Andrew Patner: The View from Here

David Daniels and The English Concert at the Harris -- sweet musick

Here is my Tuesday, March 31 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Sunday afternoon March 29, 2009, concert by David Daniels and The English Concert, Harry Bicket conducting, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park.

Countertenor David Daniels lives up the the buzz

BY ANDREW PATNER

David Daniels is riding high.  At 43 the countertenor has mastered his art in a way that matches singers of the Golden Age of Opera in their more traditional voice categories.  A fine actor and a handsome, dark-bearded, even macho physical presence onstage, he has a deserved following for his opera, concert, and recital appearances, as well as his excellent recordings.

His appearance Sunday afternoon at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance was much anticipated by his many Chicago fans and did not disappoint.  Singing with the 18-member English Concert and its music director Harry Bicket, a frequent operatic collaborator of Daniels, in support of their joint new disc of Bach arias and cantatas, Daniels was clearly comfortable with his musical partners and the intimacy of the Harris.

An hour of Bach followed by an hour of Handel was the agenda.  Both were pleasing, but, not surprisingly, the Handel more so.  Bicket's approach with Bach, especially since many other leaders and ensembles let the great composer take off his gloves in performance, is extremely delicate and well-ironed.  And Daniels shines most brightly in theatrical rather than sacred scores.  Still, to hear this sweet, strong voice with its impeccable control in Bach's "Schlummert ein" ("Slumber now") from the Cantata No. 82, Ich habe genug was nothing short of a privilege.

The fire went up in the Handel half.  Daniels knows just how to bring dramatic roles to a concert performance, offering the right balance of impersonating his characters without overacting.  Between the expressions of his voice and his face and his command of ornamentation, he tells us all that we need.  In arias from Radamisto and Partenope, he showed the special interpretive skills he brings to matters of death and loss.  The mad scene from Orlando was a whole opera of its own, contained in just a few minutes.

I love Bicket in the opera house.  But for my ears, his Bach and Handel onstage, including orchestral works without Daniels, were both too tame and too much alike.  Bassoonist Alberto Grazzi had the freedom and individuality of sound that characterizes the best of earlier music groups.  The single encore, though, "Qual nave smarrita" ("Like a lost ship"), another aria from Radamisto, turned any objections into quibbles.  This was perfection of both a composer's art and a singer's craft.

My (radio) guest tonight -- pianist Diane Walsh on "33 Variations" and . . . 33 Variations

Monday 30 March 2009 -- 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CST

Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner

The distinguished and clear-seeing American pianist Diane Walsh discusses her work as onstage pianist and musical director of Moisés Kaufman's new play on Broadway, 33 Variations (starring Jane Fonda), as well as her own recent recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations -- also titled 33 Variations -- on Jonathan Digital Recordings.  

Kaufman's play involves a search for the reasons behind Beethoven's devoting so much of his time in his later life to creating the 33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, his Op. 120, for piano solo.  It's a marvelous production, under Kaufman's own direction, skillfully weaving Beethoven's music -- performed live at the Steinway by Diane Walsh -- with a fine cast at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre through May 24th only.  And Diane Walsh's own recording of the Diabelli is fresh and revealing.

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

and subsequently available at 

http://wfmt.com/criticalthinking

for free podcast/streaming

See you on the radio!

Chicago Opera Theater's 2010 season -- Heggie, Rossini, and Cavalli -- Von Stade, Moses, and Medea

Here's my Thursday March 26 Chicago Sun-Times preview piece on Chicago Opera Theater's 2010 Spring Festival Season.  COT kicks off its 2009 array of three operas on April 18 with Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, conducted by Jane Glover and stage by Christopher Alden.

Chicago Opera Theater takes it to the limit for 2010

Lineup includes 'Three Decembers,' Rossini rarity, and 'Giasone'

BY ANDREW PATNER

A farewell visit by a beloved American diva, a biblical outbreak of Rossini fever, and everybody's favorite mother from Greek mythology, Medea, are in store next year at Chicago Opera Theater.  It's a season unusually eclectic even for the unusually eclectic company.

While Lyric Opera of Chicago has a number of tried and true works slated for 2009-10, the riskier COT is pushing to the edge of the envelope and beyond with a series of little-known but greatly intriguing works: the local première of Jake Heggie's Three Decembers (2008), Francesco Cavalli's Giasone (1649) in its first-ever professional production here, and Gioachino Rossini's Moses in Egypt (1818), presented in Chicago for the first time in 150 years.

