Andrew Patner: The View from Here

A peek at Lyric Opera of Chicago's 2009-2010 season

Filing from Tokyo means that this post of my January 28 Chicago Sun-Times piece was subject to some delayed format changes.  Thanks for your patience!

Susan Graham (above) is on board for Lyric's new production of The Damnation of Faust

Full speed ahead for Lyric in 2009-10

OPERA | Season survives downturn with few trims

BY ANDREW PATNER

Things may be tough all over, but thanks to careful budgeting and planning, Lyric Opera of Chicago will present a six-month, eight-opera season in 2009-10 with only minimum scheduling trims and adjustments.

While the largest U.S. company, New York's Metropolitan Opera, recently announced production cutbacks and warned of potential emergency measures due to the downturn in the economy and fund-raising, Lyric is not canceling any productions next season.    It will reduce its planned 79-performance schedule by only two evenings and will shift four other evening performances to matinees.   Subscription prices in most categories will rise by less than five percent.  Upper balcony prices will remain unchanged.

In a statement announcing the company's 55th season, Lyric Opera general director William Mason said that interest in matinee performances is on the rise and expressed confidence that with scheduling adjustments and a new "25 percent down" subscription payment plan, Lyric would be able to continue its commitment to fiscal responsibility and a diverse season of eight operas with international casts and artistic teams.

Next season will see three new productions, including a Lyric premiere (Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust) and a new-to-Chicago production (Janacek's Katya Kabanova).  The company also will present four beloved but often-repeated productions from its repertory, including Tosca with American star soprano Deborah Voigt, Lyric's current Isolde,  in her first Puccini role in Chicago.  Tosca, which also features tenor Vladimir Galouzine and veteran bass James Morris, will open the season September 26 at the Civic Opera House.   (Tosca also will return with a second cast in January.)

British director Stephen Langridge's new production of The Damnation of Faust, Lyric's first Berlioz work, will follow a fall revival of Charles Gounod's Faust, his popular retelling of the German legend.　 Lyric music director Sir Andrew Davis will conduct The Damnation of Faust, which stars tenor Paul Groves, mezzo Susan Graham, and bass John Relyea.  Davis also will conduct Gounod's Faust and the fall run of Tosca.

For Faust, Polish tenor Piotr Beczala will make his much-anticipated Lyric debut in the title role, suppported by superstar German bass Rene Pape and Placido Domngo protegee, soprano Ana Maria Martinez.

Verdi's Ernani will receive its first Lyric production in 25 years, with tenor Salvatore Licitra in the title role.  Local theatre mainstay Gary Griffin will make his Lyric debut with a new staging of Lehar's operetta The Merry Widow, and Emmanuel Villaume, whose musical leadership of Massenet's Manon was a triumph of Lyric's present season, will conduct.

Maverick director Jonathan Miller's acclaimed Met production of Janaeck's Katya Kabanova will be seen in Chicago for the first time, with superb Finnish singing actress Karita Mattila in the title role.

Donizetti's The Elixir of Love will feature American soprano Nicole Cabell heading one of two casts.  Rounding out the season will be Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, with another local favorite, Danielle de Niese, as well as returns by brilliant American mezzo Joyce DiDonato and Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien.

Second casts also will include the house debut of Lithuanian soprano Violeta Urmana as Tosca and Lyric Ryan Center alum Joseph Kaiser in Gounod's Faust.

Lyric will continue to broadcast its opening nights live over WFMT-FM and the WFMT Radio Network.  It also will expand several subscription miniseries and ticket-exchange programs.

Pärt Three -- a newbie voice from the upper balcony

The Chicago-based pop observer/critic Jessica Hopper, 32 (left), who writes or has written for the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, the late Punk Planet, and other publications over the years, has a wonderful entry on her weblog tinyluckygenius about her first-ever visit to Orchestra Hall for a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert Saturday night.

Her hilarious and insightful brief notes on attending an Orchestra Hall concert and on her experience of the CSO, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Arvo Pärt's Symphony No. 4 (Los Angeles) are here.

Pärt Two -- knowing the score

I neglected to mention in my review that Arvo Pärt's publisher, the distinguished Universal Edition of Vienna, has posted a study score of the new Symphony No. 4 (Los Angeles) for free viewing and reading.  

This is a remarkable thing, unprecedented as far as I know.  Yet one more reason to applaud this exceptional house, now in its 108th year.  (It should be noted that, unlike many other cultural enterprises, Universal and its supporters survived the 1938-1945 Nazi years in Vienna with integrity and re-established the firm on its historic track after the War.)

"Left Coast" and Pärt -- a muted Salonen in Chicago

Here's my Saturday January 24 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday January 22, 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Esa-Pekka Salonen, conducting. 

