Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Roger Ebert on "the death of newspapers," Jay Mariotti, and the Chicago Sun-Times

Roger Ebert, 66, joined the Chicago Sun-Times in 1966, at 23, as a reporter and feature writer and, at the age of 24, was named the paper's film critic on April 5, 1967, a position he retains to this day.  Roger (left) won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism -- the first awarded for film criticism -- in 1975.  The rest is history.

I am proud to say that he is my colleague, my friend, and one of my heroes.

Friday 28 August 2008 -- Chicago

By Roger Ebert

An open letter to sports columnist Jay Mariotti, who resigned from the Sun-Times and lashed out during a TV interview announcing that newspapers were dead:

Dear Jay,

What an ugly way to leave the Sun-Times. It does not speak well for you. Your timing was exquisite. You signed a new contract, waited until days after the newspaper had paid for your trip to Beijing at great cost, and then resigned with a two-word e-mail: "I quit." You saved your explanation for a local television station.

As someone who was working here for 24 years before you arrived, I think you owed us more than that. You owed us decency. The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat.

Newspapers are not dead, Jay, and this paper will not die because you have left. Times are hard in the newspaper business, and for the economy as a whole. Did you only sign on for the luxury cruise?

There's an old saying that you might have come across once or twice on the sports beat: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

Newspapers are not dead, Jay, because there are still readers who want the whole story, not a sound bite. If you go to work for television, viewers may get a little weary of you shouting at them. You were a great shouter in print, that's for sure, stomping your feet when owners, coaches and players didn't agree with you. It was an entertaining show. Good luck getting one of your 1,000-word rants on the air.

The rest of us are still at work, still putting out the best paper we can. We believe in our profession, and in the future. And we believe in our internet site, which you also whacked as you slithered out the door. I don't know how your column was doing, but we have the most popular sports section in Chicago. The reports and blog entries by our Washington editor Lynn Sweet have become a must-stop for millions of Americans in this election year. After a recent blog entry I wrote about the Beijing Olympics, I woke up at 5 a.m. one morning, when North America was asleep, and found that 40 percent of my 100 most recent visitors had been from China. I don't have any complaints about our web site. So far this month my web page has been visited from almost every country on earth, including one visit from the Vatican City. The Pope, no doubt. Hope you were doing as well.

You have left us, Jay, at a time when the newspaper is once again in the hands of people who love newspapers and love producing them. You managed to stay here through the dark days of the thieves Conrad Black and David Radler. The paper lost millions. Incredibly, we are still paying Black's legal fees.

I started here when Marshall Field and Jim Hoge were running the paper. I stayed through the RupertMurdoch regime. I was asked, "How can you work for a Murdoch paper?"

My reply was: "It's not his paper. It's my paper. He only owns it." 

That's the way I've always felt about the Sun-Times, and I still do. On your way out, don't let the door bang you on the ass.

Your former colleague,

Roger Ebert

The view from here to . . . City Opera, Bayreuth, and Gérard Mortier -- 2

OK, so we can all agree on one thing -- if there is one person who can get people talking and arguing and speculating about opera, it's Gérard Mortier (left).

My post yesterday on Mortier's surprise bid -- in concert with Nike Wagner -- to take over the Bayreuth Festival generated a great deal of response, some of it positive, some of it critical, and some of it -- from a member of the sandbox at parterre box -- equal parts nasty and wacky.  (Memo to writers: Unless you're David Mamet, the use of profanity and obscenity is almost always a substitute for thought and clear expression.)  

The questions I raised also seem to have received some answers, via an e-mail to, at least, our Berlin-based Aussie pal Shirley Apthorp at Bloomberg.com, and the Associated Press ("the other AP") cultural reporting workhorse Ronald Blum, from the international Intendant/Directeur himself.

Before reporting on these developments, let's back up a bit and clarify some things.

My post yesterday was not meant as an attack on Mortier, rather it was an attempt at a summing up of a number of issues on his situation vis-à-vis New York City Opera that have gone un- or under-reported or that have simply been swept under the rug as so much is in reporting on cultural institutions.  