New American work

In announcing the 2010 season, COT general director Brian Dickie also confirmed that beloved American mezzo Frederica von Stade (above) will make a rare theatrical appearance in the lead role in Heggie's Three Decembers.

Best known for his songs and his operatic adaptation of the Death Row justice tale Dead Man Walking, Heggie wrote the chamber opera for von Stade, with librettist Gene Scheer, after a play by Terrence McNally (Master Class).  The opera will be conducted from the piano by COT's Stephen Hargreaves and staged by Broadway's Leonard Foglia, who also directed the work's world première (as Last Acts) in Houston in 2008.

Heggie also will accompany von Stade in what is billed as her Chicago farewell recital on May 10, 2010.  It's an exclusive appearance for COT subscribers.  And Heggie will also be a pianist in all performances of Three Decembers.

'People's Opera'

The season will open April 17, 2010, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance with Moses in Egypt (Mosè in Egitto), the winner of the "People's Opera" contest, a COT fund-raising scheme last year that netted more than $40,000 in "votes" for the Rossini.

Moses in Egypt has been seen in Chicago only once: at the downtown McVicker's Theatre in 1863, during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.  This rare revival of a work written two years after Rossini's signature The Barber of Seville will mark the COT debut of Italian conductor Leonardo Vordoni who is married to American star mezzo Joyce DiDonato.  Italian baritone Andrea Concetti, a Rossini devotee, will take on the role of Moses leading the Hebrews out of captivity.  COT's Andrew Eggert will direct the work, sung in Italian with English supertitles.

Medea cycle

A three-year cycle of Baroque works based on the charismatic but murderous character of the vengeful Greek queen Medea will kick off with Francesco Cavalli's Giasone, led by Scottish early music specialist Christian Curnyn.  Founder of Great Britain's Early Opera Company in 1994 and a favorite at the English National Opera, Curnyn will lead all three works, including operas by Charpentier and Handel in coming seasons.

Australia's Justin Way, who staged COT's masterful production of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio in 2006, will direct.  American mezzo Sasha Cooke, who played Kitty Oppenheimer in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of John Adams's Doctor Atomic, will be COT's Medea.

Repertoire choices and scheduling mean that two of COT's stalwarts, Alexander Platt and Jane Glover, are off the podium roster for 2010.

Three-opera season subscriptions range from $90 to $345. Half-off student subscriptions are available in most sections. For details, call (312) 704-8414 or go to chicagooperatheater.org.

Gatti in the CSO house -- and Prokofiev hits a triple

Here, with cuts restored, is my Saturday March 28 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday, March 26, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Daniele Gatti and Dmitri Alexeev, piano soloist.

Photo by Silivia Lelli

Prokofiev helps Gatti warm to CSO

BY ANDREW PATNER 

RECOMMENDED

Repeated Saturday March 28 at 8 p.m.

This week's Chicago Symphony Orchestra program is unusually varied and intriguing.  Italian conductor Daniele Gatti, 47, was once courted by both the CSO and Lyric Opera of Chicago for long-term relationships.  He is serious, not overly egotistical, and has a broad repertoire.  But it's hard to get Italians to travel (Gatti even says that he “suffers from homesickness”) and harder still to get them to move to the States. He and Chicago then went in their own directions.

Still, fans and musicians were sorry that it took seven years for him to visit Orchestra Hall again. The bloom is by no means off the rose, but the long absence might account for the sense that conductor and orchestra are still rebuilding their relationship.

Mendelssohn's 1830 Italian Symphony, No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90, was a beautiful opener.  Lyrical, lush, even Barenboimian at times.  The strings were reduced, but lightness was never mistaken for superficiality.  Winds and horns made the score's many technical demands seem natural.

But the closing Beethoven's Third, the E-Flat Major, Op. 55, Eroica, was more of a work in progress.  Choosing driven tempi, Gatti shaved minutes off of this massive masterwork.  He seemed to want to tear Beethoven out of his Romantic context and show this as a dramatic exercise in sound alone, still theatrical in effect, but existential, not operatic.

In between came Prokofiev's Fourth Piano Concerto, B-Flat Major, Op. 53, a rarity written for the left hand alone.  It is one of the many commissions from Paul Wittgenstein, the wealthy Viennese pianist who had lost his right arm in World War I and whose desire to continue his career gave us the great Ravel left hand concerto among many other works.

