Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Boulez is back -- Stravinsky, Carter, and oh that Varèse with the CSO

Here is my Friday, February 27 suntimes.com review of the Thursday, February 26, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Pierre Boulez.

Pierre Boulez leads CSO in beautiful music -- and vibrant noise

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeated 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday March 3

Sometimes you just have to pinch yourself these days at Orchestra Hall.  Yes, we really do have Bernard Haitink and Riccardo Muti heading up the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and, yes, another living legend, Pierre Boulez is continuing his long relationship with the orchestra as well.

Boulez turns 84 next month and the CSO already has announced a month of concerts to mark his 85th birthday in 2010.  But the French composer-conductor has always been much more about the here and now than about festivities or making plans.  And Thursday, he opened the first of two subscription-program weeks (to be followed by two concerts at New York’s Carnegie Hall March 9 and 10) chock-full of variety, unexpected connections, and the rigor and excitement that characterizes the orchestra’s conductor emeritus.

The CSO will mark Pierre Boulez's 85th birthday in 2010 with a month of concerts.
(AP file)

Stravinsky is the draw both weeks, with a rare performance of the full version (including songs) of his 1920 ballet score Pulcinella as the marquee event in March.  And this week’s program opens with two of the revolutionary’s works as well -- the 1942-45 Symphony in Three Movements and the Four Studies for Orchestra, 1914-1928.  Crisply and elegantly presented by Boulez, they remind us of just how deep Stravinsky's early insights into rhythm and structure were and how arresting they remain.

But to these ears the news of the evening were the gauntlets that the Franco-American Edgard Varèse threw down in Greenwich Village on either side of the 1920s.  Stravinsky’s scandals and explosions of expectations were all well and good for the Paris-born Varèse as he arrived in the United States age 32 at the end of 1915.  But they only went so far.  He wanted real explosions.  The modern world was defined by machines and the noises they made, and he wanted to make music out of noise.

Varèse’s successful compositions in this direction include the mammoth 1918-1921 Amériques and the percussion-only Ionisation, 1929-1931.  Astonishingly, these pieces, hits in their time, were not played by the CSO until Boulez programmed them in 1995, when he also recorded them with the orchestra for DG.  Hearing them Thursday offered a clue to the infrequent offering of these immediately attractive spins through many sound worlds: Varèse was so good at what he did, and packed in so much, that he gave those who followed him (including Leonard Bernstein) much of their material and raised the bar so high for the orchestration of modern music that few have matched him since. ,The Boulez-CSO pairing in this repertoire is authoritative.

The program also includes the Chicago première (with the first New York performance to follow next Month at Carnegie) of one of the many pieces to flow recently from the pen of the now 100-year-old phenomenon that is Elliott Carter.  Réflexions, a loopy 10-minute tour for small orchestra, was composed in 2004 for Boulez’s 80th birthday the following spring.  Carter very much builds on Varèse’s noisemaking ideas -- even having the piece open with some chopping on a stone (pierre, en français) -- but seems to add the scenario of a Tom-and-Jerry cartoon to the mix, chasing lines from a giant contrabass clarinet to the piccolo and back across the percussion section.  Good times had by all.

CSO's 2009-2010 season -- three kings, plus

 

^{Photo: Le regard de James}

Here is my Friday, February 20 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com "Weekend" story on last week's announcement of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's 2009-2010 season.

CSO season boasts Muti, Haitink, and Boulez

BY ANDREW PATNER

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been riding a crest lately -- a triumphant Asian tour, Grammy Awards on its own record label, and dodging bullets in the economic downturn.

This week, the CSO announced every intention of staying atop the artistic waves with a 2009-2010 season led for 13 weeks by three of the world's top conductors: music director designate Riccardo Muti, principal conductor Bernard Haitink, and conductor laureate Pierre Boulez.

Each of these gentlemen won't just be showing up.  Muti will be leading the beloved Brahms German Requiem, a piece he added to his repertoire only last year, and his first Bruckner symphony with the CSO, the No. 2, as well as Mozart's Haffner, in October concerts that also will include a free CSO performance as a part of the 13th annual "Day of Music."