Reporters, in New York in particular, too often take claims by major arts organizations at face value so that initial articles can read like press releases -- Remember the trumpeted 2003 "merger" of Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic?  Or the 2006 "merger" between Carnegie Hall and City Center?  How about the various plans of New York City Opera (above) to move to Times Square (1991), a downtown site -- even  Ground Zero (2002), Amsterdam and 66th (2004), or the dark side of the moon (pending)?  Claims that Peter Martins is the true heir to Balanchine?  That Riccardo Muti was (twice) going to be the next music director of the New York Philharmonic?  That Alan Gilbert is the next Leonard Bernstein?  That the Guggenheim's Thomas Krens was the Second Coming?  That Alberto Vilar was all that he said he was?  That the slicing and dicing of the Morgan Library buildings was a brilliant success?

Whatever the reasons that Mortier agreed to take the City Opera general manager's post in early 2007, the company has faced a continuing set of financial and venue difficulties not of Mortier's making since then, many of Mortier's ideas for the company -- such as the economically questionable one to shift it from a repertory schedule to a one opera at a time stagione system -- have been slow to find support or opposed outright, and the opportunity  landscape in Europe has shifted a time two.  

Certainly I did not mean to have anyone infer that Mortier might be afraid of Peter Gelb (left) and the Metropolitan Opera -- or of anyone or anything for that matter: The man loves a fight, even when one is wholly unnecessary.  It's in his blood.  What I hoped was clear is that Gelb -- a veteran battler and mirror-watcher himself -- has succeeded in stealing "populist" thunder ahead of Mortier's contracted fall 2009 start date at City Opera and that he continues to stand in the way of a number of financial and Lincoln Center entente possibilities for the smaller company.  Mortier relishes a fight, but not wasting his time.

Pace some of the blogerati -- I am not an opera conservative and I am not a proponent of park and bark, of dusty old productions, or of the mass expulsion of stage directors from the opera houses.  Although I have not seen him in recent years, I've known Mortier since 1995 and spent good chunks of four summers -- 1995, 1996, 1999, and 2000 -- at the Salzburg Festival when he was in charge.  I was and remain a huge fan of what he and Hans Landesmann (then the Festival's visionary concerts director and business manager; left, back in the day) did at Salzburg.  I have interviewed Mortier one on one, asked questions of him at press conferences, had many informal conversations and exchanges with him, been fortunate to dine with him, and generally interacted with him in Salzburg, New York, and Chicago (he was a great fan of Lyric Opera's Ardis Krainik -- as who was not?).  I even introduced him to some Americans in the Midwest who might have been potential supporters of his vision for Salzburg.

I stopped going to the Festival when Mortier and Landesmann were leaving; I had no interest in the direction of their successor.  Since Jürgen Flimm (left) and Markus Hinterhäuser took over in 2007 I have been going back -- thus far to the 2007 and 2008 main Festivals in summer and to the 2008 edition of the Pfingsten/Whitsun/May Festival that they organize with Riccardo Muti.

I admired and admire Mortier not only for transforming much of the program at Salzburg from its Karajanian stasis and glitz, but also for his and Landesmann's direct confrontations with the Festival's -- and Austria's -- complex past and with the treatment of Jewish composers and artists in Salzburg and Austrian history.  In addition to programming the works of Schoenberg, Berg, and others often silenced at the Festival, he encouraged remarkable public exhibitions and catalogues by the intrepid archivist Gisela Prossnitz and her colleagues on such subjects as the 1938 Anschluß Salzburg Festival. 

 Mortier even went so far as to commission the first ever German-language publication of Michael P. Steinberg's essential 1990 work, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theatre and Ideology, 1890-1938 (Cornell University Press) in 2000 in both Austria and Germany as Ursprung und Ideologie der Salzburger Festspiele 1890-1938 (Anton Puset Verlag, Salzburg and Munich). The German-language edition was the recipient of Austria's Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001.  The book was also republished in English as a Cornell paperback in 2000 (left) with its title reversed and the dates dropped as Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival with an important new preface, discussing, inter alia, Mortier's role in the modern Festival and the 1999 "Salzburg culture wars."