Despite his own conservative instincts, Wittgenstein approached many composers with Modernist tendencies for his project and so was not always pleased with the results.  Prokofiev delivered his score in 1931 and while Wittgenstein lived another 30 years he never played it.  Another battle-injured musician, Siegfried Rapp, gave its premiere, in Berlin, in 1956, three year's after Prokofiev's death.  Leon Fleisher played the work at Ravinia in 1986 and the late Israeli pianist turned political agitator David Bar-Ilan took it on it with the CSO in the 1960s, but these are its first subscription performances here.

It's a shame that the work was not known soon after its composition almost 80 years ago, for it is more interesting than many of Prokofiev's better-known works.  Perhaps because he had to address genuine artistic and technical problems, Prokofiev challenged himself to go beyond his usual patterns -- “neo-classical,” motoric, “modern,” -- and created a a bracing work for one hand covering the full keyboard and never losing our interest.  Dmitri Alexeev (above), a Russian émigré whose career has been in eclipse, was a remarkable interpreter, playing with passion and precision.

Last Sunday, Valery Gergiev led the London Symphony Orchestra here in an all-Prokofiev program that was more like an argumentative brief for the composer’s historic importance. Alexeev and Gatti gave us the unexpected notes on the page and that proved a better and more beautiful tribute to the music itself.

Gergiev, Felstman, and the LSO make their case for Prokofiev in Chicago

Here is my Tuesday, March 24 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Sunday, March 22, 2009 all-Prokofiev program performed by Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra with pianist Vladimir Feltsman at Orchestra Hall.

Principal conductor Valery Gergiev rehearses the London Symphony Orchestra at Chicago's Orchestra Hall on Sunday. Photo courtesy LSO on Tour website.

Gergiev presents Prokofiev in most flattering light

Russian conductor puts superb spin on varied compositions

BY ANDREW PATNER

It's a truism to say that a concert is more than the sum of its parts.  Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall, though, the individual parts varied greatly from each other, and that was not a bad thing.

The Russian-Ossetian maestro Valery Gergiev has brought majesty and celebrity back into conducting as he has circled the globe advocating the music of Russia and the former Soviet Union.  Almost pridefully unpredictable, he appeared here remarkably (for him) rested and calm.  The London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev's second ensemble after those in his St. Petersburg home base, is one of the world's finest; it also lacks the cockiness or gender and race discrimination that mar some of its European rivals.

The Russian-Jewish pianist Vladimir Feltsman, a former Soviet refusenik, has spent the last 20 years trying to establish a career that matches the drama of his pre-U.S. struggles for freedom. And then there was the material of the all-Prokofiev program Sunday: his earliest (the Classical, 1917) and his most bombastic (No. 5, 1944) symphonies, and the hodgepodge of his Piano Concerto No. 2 (1913; revised 1924).

Music lovers will continue to debate the merits of Prokofiev for some time. When I happened to post the simple phrase "perplexed by Prokofiev" on my facebook page Sunday, I was hit with some 30 replies from all over the world.  My saying that, with a few exceptions, he was much better suited to program music -- operas, ballets, film scores -- and chamber works than he was to symphonies and piano concertos is not going to change any minds.

Gergiev gave the controversial composer superb presentations. The Classical, a college dorm room favorite, was bright and brisk and alive, taking Prokofiev at his word that Mozart was his ideal here.  With the transparent and easily worn virtuosity of the LSO, the Fifth Symphony, with its many mood swings and eclectic combination of "deeply personal" and "war" music, was similarly taken seriously, and  therefore, for me, but not for most of the audience, shown to be essentially an empty vessel.

Feltsman knows the G minor concerto, with its heavy helpings of Rachmaninoff served side-by-side with Prokofiev's trademark "modern" dissonances and themes, is a bit schizophrenic.  His playing in each style was strong and assured, but he never truly integrated the two sound worlds.

Feltsman offered a very Russian Bach as an encore: Alexander Ziloti's transcription, Prelude in B minor.  Gergiev and the LSO gave us the sprightly March from Prokofiev's opera The Love for Three Oranges, which had its world première in Chicago in 1921, and was also the theme of both the radio and television series, The FBI.

Normally I envy New Yorkers the multi-concert residencies of great touring orchestras.  In this case, even with Gergiev and the LSO, I'm not unhappy to miss four programs of the complete Prokofiev symphonies over this next week at Lincoln Center.