Haitink, who just led the orchestra in a highly-successful three-week tour of Japan, Hong Kong, and China, will start next season with a five-city European tour (Berlin, Vienna, Lucerne, Paris, and London) in September, return in November for major works by Bruckner, Mendelssohn, and Ravel, and then close out his four years as principal conductor in Chicago with a three-week Beethoven Festival in June 2010 featuring all nine of the master's symphonies.

January will see the CSO conducted by and paying tribute to Boulez in anticipation of the composer-conductor-eminence's 85th birthday in March 2010.  Celebrations will include works by Ravel, Berg, Stravinsky, Messiaen, and Boulez himself, as well as Marc-André Dalbavie's flute concerto, with CSO principal Mathieu Dufour as soloist, and a pairing of Schoenberg's prophetic Transfigured Night with Bartók's chilling one-act opera Bluebeard's Castle.

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra music director David Robertson will lead one week of these concerts, and Boulez also will take his own programs to Carnegie Hall and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The continuing absence of a major voice for contemporary music at Orchesta Hall means that new music is less prominent than it should be next season.  The CSO will give the first downtown performance of Osvaldo Golijov's whirling pageant The Passion According to Saint Mark and will offer world premières by American James Primosch and Uzbeck exile Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky.

Soprano superstar Renée Fleming will highlight the Oct. 3 gala opening concert with Cincinnati music director Paavo Järvi and the CSO accompanying her in works of Barber and Richard Strauss.

Other guest conductors include Lyric Opera of Chicago's Sir Andrew Davis, veterans Christoph von Dohnanyi, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and Charles Dutoit, Semyon Bychkov, Cologne's Markus Stenz, former Tokyo String Quartet violinist Peter Oundjian, Atlanta's Robert Spano, Russian rising star Vladimir Jurowski, newly knighted Sir Mark Elder, and Esa-Pekka Salonen in his first season after his youthful retirement from the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

San Francisco Symphony chief Michael Tilson Thomas comes to Chicago for two weeks in February for rare performances of Stravinsky's ballet score Agon and his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex.  Other exciting programs and debuts include Québécois early music champion Bernard Labadie leading Bach's St. John Passion, Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda with a work by Kaija Saariaho and the welcome return of pianist Radu Lupu in Beethoven's Third Concerto, and Haitink protégé Ludovic Morlot in a program including concertmaster Robert Chen in the Ligeti Violin Concerto.

Three important young pianists will make their solo debuts next season: Paul Lewis, Shai Wosner and Kirill Gerstein.  Mitsuko Uchida returns as pianist-conductor in an all-Mozart program in March.  Also returning are pianists Peter Serkin, Yefim Bronfman, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Emanuel Ax, Jorge Federico Osorio and violinist Christian Tetzlaff.

The CSO's wildly successful Beyond the Score series featuring live multimedia analysis of major works will expand to two performances of each program next season; creative director Gerard McBurney will examine three pieces from the first decade of the 20th century: Mahler's Fourth Symphony (with soprano Nicole Cabell), Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead, and Debussy's La Mer.

Details of MusicNOW, Symphony Center Presents concerts and recitals, and other programs will be announced later.

"When Lilacs Last . . . . " -- the CSO and James Earl Jones do Lincoln

Here's my Tuesday, February 24 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Saturday, February 21, 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with special guest, James Earl Jones. 

Lincoln's words pack mighty wallop in CSO tribute

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Repeated Tuesday, February 24 at 7:30 p.m.

The bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln's birth kicked off this month; what it is not about is as interesting to observe as what its focus is.

Lincoln resists cheap commercialization and even pushes past platitudes.  The uniqueness of our 16th president lies not only in his greatness as a political leader and philosophical figure but also in his essential humanity.  Somehow, the more we know or know about Lincoln, the more we are both astonished at his brilliance and successes against so many odds and amazed at his down-to-earth, sensitive, even melancholy humanity.