But one can admire Mortier and his Salzburg accomplishments and still find him an odd fit for City Opera, still find some of his commissioned productions juvenile or otherwise ridiculous, still wonder why he keeps coming back to the same interpreters and the same works in his various international posts.

That he now claims that if he and Nike Wagner were to get the Bayreuth job that he could easily run both City Opera and Wagner's Valhalla would seem either to be a jest or a sign of awful hubris.  "Nobody knows at the moment what will happen," quoth Mortier's e-mail in both Shirley Apthorp's and Ronald Blum's reports.  "Anyway, with their six-week season (plus rehearsals period), the Bayreuth festival should not affect my work for NYCO.  On the contrary, it could reinforce the international stature of City Opera."

But Ronald Blum also quoted the following from Mortier's e-missive, and this brings us all the way back round to where we started:  If the Gérard-Nike bid succeeds, Mortier writes, it "could also give a signal to the [City Opera] board members to give full financial support to the new vision" Mortier has proposed for the company.

I'd be fascinated if Mortier indeed comes to City Opera and it would be fascinating to see what would happen if he stayed for his whole contract.  I just don't see it happening for at least the reasons outlined above.  I'd be happy to be wrong.

The view from here to . . . City Opera and Gérard Mortier

I'll believe it when I see it department.

Let's just put on the record what we have been saying for the past 18 months:

I have never thought that the cunning and beyond self-assured Flemish impresario Gérard Mortier (left) will actually take over the New York City Opera next year, and if he does start at City Opera I can't see him serving out his contract there.

The former Intendant of the Salzburg Festival (1992-2001) and the current Directeur of the Paris Opéra (since 2004) has about as much interest in the United States as Daniel Barenboim did, has no experience with or interest in fundraising or American arts administration, will have no budget to speak of and no building to work with for his first season or two, and now has the stop-at-nothing Peter Gelb next door at the Metropolitan Opera.

Now comes word via Bloomberg.com and the essential FAZ newspaper in Germany that Mortier and Nike Wagner, Richard Wagner's great-granddaughter, have submitted a bid to run the Wagner epicentric Bayreuth Festival.  (More from the FAZ here, also in German only.)

The German government, headed by opera-loving and frequent-attending Chancellor Angela Merkel, is a part of the foundation that will choose a successor to the impossibly impossible Wolgang Wagner, 88 (he turns 89 on Saturday), who is finally stepping down from the family fiefdom (Nike is the daughter of WoWa's brother, the brilliant Wieland Wagner, who died too young in 1966), in meetings that begin September 1.  

Mortier and Nike Wagner faxed their application to to the Festival foundation this weekend.  They are up against the previously unlikely pairing of WoWa's two daughters, Katharina, just 30 and WoWa's favorite, and her half-sister, international artistic consultant Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 63, until this spring bitter enemies.

Mortier turns 65 in November and is required by law to step down from his Paris job then, although not for want of trying on his part for a waiver to the French work rules.  If there were any other reasons that he put in for the City Opera post, I've never encountered them.

Even if Mortier and Nike don't get the Bayreuth leadership -- and everyone in that Wespennest (wasp's or hornet's nest) is a fierce competitor and intriguer -- they could still share in some plan for the Festival's direction.  

_{The main thing is that with his fax to Bayreuth, Mortier is telling the folks at the State Theater at Lincoln Center what anyone who knows Mortier at all already knows -- his true interests lie elsewhere.}

The view from . . . Salzburg 3 -- Riccardo Muti looks ahead to Chicago

Chicago Sun-Times, Sunday, August 24, 2008

Hills alive with the sounds of Muti

SALZBURG FESTIVAL: Where CSO's next maestro gets to lead music as it should be heard

By Andrew Patner

SALZBURG, Austria -- Although he'd never heard of Clarence Darrow, the adamant tone of voice and look on Riccardo Muti's face made it seem that the Italian maestro takes his future in Chicago with the same seriousness as did the "attorney for the damned" who famously made our city his home.