Muti to Rome? The Eternal City's mayor would like him there

 

Now that Riccardo Muti is returning to the life of an active orchestral music director -- he takes up the baton of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in fall 2010 -- can a reprise directing an opera house be far behind?

The invaluable Opera Chic tipped us off yesterday that the website of Rome's main local newspaper, Il Messaggero, was reporting that the city's controversial conservative mayor Gianni Alemanno has asked Muti, 67, to handle the musical reins at the Rome Opera.  The website reported that Muti had asked to think the proposition over.

As is par for the course in Italy, the Rome theatre is in the midst of government funding and labor union clashes, with strikes threatened almost daily -- even while Muti is there conducting a new production of Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide this week.  

Muti left Italy's top opera house, Milan's La Scala, after 18 years in 2005 amidst political and union intrigues.  But what better way to stick it to his Northern Italian tormentors than to build up the Rome company and reputation?  Mayor Alemanno, 51, who has flirted with neo-fascism over the years, hails from Bari in the south and knows the ways of the class and regional conflicts that have haunted Italy throughout its history.  Muti's home town of Molfetta is just 15 miles up the Adriatic coast from Bari in Puglia.

As I report today in the Chicago Sun-Times, it is not uncommon for music directors to head two complementary organizations.  Muti could not be reached for comment yesterday, nor could CSO President Deborah Rutter.

Stay tuned!

Ravinia 2009 -- Lincoln, vocals, "Rigoletto," Weill, and Mendelssohn

Due to scheduling problems, my Chicago Sun-Times preview this week of the Ravinia Festival classical music season for summer 2009 was not linked easily to the print edition.  Here 'tis, with more to come:

Ravinia Festival to showcase Lincoln's legacy

BY ANDREW PATNER

Abraham Lincoln's legacy will hold center stage at this summer's Ravinia Festival with world premiere music and dance works, tribute programs, and chamber projects.  Works of German composer Felix Mendelssohn, the 16th U.S. president's almost exact contemporary, also will be a focus of the core classical music programming at Ravinia, the Highland Park summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

In announcing the 2009 season Thursday, Ravinia President and CEO Welz Kauffman confirmed that Ravinia's ticket prices would remain at 2008 levels and that the popular experiment of incorporating live video screens into Pavilion performances last summer will now be used for all CSO concerts.

'A festival of vocal splendor'

In an alluring twist that Kauffman ties in with Lincoln as well there will be more vocal and text-based works on this year's calendar.  Kauffman linked these ideas with the longstanding fascination with Lincoln's words and with the mood of the recent presidential election that saw "Americans of all stripes talking about 'raising their voices' and 'being heard,'" he said.  "A festival of vocal splendor seemed right for 2009."

A tantalizing lineup of international singers will headline in the Pavilion and the intimate indoor Martin Theatre as well as in special projects.  Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky will take the title role in a concert staging August 15 of Verdi's Rigoletto.  American mezzo Michelle DeYoung, an alumna of Ravinia's remarkably successful Steans Institute for Young Artists, will be heard in Mahler's monumental Das Lied von der Erde ("Song of the Earth") with the CSO.

American artists Thomas Hampson and Susan Graham will give recitals and the superb German lieder singer Matthias Goerne will present a series of three recitals of the complete Schubert song cycles with former Ravinia music director Christoph Eschenbach as pianist, an unusually intuitive accompanist.  Hvorostovsky also is on the recital series and Goerne will have a Viennese evening with the CSO.

Musical theatre emphasis

In addition to the previously announced Lincoln commissions from choreographic legend Bill T. Jones and Chicago jazz artist Ramsey Lewis, Ravinia will open its season June 5 with another work holding emotional connections to past and present occupants of the White House, Lerner and Loewe's 1960 Camelot with George Hearn, Sylvia McNair, and Rod Gilfry.  Evenings of Cole Porter (August 16) and Rodgers & Hammerstein (September 6) will be headlined by Broadway stars David Hyde Pierce, Kelli O'Hara, and Paulo Szot, and Ravinia and Broadway favorite Patti LuPone will take the lead in a Kurt Weill evening with the CSO.

CSO lineup

The CSO will give 17 concerts from July 7 to August 15, starting with Mendelssohn's First Symphony and Yefim Bronfman as soloist in the Brahms Second Piano Concerto.  This year's Women's Board gala, on July 18, will feature Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait and the Beethoven Ninth Symphony with the CSO Chorus and four American soloists.  In addition to the 11 concerts to be conducted by Ravinia music director James Conlon, Eschenbach will lead five CSO concerts.