James Earl Jones (inset) read execerpts of Walt Whitman's elegy to slain President Abraham Lincoln, as well as Lincoln's own words, while the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed a tribute to the 16th President. 

You could feel these things physically Saturday night at Orchestra Hall when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its special guest, living legend James Earl Jones, launched the first of two performances of a Lincoln tribute program.

Hearing excerpts of the the words of Walt Whitman's elegy to the slain president, "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd," from Jones and then from Lincoln's own Second Inaugural Address, read by Chicago actor Kevin Gudahl, a hush fell over the sold-out hall that had nothing to do with celebrity or enforced piety.  The faces in the audience seemed to ask: How was it that one person could write and speak so clearly, so poetically, and inspire such poetry from others?

Using a suite of music drawn from the mid-19th century, including "Home, Sweet Home," as well as the first movement, "Awakening," from Roy Harris's 1944 Sixth Symphony, Gettysburg, and two movements from Robert Russell Bennett's 1929 Abraham Lincoln (A Likeness in Symphony Form), narrator Gerard McBurney, Gudahl, and Jones wove in and out of the music with readings before reaching the closing climax, Aaron Copland's unrivaled Lincoln Portrait of 1942.

Copland understood music and America in a way that rose to almost Lincolnian heights; he could stir, with wholly invented sounds, "the mystic chords of memory" of the country's early days and settlement.  His ability to distill and pare down made and makes his joining of selected words of Lincoln with inspirational scoring that always stays this side of hokum one of the great achievements in program music.

Jones knows the legacy of Lincoln well from his own experiences and struggles and those of his family.  Born 78 years ago in Arkabutla, Mississippi, Jones is the son of a sharecropper who fled North and became an actor as well.  Growing up, Jones had great understanding of his Black, whit, and Native American Southern ancestry.  Saturday, he seemed to pick a deliberately low-key approach to his readings, although he also could have been settling into the role.  But if we leaned in to hear "what Abe Lincoln said," we were surely rewarded by the actor's thoughtful recitations.

James Gaffigan, the associate conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, led the music ably and handled the incongruously programmed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony decently after intermission.  Why he was brought in for these concerts instead of any of a number of excellent young Chicago-based conductors is one of those CSO puzzles that not even a Lincoln could solve.

The view from . . . Beijing -- my WFMT reflections on "Chinese Freedoms"

My "Critic's Choice" essay "Chinese Freedoms" [that's the link] on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and wfmt.com this week as I try to put together my competing impressions of my trip to China with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last week -- my first to Mainland China since 1985.

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Above: Chicago Symphony Orchestra press conference in Beijing, 13 February 2009.  iPhone photo by my WFMT colleague Matt DeStefano.

The view from . . . all over the Asia tour -- Matt's "WFMT OffMic"weblog

Here are just a few of the photographs that my WFMT colleague and associate producer Matt DeStefano has posted on the new WFMT OffMic weblog from the CSO Asia tour.  You'll also find video and audio clips and "postcards" as well as Matt's wry comments on his first big trip outside of the ol' US of A.

The National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing -- aka "The Egg" -- site of the last two CSO Asia tour performances.

CSO principal flute Mathieu Dufour rode a camel to the Great Wall.

CSO assistant principal viola and Shanghai native Li-kuo Chang is interviewed by one of the ace New York Times Beijing correspondents, Edward Wong, for a story perhaps a bit less complex than those from Ed's years of covering the War in Iraq.  Li-kuo played a major role in lobbying for and helping to bring about the CSO's historic first trip to China.

The view from . . . Beijing -- my Sun-Times CSO Far East Asia tour round-up

My Monday February 16 Chicago Sun-Times story.

 

CSO's Great Wall of sound

First China tour thrills audiences and stirs musicians

BY ANDREW PATNER

BEIJING -- Some 35 years after the first major American orchestra visited the People's Republic of China, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra became the final top ensemble to make its debut here as it closed its three-week, five-city, 10-concert tour of Far East Asia with two sold-out performances at the new National Centre for the Performing Arts (above, top) in the Chinese capital. 