"When I say that I want to make the Chicago Symphony Orchestra a greater part of the life of Chicago and to bring it to new audiences, I do not mean just to persuade the children of the current subscribers that it is their turn to buy tickets. I mean that we must go into the schools, into the neighborhoods, into the communities -- blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Asians, everyone.

Riccardo Muti (pictured in May below the Salzburg Castle and in front of the Franciscan Church) values the area as a place where he can "work with musicians and orchestras of the highest level, but be away from the noise -- including the mental noise -- of a big city." 
(Silvia Lelli/Milan)

"When people heard me say in Chicago I want to take the orchestra to play in a prison, they thought, 'Ah, Muti is joking.' But I was not joking and I am not joking. Music -- serious music, the music of this orchestra -- must be for everyone."

When told that Darrow gave a major address to the prisoners in Cook County Jail in 1902, Muti narrowed his dark eyes. "Get me a copy of this address, please. I must read this."

To spend two weeks in Salzburg, where Muti and his wife, stage and Ravenna festival director Cristina Mazzavillani, have a home in the chic neighboring village of Anif, and where Muti has been a regular podium presence at the Salzburg Festival since 1970, is to get a chance to view the next music director of the CSO in slow motion. For the seven weeks he is here his life is centered on work -- opera and orchestra rehearsals, studying scores, and meetings this last week with CSO president Deborah F. Rutter and artistic administration chief Martha Gilmer to start serious planning for his tenure as Chicago's 10th music director with the 2010-11 season.

Where else but Salzburg?

Other than family and a few close friends, usually other Italians, the Mutis are not caught up in the social side of Salzburg. "I do what must be done," he says over a simple lunch of pasta and smoked fish. "We live in an age when we need sponsors and donors, et cetera. Fortunately, with the administration of this festival, one can also have real conversations about real topics."

While Muti's humor is sharp, and even salty at times, small talk is of little interest to the 67-year-old Neapolitan. Even a quick -- and friendly -- exchange with his CSO predecessor Daniel Barenboim, who was briefly in Salzburg in late July to play concerts as a pianist with Pierre Boulez and Lang Lang, included some sharp words on Milan's La Scala opera house, which Muti led for 19 years and where Barenboim now holds a regular conducting and programming position.

"I am here in Salzburg 38 years. My children grew up summers and winters in this house which we built here. Like Ravenna [Italy, site of the Mutis' main home], it is a place where I can work, and work with musicians and orchestras of the highest level, but be away from the noise -- including the mental noise -- of a big city. Where else can someone work on a new production of [Verdi's] Otello, a revival of The Magic Flute and the great Brahms German Requiem -- and all with the Vienna Philharmonic -- without having to fly from here to there to here?"

Raves for 'Otello,' musically

We have long associated Muti, of course, with Verdi and Italian opera. Still he is concerned that too many musicians and audience members miss the true musical side of the Milanese giant's works. "Verdi was acomposer. This means he wrote music. He was not a circus master or the proprietor of a wax museum. I want people to hear what Verdi -- what any composer -- actually wrote."

The proof, as ever, was in the playing. While the dull new Otello production got its share of boos on opening night and the critics concurred in the following days, the orchestral playing and the direction of the singers was breathtaking. Paolo Isotta, the most respected -- and often feared -- critic in Italy, wrote in the Corriere della Serra that even he had never heard a performance such as this. "You see what happens when you actually study the score," Muti smiles, a bit devilishly.

And a few days later it was the same with Mozart's The Magic Flute, although this time with a beautiful and colorful production by Pierre Audi and the late Dutch painter Karel Appel. Those who think Muti only shines in Italian opera should hear him in Mozart's great singspiel. Always poised, always attentive, always Mozartean.

On the Karajan cult

The orchestral part of Muti's Salzburg trifecta was certainly its most complicated -- a performance of the Brahms Requiem as, essentially, the festival's only tribute to the centennial of Salzburg's other native son, the controversial and dictatorial conductor Herbert von Karajan, who ran the festival (and much else musical in Europe) with an iron grip until his death in 1989.