Tenth anniversary return of Lang Lang

The international phenomenon that is the pianist Lang Lang saw his career launch a decade ago at Ravinia as a last-minute gala substitute for an ailing André Watts, and he returns in July for two CSO programs, one on July 26, in the Prokofiev Concerto No. 3 with his early mentor Eschenbach, and another on July 28, with Chicago-born Herbie Hancock (himself another former prodigy who made an early debut as a pianist with the CSO), in a program that includes a reprise of their Grammy Awards broadcast of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Other CSO guest soloists include cellist Yo-Yo Ma, flutist James Galway, violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and pianists Garrick Ohlsson and Peter Serkin.  Eschenbach also will lead the Chicago-area premiere of a recent work, Concerto 4-3 by Philadelphia composer Jennifer Higdon for orchestra and a "garage band" string trio, Time for Three, on July 24.

'Breaking the Silence': Kurt Weill, and Mendelssohn

Continuing his Breaking the Silence series of music by composers whose lives and careers were disrupted or destroyed by the Nazi German regime, Conlon offers two Kurt Weill programs featuring work from both Weill's German and American-exile periods.  The Mahagonny-Songspiel that Weill wrote with Bertolt Brecht will be performed August 4 by the Chicago Chamber Musicians with singers who have won the Lotte Lenya Vocal Competition, named in memory of Weill's wife and muse.  Then on August 8, Patti LuPone joins Conlon and the CSO for a symphonic Weill evening that features the Brecht-Weill Seven Deadly Sins.

The focus on Mendelssohn, who was born nine days before Lincoln in February 1809, also ties in to Conlon's interest in music suppressed by the Nazis.  Although Mendelssohn died in 1847, his works were banned and belittled by the Nazis because of his Jewish background.  In addition to his First, Third and Fourth Symphonies with the CSO, Ravinia is also claiming a world première June 20 by Misha and Cipa Dichter of an unpublished, recently discovered, Mendelssohn four-hand piano arrangement of seven of his Songs Without Words.

Martin Theatre instrumental roster

Martin Theatre recital guests, some of whom also will include Mendelssohn works on their programs, include two appearances by the famed Juilliard String Quartet, one featuring its retiring first violin Joel Smirnoff on June 22, and the second debuting his successor, Nick Eanet, on July 8.  Also appearing in the Martin will be pianist Leon Fleisher, cellist Gary Hoffman, young performers cellist Zuill Bailey and pianist Simone Dinnerstein, 14-year-old piano prodigy Conrad Tao, pianist-composer Marc-André Hamelin and piano improviser Gabriela Montero, a member of this year's Presidential Inauguration quartet.

Lisitsa's unscheduled CSO debut -- "Emperor"'s princess

Here is my Sunday, March 15 suntimes.com review of the Saturday, March 14, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra performance of the "Emperor" Concerto with Valentina Lisitsa, James Gaffigan conducting.

Pinch hitter Lisitsa goes with the slow on Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’

BY ANDREW PATNER 

RECOMMENDED

Repeats Sunday March 15 at 3 p.m.

Even the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has its in-between weeks.  Every day can't be a part of a triumphant three-week tour of the Far East with principal conductor Bernard Haitink.  Or of two weeks of intense modern masterworks -- followed by a two-night runout to New York's Carnegie Hall -- under the leadership of conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez.

Somehow the CSO managed to squeeze in two performances of an Abraham Lincoln 200th birthday anniversary tribute last month in the midst of all that high-end hubbub and to tack Beethoven's Fifth Symphony not only on those bicentenary programs but on three subscription concerts this weekend.  The much-hyped young French pianist Hélène Grimaud was to anchor this week's all-Beethoven shows, performing the great Fifth Piano Concerto in E-Flat Major, Op. 73, known as the "Emperor," with San Francisco Symphony associate conductor James Gaffigan repeating his February role as utility man on the podium.

Then Grimaud, who has written a memoir about her fascination with wolves, claimed that her management had not told her what piece she had contracted for a year or more ago.  (This is sort of like a major actor saying that he thought he was playing Othello and not Hamlet at the Stratford Festival.)  Enter longtime Grant Park and Mandel Hall favorite Valentina Lisitsa -- who had just scored high marks as violin wonder Hilary Hahn's recital accompanist at Orchestra Hall -- to sub for the spaced-out Grimaud.