 

^{_{With 11 Chinese-born players and some 20 Asian members, the CSO has the largest representation of Eastern musicians of any leading Western orchestra and throughout this tour of Japan, Hong Kong, a}nd Mainland China, the sense of homecoming and of connection between peoples was palpable.  From Yokohama to Tokyo to Hong Kong to Shanghai to Beijing, crowds greeted the orchestra with waves of applause and waited in lines at the stage door to meet performers.}  

^{The reputation and teaching experience that many non-Asian CSO players have in the Far East meant that the orchestra as a whole had the classical equivalent of rock-star groupies grabbing up available tickets even when top prices reached almost 500 U.S. dollars in Tokyo and $200 and more in Hong Kong and China.} 

 
^{CSO principal conductor Bernard Haitink was also making his first visit to China (and Hong Kong as well in his case) and he is revered here in a way normally reserved for legends. Banners with the Dutchman's face and showing the maestro in action on the podium hung throughout the cities on the orchestra's itinerary.} 

^{Standing ovations are not a part of concert ritual in the Far East, but a happy audience can keep curtain calls going for 10 minutes and more.  At Tokyo's famed Suntory Hall, audience members would not leave even after the musicians had exited the stage, demanding that Haitink come out for a solo bow.  Claques of brass fans shouted bravos from student galleries and cheap seats in every city when performances of Mahler's Sixth Symphony and Bruckner's Seventh, massive works both, came to an end.  Programs also included Haydn's Symphony No. 101, "The Clock," Mozart's No. 41, "Jupiter," and Richard Strauss's "Ein Heldenleben," "A Hero's Life," with Taiwan-born concertmaster Robert Chen as the brilliant soloist in the latter. 
 
"The Chicago Symphony is characterized by its intensity, its sense of common purpose, and its insistence on playing each piece at the highest level," Haitink told the Sun-Times.  "When you add the sense of these qualities that the Asian players bring as a part of their cultural heritage and the excellence that Japanese and Chinese audiences expect, I can say that this tour has been one of the most wonderful and moving experiences of my long career."  (Haitink turns 80 on March 4.)
 
Shanghai-born and -trained Li-kuo Chang, CSO assistant principal viola, had been lobbying and working for a tour to China since joining the orchestra in 1988 -- the first Chinese to be hired by a major U.S. orchestra.  Working closely with CSO administrators and sponsors and with Chinese officials, Chang helped to negotiate the arrangements and contracts for the appearances in Beijing and at the Shanghai Grand Theatre (above, below) that preceded them. 
 
"This is beyond a dream come true," said Chang backstage, with tears in his eyes after the final performance Saturday night.  "For so many of us to come home, and for all of us to show these audiences what can happen when people of all backgrounds play the most serious music together -- it's just overwhelming."} 

The View from . . . Tokyo -- CSO Asia tour diary 2: the ticket man

The enthusiasm of Japanese audiences for Western classical music is well-known and we saw plenty of evidence of it in Yokohama and Tokyo.  Eerily attentive audiences.  The plastic bags handed out at the hall entrances filled -- inches thick -- with promotional fliers for upcoming concerts and recitals.  The curtain calls lasting eight, ten, 12 minutes complete with demands -- via the torrents of applause -- standing ovations are not in the repertoire and the stomping of feet is akin to rudeness -- for the conductor and soloists to return to the stage even after the orchestra players have been able to leave at last.  The astonishingly high ticket prices.  The clusters of connoisseurs standing in the lobbies at intermission comparing notes.

But who are some of these fans and how are they able to attend so many concerts on moderate salaries?  An answer came with my encounters on two successive evenings with a gentleman I dubbed Ticket Man.  At the intermission of the second Suntory Hall concert (Haydn 101 and Bruckner 7) I left the Hall and crossed Karajan Platz (!) to the facing office building/shopping mall to use a washroom without having to wait in the tremendous line back in the lobby.  As I was walking briskly, concert program in hand, a tall, conservatively-dressed gentleman who appeared to be in his early fifties, all but accosted me and shouted something at me in Japanese.  I'm sorry, I called back, I really don't speak Japanese.  "Oh.  I am sorry.  I want your ticket!  You are leaving the concert!"  I explained that I was only excusing myself for the intermission.  "Oh," he continued despondently.  "I am sorry."