It is to Muti's credit that he always acknowledges, privately and publicly, the opportunities Karajan gave not only to him but to Maazel, Abbado, Mehta, Ozawa, essentially every major conductor of the postwar generation. But as time passes, he sees that much about the Karajan cult was just that, cultish. "There are recordings by him that you hear and wonder, 'How does he do this? How does he get this sound? This 'shine,' you could say. But then you listen to several recordings of several pieces, and you wonder, 'Why do they all have this sound, this shine?' "

As he played the Brahms German Requiem for the first time ever, Muti was, to this listener, restricted somewhat by the sense of occasion, framed with a festival request for no applause after the work. Yet he achieved something this summer in Salzburg that is rare indeed: His Verdi sounds like Verdi. His Mozart like Mozart. And his Brahms like Brahms.

Muti is serious about music and serious about Chicago. He is also seriously excited. Wait'll you hear him and the CSO at Cook County Jail.

The view from . . . Salzburg 2 -- Klaus Huber nets $120,000 composer prize

Klaus Huber, (left) 83, an individualist composer whose interests were multicultural long before such encounters were fashionable and whose composition students have included some of the top names in international contemporary music, has been awarded one of the world's richest music prizes.

The state of Salzburg, home to the Salzburg Festival, the Mozarteum University and Foundation, and the mountains and lakes that fill The Sound of Music, named Huber Thursday as the recipient of the 2009 Salzburg Music Prize/International Composition Award.

The prize is worth €80,000, or $120,000, and also allows its recipient to select a young composer for an Advancement Award of €30,000 Euros ($20,000). Huber selected a reclusive French-Armenian protégé, Franck Christoph Yeznikian, 39, for that prize. Established during the 2006 Mozart Year to highlight contemporary musicmaking as well as the historical, the first Salzburg Music laureate was Italian iconoclast Salvatore Sciarrino, now 61, whose work is the subject of a retrospective series at this year's Salzburg Festival, "Kontinent Sciarrino."

The award was to be given every three years, but state government representatives also announced this week that it will become a more frequent bi-annual one and will be formally coordinated with the new Salzburg Biennale of contemporary music set to launch in March of next year. As a result, the lead award will drop to €60,000, or $90,000, starting in 2011.

Candidates for the lead prize must be significant and still active composers who also have strong involvement with teaching and society at large.  The award is open to composers regardless of nationality or place of residence.

Huber, whose works are rarely played in the United States, was born in Berne, Switzerland, in 1924 and studied violin with Stefi Geyer and composition with Willy Burkhard in Zurich in the 1940s and '50s. After establishing himself as a composer on the European scene in the late 1950s, he taught in Lucerne and Basel before beginning a long career teaching in Freiburg, Germany. His students have included such internationally prominent composers of the next generations as British-born Brian Ferneyhough (left), Germany's Wolfgang Rihm, and Japan's Toshio Hosokawa.

Sciarrino, who chaired this year's jury which also included German radio and festival producer Harry Vogt and conductor Sylvain Cambreling, told me "Huber's influence as a mentor and teacher is remarkable and remarkably varied. And unlike many composers today, he is a true personality of culture, combining so many areas of interest, knowledge, and concern."

Huber's works range from chamber music (he is championed by Britain's Arditti Quartet) to oratorios to opera and are frequently integrated with the laments of Soviet-era Russian dissident poetry, Christian theology, Sufi mysticism, and Arabic musical practices.

The composer, who now divides his time between Bremen, Germany, and a village in Umbria, Italy, is also highly regarded as a technical craftsman, a scholar of early and Baroque music, and for being politically éngagé -- he is a longtime associate of Ernesto Cardenal, the former NIcaraguan Sandansita, and has set poems and writings of Palestinian and Iranian authors as well as the great Russian-Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in Stalin's camps in 1938.

The lively and vigorous Huber told a press conference in his Swiss-accented German that despite the heaviness of many of his topics there is a need for "a certain lightness in living life." With a hearty laugh he reminded his listeners, "The cork always floats!"