Lisitsa is Ukrainian-born and -trained and first came to attention as a duo-pianist with her husband Alexei Kuznetsoff.  Chicago summer audiences know her for her Rachmaninoff and other showpieces, so to make her CSO debut in a titanic work of the classical repertoire added to the excitement of her valiant fill-in.

I don't know what a seasoned conductor would have done with the situation, but Gaffigan wisely deferred to his soloist, holding the orchestra down and emphasizing the gentle sides of a score often seen as a battle between piano and ensemble.  Lisitsa is known for her manual dexterity and an ability to delineate individual notes in even the most torrential runs.  And her filigrees hold our attention.

She did not disappoint Saturday night.  But she also seemed to take Beethoven's majesty down a notch so that the elegant slow movement became the work's musical as well as literal center.  Winds and horns in the orchestra were in full accord with this sort of inside-out interpretation, which often was deeply satisfying even when it did not storm the heavens.

The second half held the Fifth Symphony, heard and reviewed here last time around.

My (radio) guest tonight -- Reese Erlich, "Dateline: Havana"

  

Monday 09 March 2009 -- 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CST

Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner

 

Veteran journalist, author, and broadcaster Reese Erlich in an enlightening discussion recorded last month discussing his new book Dateline Havana: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Future of Cuba, recently published by PoliPointPress.   Erlich has been visiting and reporting on Cuba for more than 40 years.  Neither Fidelista nor Cuba Lobby-ist, he tells us a great deal about the island nation just 90 miles from our shores but about which we actually know very little.  The book has won endorsements from Walter Cronkite and Stephen Kinzer and has a forward by Kinzer.

Reese is also a longtime aficionado of Cuban music and on a subsequent program we'll take up his chapter "The Real Story of the Buena Vista Social Club," all

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!

Boulez encore -- Montovani, Kyburz, and Carter at CSO's MusicNOW

Due to a layout mix-up, my suntimes.com review of the Monday March 2, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW concert did not appear online until today.  Here 'tis:

CSO's MusicNOW series gets another boost

BY ANDREW PATNER

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s indispensable MusicNOW series is firmly entrenched in the city’s cultural life.  People of all ages and backgrounds mark their calendars in red for the four contemporary concerts each season.  Just about every local composer, conductor, and performer with an interest in the new attends, as do music students and long time aficionados of experimental art.  And, with the aid of free pizza and beer supplied by the CSO, the hour-plus post-performance receptions in the Harris Theater lobby are the place to be for lively conversation and critical debate.

Even with these built-in constituencies, though, a visit by Pierre Boulez is a shot in the arm for both the players on the stage and the large audience in the house.  Despite the efforts of MusicNOW principal conductor Cliff Colnot, programming of the series under current CSO composers-in-residence Osvaldo Golijov and Mark-Anthony Turnage has not always been the most challenging, sometimes even veering into new-music easy listening.

Just as he does at Orchestra Hall with the big band, Boulez, who turns 84 this month, reminds us that serious need not be morose.  Far from it.  The concert he curated and led Monday night, featuring an essential 1975 score by Elliott Carter and recent works by French and German Boulez protégés, showed that rigor, discipline, and edginess captivate much more than endless loops and post-modern noodling.

Despite his name and ancestry, Bruno Montovani, 34 (above, right), is French to the core, and his 2005, 15-minute "Streets" for 10 players is a brilliant update on Edgard Varèse’s pioneering works inspired by sounds of the big city.  Tightly wound and carefully composed, Montovani's music is rhythmically propulsive and laced with surprising turns.

I was not a great fan of the large orchestral Noesis that Berlin-based Swiss Hanspeter Kyburz (below, left) penned for the CSO in 2001.  It seemed to turn massive, thorny Modernist scoring into cliché.  But the latest version of his 2003-07 work-in-progress “Reseaux” (“Networks”), distilled to 15 minutes for just six players, had the characteristics of a gripping novella with stories and characters emerging and subsiding within the small ensemble.

The last musical words went to Carter in one of his masterworks, A Mirror on Which to Dwell, the 1975 setting of six poems of Elizabeth Bishop for soprano and small chamber orchestra.  Like Carter and Bishop, young soprano Jo Ellen Miller is an American artist at home in many vocabularies.  For half an hour, she rode Bishop’s alternately elliptical and stark language as masterfully as Carter's tender dissonances.  I wish they'd given it twice.

Boulez believes in the new and the daring.  But only with works and performances such as these that grab us, shake us, and leave us changed -- and hungry for more.