Arvo Pärt and Esa-Pekka Salonen at the world première of Pärt's Fourth Symphony in Los Angeles.  Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

West meets Midwest as Salonen gives Pärt piece Chicago debut

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

with Esa-Pekka Salonen

Repeated  Saturday Jan. 24 at 8 p.m.

BY ANDREW PATNER

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

The dramatic political and cultural shifts in our world have their geographic consequences as well.  Who would have thought that the South Side of Chicago would some day become the home base of a U.S. President and his closest advisors?  

Similarly, with a contemporary landmark concert hall, an emphasis on contemporary composers and the appointment of a young Latin American superstar as its orchestra’s music director, Los Angeles, long identified with tinsel and trivia, is now seen by many as the new hub of classical music.

Gustavo Dudamel just announced plans for his first season heading up the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  In addition to some South American works and personal favorites, it's a program much in the tradition of the orchestra's departing chief, Esa-Pekka Salonen: West Coast composers and Europeans who have positioned themselves against more intellectually-based Modernist music.

Salonen, leading this week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts, is the youngest conductor to retire from a major orchestra since Leonard Bernstein, who was also at the cusp of 51 when he left the New York Philharmonic.  He intends to focus more on his own composing which just last year yielded one of his most successful works to date, his raucous Piano Concerto which he led here nine months ago with its dedicatee, Yefim Bronfman.

For this listener, composition seems the way to go for Salonen.  In recent years his general conducting has been in a static place and his programming tastes have been narrow. He opened Thursday night at Orchestra Hall with Bartók’s 1936 Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.  Whether he was spooked by playing this work in the House that Hungarians (Reiner and Solti) Built or was seeing this normally edgy score through the scrim of the brand-new Fourth Symphony by the Estonian spiritual minimalist Arvo Pärt that followed, the performance was gauzy and sludgy.  The closer, Debussy’s 1903-05 La Mer, had micro-shaped moments but also lacked overall drive and shape.

Pärt, now 73, has been a cult figure since the late 1970s when he started writing in a slow-moving, lightly-scored style inspired by his Eastern Orthodox Christian faith.  For me, this works best in his vocal pieces.  I have little doubt that Salonen, who believes deeply in this music, gave this 35-minute symphony, Los Angeles (as in angels rather than the city named for them), an appropriate performance and I am sure that it fit better with the live and in-the-round acoustics of Walt Disney Concert Hall at its world première two weeks ago.  

But to my ears this work for strings, harp, and percussion sounds more like a meditation tape than it does a work one hopes to engage with seriously and see how it lends itself to future interpretations.  Over hazy, quiet strings a triangle sounds just when you know it will.  Silences ask us to invest them with importance.  A long-haul middle movement is followed by an angel's skipping ascent that sounds forced.

The piece may yet have an audience, and not only in Los Angeles.  As Abraham Lincoln is said to have responded after hearing a reading of an over-long spiritualist tract, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union . . . "

 

 

 

My (radio) guest tonight -- Riccardo Muti

 

Monday 19 January 2009 -- 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CST

Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner

Riccardo Muti, in his first conversation as music director designate of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in an exclusive radio interview recorded on January 14 at Chicago's Orchestra Hall just after his first open rehearsals with the CSO and just before the Italian maestro's sold-out-months-ago subscription week concerts of the Verdi Requiem (see my concert review here)

on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and streamed (free) on wfmt.com

and subsequently available at 

http://wfmt.com/criticalthinking

for free podcast/streaming.

Thanks to the one and only Opera Chic of Milan both for the wonderful illustration stolen by me above and for the article and translation on her website on and from Muti's interview in Saturday's Corriere della Sera. Between the two of these you should have a fairy good idea of Muti's views of Verdi, the Requiem,  Chicago, and Barack Obama.

And a shout-out to our regular reader and critical colleague Lynn Becker for his post "Muti/Obama, Chicago's Dynamic Duo of Hope" today on his essential weblog, ArchitectureChicago Plus !

See you on the radio!

 

Monday 19 January 2009 -- 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CST

Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner

Riccardo Muti, in his first conversation as music director designate of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in an exclusive radio interview recorded on January 14 at Chicago's Orchestra Hall just after his first open rehearsals with the CSO and just before the Italian maestro's sold-out-months-ago subscription week concerts of the Verdi Requiem (see my concert review here)

on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and streamed (free) on wfmt.com

and subsequently available at 

http://wfmt.com/criticalthinking

for free podcast/streaming.

Thanks to the one and only Opera Chic of Milan both for the wonderful illustration stolen by me above and for the article and translation on her website on and from Muti's interview in Saturday's Corriere della Sera. Between the two of these you should have a fairy good idea of Muti's views of Verdi, the Requiem,  Chicago, and Barack Obama.

And a shout-out to our regular reader and critical colleague Lynn Becker for his post "Muti/Obama, Chicago's Dynamic Duo of Hope" today on his essential weblog, ArchitectureChicago Plus !