Huber and Yeznikian's compositions, along with Arabic music, will be featured during one of the four long weekends of the new Salzburg Biennale in March 2009. Other featured composers and areas will be Swiss-Austrian Beat Furrer and flamenco, American Steve Reich and Balinese gamelan, and Toshio Hosokawa and music of Japan. The new festival was founded by Hans Landesmann (left), former concerts director and business manager of the main Salzburg Festival.

The view from . . . Salzburg -- 1

The calendar gods once again thoughtfully conspired to encompass almost all of my Salzburg Festival needs in a single two-week stretch -- all of this year's operas save one (Rusalka, sigh), all of the "Kontinent Sciarrino" new music fest within a fest, both Riccardo Muti operas (Otello, new, and Die Zauberflöte, revival) and his Vienna Philharmonic concert (the Brahms Requiem), both Leif Ove Andsnes performances (chamber and solo recital Festival debuts), a new theatrical adaptation of Crime and Punishment, a rare staging of the Bertolt Brecht/Hans Eissler 1930 music theatre piece Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken), and a few other goodies besides -- so here I am, back in "die schöne Stadt."

My departure time and date having been tossed about by the Lufthansa strike like Otello's ship (quoth the redoubtable Betty of University Travel in Hyde Park, "How come if they are only canceling 4 of 78 over-the-water flights, my clients are booked on two of them?!), I arrived Thursday 31 July via Frankfurt and Munich and was able to go straight to the first public master class of Barbara Bonney and Michael Schade's new Young Singers Project�with no less than Christa Ludwig (left), four months past her 80th birthday and looking and seeming no different than when I saw her farewell performances at Ravinia�14 years ago.� In addition to the project directors, the students, selected from international auditions, will also work with Franz Grundheber, Thomas Quasthoff, and pianist Malcom Martineau, among others during their six weeks here. Of Ludwig, what is there to say? Grounded and open, informed and informal, fit and moving briskly, this great singer who all her career said she yearned for "normal life," helped her charges to themselves be normal and unaffected, and, simple as it might sound, to smile when they were happy and to smile "to be happy."

�

Above, l. to r.: Jürgen Flimm, Salzburg Festival President Helga Rabl-Stadler, Riccardo Muti, Markus Hinterhäuser, and Cristina Muti  [NOTE: Due to a careless error on my part, this photo was used without credit to its excellent maker -- Robert Jungwirth of the excellent www.KlassikInfo.de website.  My sincere apologies to Robert and www.KlassikInfo.de for this inappropriate action.]

Since the German theatre and opera director Jürgen Flimm (above) took the Intendant's helm here last year and brought the gifted Austrian pianist and new music champion Markus Hinterhäuser (above) back to the Festival as Concerts Director a spirit not at all unlike Ludwig's has prevailed. The glitterati still make the scene at opera first nights, but the Festival's real life revolves around the tiny stretch from the grand Festival Halls towards the farmers' market in front of Fischer von Erlachs's Kollegienkirche (built 1696-1707) with the Triangel restaurant and café -- whose outdoor space has tripled with the expansion and renovation of the park/plaza across from the Festival Halls -- functioning as unofficial canteen and star-spotting hub.� Thus far we've spied�Uruguayan bari-hunk Erwin Schrott (left), Leporello in this year's new Don Giovanni,regularly holding animated court, sometimes with much-pregnant fiancée super-soprano Anna Netrebko (ditto), and British-American actor-author Rupert Everett passing through for a day or so. (Salzburg resident BIanca Jagger remains a fixture at the more formal events and openings which are still here, but no longer defining or suffocating.) Flimm and Hinterhäuser (neither of whom seems to own a necktie, let alone black or white tie) do much of their business and chatting here as well at the communal outdoor tables. This lively stretch makes Salzburg a sort of comfortable cultural bathtub.