The next night, I noticed him again at intermission in the plaza, just after the Mozart Jupiter and before Ein Heldenleben.  "Hello!" he shouted quickly.  "I want your ticket!"  This time I happened to have a second one and so I handed it to him and told him that I would see him inside.  When I took my seat, I found him sitting ramrod straight and staring directly ahead, no program, no brochures.  "Are you a music lover?" "Yes," he responded.  "Um, no.  Music . . . crazy!"  He seemed neither ashamed nor proud of his condition; he was simply trying to be clear.  In the course of a few minutes of chatting, continued during the lengthy ovation that followed the Strauss, I learned that Ticket Man was a "public servant" and had no business card, leading me to believe that he was a clerk for some governmental entity and lived for concert music.  "Do you have a favorite conductor?" I asked, half-expecting his answer.  "Number one, um, Karajan!"  I nodded, "And?"  "Number two -- Kleiber!  Carlos Kleiber!"  This was no surprise either.  "And among living conductors?"  "Mmm.  Difficult.  For opera, Italian repertory, Muti.  Riccardo Muti!  Verdi's Otello.  Wagner -- Barenboim!  Ring!  Haitink!  Others."

Comparisons followed.  "Last time Sir Solti came here with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, I saw them.  Five times!  Vienna Philharmonic, last time, five times!  Haitink with Dresden Staatskappelle.  Same program as this night, though this time maybe he is slower in his Bruckner tempos.  No?"  He asked my occupation.  "You are a music critic?!"  He paused and looked ahead.  "You must see many concerts.  Many tickets!"

I asked if he had made it in for the Mahler 6 the night before.  "No," he shook his head.  "No ticket!"  I suggested to him, Mr. Takayashi turned out to be his name, that he might try some different phrases for his future request and wrote some out on a piece of paper, including "Excuse me, are you using your ticket for the second half?"  And, "Do you still need your ticket?"  "Oh," he replied, intrigued.  "'I want your ticket!' is not proper?"  "Well, it certainly describes your situation and desire, but it might strike some people as a bit forward, less polite."  "Oh. Thank you!  Thank you so much!  Perhaps I get more tickets now!  Thank you for the concert!  Thank you for the ticket!"  He extended his arm to shake hands Western-style.  "Auf Wiedersehen!" he repeated several times.  And with that, Ticket Man went off into the night, dreaming already, I am sure, of his next ticket.

My (radio) guests this week . . . in Tokyo

Our first ever "On the Road" edition of Critical Thinking -- from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Asia tour now underway -- aired Monday night Chicago time over 98.7WFMT Chicago and via free streaming over wfmt.com.  It will be available starting later this week as a free podcast over wfmt.com.

Produced with my WFMT colleague Matt DeStefano, tonight's program includes a sound portrait by Matt of the stage set-up by the CSO stage crew at Suntory Hall in Tokyo, a conversation with CSO assistant principal viola Li-kuo Chang (above left), a Shanghai native and the first Chinese-born member of the orchestra, who was instrumental in getting the CSO to plan this first visit to China and helped to negotiate its logisitics, and excerpts recorded by Matt from a master class in Tokyo for young Japanese trumpet players with Tage Larsen of the renowned CSO trumpet section.

And see and hear more tour coverage at our new WFMT Tour weblog "OffMic."

See you on the radio!

The View from . . . Tokyo -- CSO Asia tour diary 1: the man who cut Takemitsu's hair

 

Leaving for a tour is always a bit hectic with many balls in the air and not all of them caught before departure.  With the lengthy strategic effort this time to get visas for the People's Republic of China taking up a lot of our time ahead of this trip -- tip of the hat to ace assistant Tim Sawyier for braving this procedure for us -- one thing that neither my producer, Matt DeStefano, nor I had done before arriving in Tokyo -- the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's first stop on this five-city (Tokyo, Yokohama, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing) ten-concert tour -- was to get a haircut. 