See you on the radio!

Muti -- CSO -- Verdi Requiem -- what more is there to say?

Here is my Friday January 16 suntimes.com and Saturday January 17 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday January 15, 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert performance of Verdi's Requiem with Riccardo Muti.

Riccardo Muti finds right forum in Verdi's Requiem

Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

Verdi's Requiem Mass

with Riccardo Muti

and vocal soloists

Repeated Saturday Jan. 17 at 8 p.m.

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

In his first concerts as the official music director designate of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti wanted to make his many and varied qualities clear to both audience and orchestra.  By programming the great Requiem Mass of Verdi, Muti offered his soon to be orchestral home base a work he has been identified with for more than 30 years but also one that makes some of the greatest demands on an orchestra, large chorus, and a quartet of vocal soloists.

In speaking of great conductors there are those singled out for their great technique, others for their musicological knowledge, emotional weight, discipline, spontaneity, humanism, or personal magnetism and authority.  Each of these is a rare commodity and any one of them can bring fine musical results.  But how many times do we see all of them coming together in one performance and one set of rehearsals from one conductor?  From the moment he walked out onto the stage of Orchestra Hall until the last notes of the Verdi sounded just over 90 minutes later, Muti showed us the summary of nearly every possible positive quality a great conductor can possess.  With four decades on the podium behind him, Muti, at 67, has entered a phase of his career where, whether working with his Italian Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra or on limited rehearsal time with one of the great orchestras of the world, he inspires musicians to play even better than they thought was their best.

Add to this both Muti’s experience with the Requiem and his deep understanding of it and you are reminded that you are listening to the composer’s work and not some sort of showboating display by a conductor, athletic exercise by performers, or an ego presentation by operatic soloists.  Muti sees the 1874 masterwork as a distillation of everything Verdi knew about the Italian character and spirit as much as what he had gained as the re-inventor of Italian opera.  The Requiem, for Muti, as for Verdi, is not simply an opera in the guise of a sacred work.  Rather it is a marriage of everything from Etruscan paganism to Neapolitan superstition to human psychology with the ancient rites of the Latin church.

So, yes, the Dies irae thrills and scares and envelops us with its massive force.  But it is ever of a part with the singing of the strings (yes, for Muti the strings must sing, like human voices), the eerie quiet of the opening passages, the lyricism of the tenor’s Ingemisco, the poignancy of the soprano-mezzo duets of the Recordare and the Agnus Dei.  A cappella passages are as important as tutti, four “f” fortissimos meaningless without four “p” pianissimos.  

The CSO played on the edge of its collective seat throughout.  Concertmaster Robert Chen leading the violins from tender melodies through impossible tremolos.  Winds all shone and the brass played not only with its customary power but with a full range of volume and emotion.  And percussionist Cynthia Yeh and her bass drums and timpanist Vadim Karpinos offered visual as well as musical excitement.

When has the CSO Chorus sounded like this?  Not since founder Margaret Hillis at her peak.  Some 170 voices singing as one, powered from the bottom ranges, standing and delivering on cue with equal parts passion and precision and investing the softest passages with the greatest musicality.  Muti hand-picked his quartet of a Milanese, a Greek and two Russians.  Each of them, from the formidable mezzo Olga Borodina to the up and coming tenor Mario Zeffiri and bass Ildar Abdrazakov to Muti favorite soprano Barbara Frittoli was there only for the music -- solos were for Verdi, not the rafters, and I have never heard such a conversational, meditative, and balanced quartet.

Muti may not be able to top this ne plus ultra in the coming years, but we know now for sure what his standards are and how he is able to meet them.

Critical Thinking playlist -- 05 January: Songs for a new year (a week late)

Alright already, I'm just a nogoodnik.

Alright already, it's true, so nu?

With thanks to Frank Loesser, our apologies for running late with the playlist for last week's WFMT Critical Thinking program,  Songs for a new year.  

"Uska Dara" -- Eartha Kitt (at left) with Henri René and His Orchestra, 1953 

"Pata Pata" -- Miriam Makeba, 1967 

"At the River" -- Marilyn Horne, 1985, from the new reissue, The Complete Decca Recitals

"In Buddy's Eyes" -- Donna McKechnie, Follies, "The Complete Recording," 1998

"Alevai Alevai" -- The Barry Sisters with Moishe Oysher, before 1958

J.S. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, in Salvatore Sciarrino's 1993 adaptation for solo flute -- Mario Caroli, 2008 , from Attacca Records, ATT28118

"Why Don't We Try Staying Home?" -- Bobby Short, 1971 (an unpublished Cole Porter song from 1929)

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- Marilyn Horne, 1985, English Chamber Orchestra and Chorus, arr. and conducted by Carl Davis, see above

"The Best Is Yet To Come" -- Mablel Mercer, 1969

My (radio) guest tonight -- Gustavo Dudamel

 

Monday 12 January 2009 -- 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CST

Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner

Gustavo Dudamel, music director-designate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and music director of both the Gothenburg (Sweden) Symphony Orchestra and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, in an exclusive radio interview recorded on January 6 at Chicago's Orchestra Hall before the young (he turns 28 on January 26) conducting phenom's subscription week concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (see my concert review here)

on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and streamed (free) on wfmt.com

and subsequently available at 

http://wfmt.com/criticalthinking

for free podcast/streaming

See you on the radio!