One of the highlights of last year's Festival was the new Andrea Breth-Daniel Barenboim Eugene Oneginand so I wanted to see Breth's Dostoevsky stage play, drawn from the 1994 German translation by Svetlana Geier that, among other things restored the actual title, in German Verbrechen und Strafe, to the 1866 work German readers had known as Guilt and Atonement (Schuld und Sühne) all of these years.� Breth also wanted both to restore the full scope of the novel -- there's much more than Raskolnikov, the old lady pawnbroker, and Inspector Petrovich here -- and to use the heavy lens of German Regietheater to do so.� But Dostoevsky is not Nicholas Nicklebyand after four hours of stage play (plus two 25-minute interviews) I had lost track of the number of blackouts and allegorical, repetiive actions and I imagine the rest of the full house at the Landestheater had as well. The work's other attraction, though, had been young Munich-based actor Jens Harzer (above left) and his Raskolnikov was riveting every bloody (in both senses) step of the way as was veteran Udo Samel (below left) as Porfiry Petrovich. Somehow his acclaimed portrayal of Schubert in Franz Lehner's three-part mid-1980s television film on the composer has eluded me. It will no more. Still, this was a very German take on a very Russian novel.

On a Chanticleer day . . . a double anniversary at Ravinia

Due to transmission and scheduling problems, my review of the July 29 joint program by Chanticleer and the Shanghai Quartet at Ravinia did not appear in the Chicago Sun-Times or at suntimes.com.  Apologies for the delay in posting it here!

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There was a hall full of happy people at Tuesday night's joint anniversary concert of Chanticleer and the Shanghai Quartetin the Martin Theatre at Ravinia.  But none could have been as happy as Chicago singer, and downstate Morgan County native, Gregory Peebles who recently won a massive audition to become the newest member of the rightly-esteemed 12-man vocal group.
 
Chanticleer (left, in their current line-up) was marking 30 years of sonic wonders while the China-founded chamber players recently hit the quarter-century mark.  Supporters of both groups commissioned a joint work for the two of them from Chen Yi, the wonderful and appealing Chinese-trained American composer.  Ravinia's presentation of From the Path of Beautyfollowed the work's world premiere in San Francisco, Chanticleer's home base, by just a few months.

Live performances by Chanticleer, especially in intimate spaces such as the Martin, are always electrifying.  One could not help but wonder what was going through Peebles' head -- a combination of intimidation and excitement, he said later -- hearing the precision and glow of the ensemble.  A soloist at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Evanston, the male soprano (Chanticleer has the full range -- and then some -- of a mixed choir) is giving a farewell benefit concert there August 1 to help with his expenses in moving to San Francisco this summer. 

At 55, Chen Yi's compositions are always intriguing and they usually bear an immediate signature -- a blending of Western and Eastern influences and a buoyant enthusiasm.  From the Path of Beauty is a seven-movement, 30-minute work that alternates a cappella vocal sections with three sections for string quartet alone and almost oceanic movements for all forces together. Inspired by ancient scroll writing and art, Chen Yi (left), a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, uses nonsense syllables and vocal sound effects rather than actual Chinese texts to create hypnotic effects.

Over the course of half an hour, however, the work, and the concept, grew repetitive.  Clearly, and honorably, influenced by the late Hungarian composer György Ligeti, the new piece, with the exception of a rollicking movement that sounded like an homage to The Swingle Singers, often lacked that pioneering artist's distillation.  That it was followed by three of Ligeti's own space-age reimaginings of Hungarian folk song settings for choir alone from the 1940s and '50s only underscored the contrast.

In all the works, including a whistling-augmented "Soupir" ("Sigh") from Ravel's 1913 Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, Chanticleer showed that it can do anything and do it superbly.  Their Hungarian pieces even had the sound of the women's voices that originally performed much of this repertoire.

The Shanghai Quartet closed the formal program with Ravel's great 1903 F Major Quartet.  Solid and passionate in their current formation, the group surely won over new fans for the piece, otherworldly in yet a different way, from audience members who had come to Highland Park because Chanticleer was on the bill.  They and others were rewarded when both groups returned for an encore of three of Chen Yi's own folk song settings.  Like Ligeti's, these were sharply etched, highly effective, and used actual texts.  When the concert was over, Peebles got up from his seat as a Chanticleer audience member for the last time for at least the near future. Though not a tall man, he looked as if he were walking on air.