lugansky rounded out this early morning.

Before the C Major Haydn "Noon," midday started with Marc-André Hamelin piloting Leo Ornstein's 1915 Suicide in an Airplane at the Steinway concert grand.  Ornstein (left, as a young man), you might recall, was the American-based virtuoso pianist and composer who withdrew from the performance and publishing world in the 1930s, when he was in his 40s, and managed to live on, in mostly good health, until his death in 2002 at 108 or 109.  Airplane has been called "the ne plus ultra of pianistic violence . . . " but Hamelin made it sing.  The young singers of the Norwegian Soloists and their director Grete Pedersen gave a phenomenally idiomatic performance of Messiaen's rarely tackled 1949 Cinq Rechants, a mystical spinning of the composer's own vision (and lyrics) of the Tristan legend, along with French vowels and pseudo-Sanskrit.  And then the Swedish Fredrik Ullén gave Book Three (1995-97) and Book Two (1988-93) -- Book One was still to come -- of Ligeti's Piano Etudes.  Ullén not only made the first full recording of all of Ligeti's piano works (in 1996), he made the first-ever recording of the second book of these astonishingly varied studies.  What other festival would or even could have programmed this concert alone?

But the day was only half-done -- early evening started with Hamelin again, this time with Antheil's (left) minute and a half yet a night of music containing Jazz Sonata of 1923 -- he polishes these things off like finger exercises, yet with all the requisite heart and mind as well.  Then Jan-Erik Gustafsson topped his already high earlier points with one of the finest Debussy 'Cello Sonata's I've heard, showing us, through clarity, focus, and empathy with Debussy's 1915 exploration, just what a daring work this is.  Luganksy was his able piano partner. 

German flutist Andrea Lieberknecht took these efforts across the Atlantic with Varèse's Density 21.5 of 1936 and then, with seven colleagues, his 1923 Octandre.  The G Major Haydn "Evening" was a fine wrap-up of this trio of symphonies but all but vanished in the wake of Hamelin's performance of Ives's 1911-15 "Concord" Sonata (Concord, Mass. 1840-1860).  

With all due respect to the many outstanding musicians here and the many exceptional performances of many a rarity or challenging work we heard, this was an experience that I am sure will stay with me for the rest of my life.  Hamelin (left) plays Ives with the mind of a composer -- there is never an illogical moment or measure in his 40-minute traversal.  Although he is meticulously faithful to the score, he seems to be improvising -- creating -- the work as he plays.  With technique to burn he shows us not only what is striking in Ives's work -- the much commented on simultaneity of themes and styles, the idiosyncracy of his portraiture, the seeming cacaphonies -- but just how beautiful and inherently logical Ives is in his best works.  Playing from memory (for a while this week the joke was that the pianist actually could not play from sheet music!) and with absolute concentration and command, Hamelin merged Ives's voyage and the senses of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau he invokes, with his own inner journey and that of the listening audience.  In this little 17th century wooden fisherman's church, a French-Canadian took his Norwegian audience to places that the eccentric New Englander had dreamed others would hear but which they rarely, if ever, did in his lifetime.  I'm still lost in the spell of that evening . . . .