Dudamel's Chicago return, plus Stephen Hough -- All that and a bag of chips

Here is my full Saturday January 10 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday January 8 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with conductor Gustavo Dudamel and pianist Stephen Hough.  I'll be doing pre-concert talks at Orchestra Hall with Stephen Hough on Saturday, January 10, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, January 11, at 2 p.m.  Admission is free with any concert ticket.

Gustavo Dudamel will also be my guest on my weekly program Critical Thinking on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago -- and streaming free on wfmt.com -- on Monday night, January 12, from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CST.

(The CSO and Dudamel gave an additional concert on Friday night, January 9, with 'cellist Yo-Yo Ma and others as soloists in Osvaldo Golijov's 2006-07 Azul in place of the Mozart piano concerto with Stephen Hough.  I did not hear that performance.)

Dudamel shows CSO fans that he's reaching his enormous potential

BY ANDREW PATNER

Two years ago, Gustavo Dudamel made his conducting debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and in a matter of days, gained the love of an orchestra and a city's musicgoers wondering who their next music director might be. The 26-year-old Venezuelan phenomenon showed that his was a rare case of believe the hype almost from his first step on to the stage at Orchestra Hall.

But he was sitting on a secret that April week in 2007: He had signed a five-year contract to become music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, beginning in 2009-10, and between concerts in Chicago, he flew to L.A. for the surprise announcement and broke ten thousand Chicago hearts.

Guest conductor Gustavo Dudamel directs the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night. 
(Chris Sweda/Sun-Times)

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When: 8 tonight and 3 p.m. Sunday

Where: Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan

Info: (312) 294-3000 or www.cso.org

Dudamel made his first return here Thursday since that week of whiplash in the classical world, once again guest conducting the CSO.  He is as impressive as before, and we should probably all be as comfortable as he is with his decision to go to Southern California.  Even if Riccardo Muti , the CSO's next music director, stays here for 10 years, Dudamel would just be in his late 30s after that.  Chicago is lucky that he thinks of this city as one of his musical homes.

In addition to giving players and concertgoers a chance to see how Dudamel is developing just shy of his 28th birthday, this week's programs are made up of works both more standard and less associated with the conductor.  In a way, it is like seeing him against a blank slate; that makes his accomplishments and abilities with these pieces all the more astonishing.

The appearance of Samuel Barber's 1936 Adagio for Strings on a printed program can be cause for eye rolling.  Played too often with a forced solemnity, associated with both public mourning in America and with commercial exploitation, what would we gain from hearing this played now by the CSO?  But Dudamel carries none of this baggage -- he might not even be familiar with it.  For him, this is a work of pure music; in an interview he told me that it is about the suspension of time, and that is just how we heard it Thursday: reverent in the right way, stretched and searing, producing a pin-drop silence in the hall.  This is what happens when a truly fresh musical intelligence encounters a work that people thought they already knew.

At 47, British pianist Stephen Hough is getting used to encountering conductors younger than he is.  He and Dudamel had never met until this week's rehearsals, but the encounter seemed one of equals and counterparts.  Hough is known for his unusual combination of intellectualism and romanticism, and his partnership with Dudamel in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, K. 467, underlined Dudamel's own remarkable intelligence and the conductor's natural ability to support Hough's experiments in rhythm and balance.  I am not sure when I last heard a performance of a Mozart piano concerto that was so interesting.  Even in the beloved Andante, Hough reminded us of Mozart's complexity by highlighting the left-hand accompaniment.   In a wonderful exchange, Hough seemed to embody wholly natural Latin rhythms while Dudamel gave the orchestra an English clarity.

The Brahms D Major Second Symphony, Op. 73, gave the audience what it was expecting -- but so much more.  Here Dudamel was the ball of energy, the builder of climaxes, the bearer of surprise and joy at every turn.  But here also was Dudamel letting us share in his three-dimensional X-ray of the score.  Of course long lines, keen handling of themes, and an on-your-toes pacing were all there and thrilling.  But they were combined and entwined with and enriched by a measure-by-measure, instrument-by-instrument analysis that brought out harmonic shifts and inner voices and forgotten combinations, each of them coming straight from Brahms's pen.

What a privilege to be able to hear this great young musician.  Of course he's charismatic and filled with a magnetic energy.  But he's also becoming a true artist.