On the flight over, Matt had his eyes on a write-up on Aoyama, a hip district of the city said to have more hair cutteries per square metre than anywhere else on earth.  I was just hoping for a place that would leave me in reasonable shape for Aaron the Miracle Hair Man back in Chicago and also not cost me an emperor's ransom.  Once we found our digs in Akasaka 8-chome, it turned out that we actually are staying fairly near Aoyama, but as we were still getting our bearings and wanted to explore the more residential and neighborhoody areas of our immediate quarter after a fairly loud night around neighboring Roppongi Crossing down the street, we thought we'd see what hair options might be in our own 'hood. 

I go by pretty much the same sussing-out system that I use fairly successfully for eateries and food markets for my rare forays into style -- what's the sense of the location, the signage, and types of people one sees going in and out.  After we had passed one place where the staff looked reasonably with-it but the clientele were mostly pensioners -- and lovely pensioners at that! -- we came across a barber pole stuck between an Italian trattoria (i.e. a Japanese Italian trattoria) and an Indian tea house (i.e. a Japanese Indian tea house).  We climbed the steps of the two-and-a-half story open-air back of an apartment block, walked down a tiled walkway past a deli and bagel emporium (i.e. a Japanese deli and bagel emporium), and found a small salon whose owner greeted us with a combination of eagerness and a certain quizzical stance. 

He was, I would guess, a man in his early '60s with the orangey-brown hair coloring that's popular here among less buttoned-down men of his generation.  (A more basic brown is the color of choice these days for those more mainstream men and women who color their hair -- and there are a lot of them.)  And when his wife appeared we noted that she, too, had the more honey-brown look.

We went with it and each took a chair.  I was directed to Mrs. Oikawa and Matt took the seat with Oikawa-san.  Mrs. and I managed to communicate quite a bit despite my near total absence of non-tourist Japanese and her self-described limited English.  She was impressed that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was visiting Japan, as many here are, and was curious what Americans thought of Japanese conductors.  She knew of quite a few, including some whose names were new to me.  It also turned out that she studies classical guitar, "Western," and, although a nylon string player herself, is also a great fan of Eric Clapton.  She had tickets to his upcoming arena concert here.  This somehow led to the inevitable question one gets in Japan, "What do yout think of Herbert von Karajan?"  While imagining von K in a jam session with Eric Clapton, I managed to tread water a bit by saying that I knew he was quite popular in Japan ("Number one!" she nodded), but that his style was not my style.  I left politics out of it.

To move on from the Question of K, I mentioned that the music of Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) was quite known among many composers, musicians, and concertgoers in the States.  At this she paused and I also heard an exclamation of recognition from her husband's chair.  "My customer!" she then said somewhat gleefully.  "My husband's customer first!"  We continued to chat about this pioneering artist and afterwards recorded a few minutes with both of the Oikawas who, understandably, became a bit more tongue-tied when we turned on the recorder.  Oikawa-san had originally been at the classic 1960s New Otani Hotel and Takemitsu, who lived nearby, started coming to him then.  When he opened his own salon, the composer followed him.  What was Takemitsu like in person?  "Elegant.  Dignified."  What was his mood or style.  "Meditative.   Spiritual."  What would you talk about with him?  "Oh, not so much talking," Mrs. Oikawa shook her head and Oikawa-san joined in the head-shaking.  "When my husband cut his hair, Takemitsu-sensei would sleep."  "Sleep, yes,"  Oikawa-san agreed.

I'm not sure that a volume of Barbers of the Great Contemporary Composers is required, and I'm actually rather glad that we stumble upon Oikawa-san and not the barber for Takemistu's great inspiration, John Cage.  In addition to the honor and the local connection, a spiritual and dignified haircut probably rests more easily on the head than one based on chance techniques.

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Throughout the current CSO Far East Asia tour you'll be able to find pictures, videos (!), and even some audio links, and text and captions from our trip -- all ably assembled by my invaluable WFMT colleague and producer Matt DeStefano on this new WFMT weblog site, "OffMic."