Andrew Patner: The View from Here

My (radio -- and on recording) guests tonight -- Friedrich Cerha and Elena Mendoza

 

Friedrich Cerha, back in the day

Tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com I'll be presenting what I am pretty sure is the North American radio première of sections I, II, and III (about 237 minutes of music) of Friedrich Cerha's seminal 1960-61 Spiegel (Mirror) from the new and first-ever recording of the full 90-minute work recently released in Europe on the KAIROS label.

The work was recorded, with Sylvain Cambreling leading his SWR-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden and Freiburg, in Bregenz, Austria, in 2006 and is at last available.  (Cerha, b. 1926 in Vienna, had to wait more than 10 years for the first full live performance of the piece, in 1972, in Graz.)  In the CD box, 18 (!) composers comment on the importance of this much discussed but rarely heard work.  Pierre Boulez notes:

"I have always regarded Friedrich Cerha as one of the most important personalities of his generation.  I have followed his composing with great interest whenever I had the opportunity to listen to a work or read it during its creation.  I am delighted that an album has now appeared which makes it possible to get an impression of his music’s remarkable development.  I hope that this will serve to create an awareness of his true significance. " -- Paris, 21 Dec. 2009.

Cerha just received the 2011 Salzburg State Music Prize as I reported here earlier this month from Salzburg.  And I'll also be playing a work for solo guitar by the winner of the 2011 Junior/Promotion Prize, the Berlin-based Spaniard Elena Mendoza, b. 1973 in Seville, also from a (2008) KAIROS release.

If you tune in to WFMT from 8 p.m. CDT you have an additional treat -- the broadcast of the fascinating and outstanding July 27 Ravinia Festival Martin Theatre concert hosted and conducted by music director James Conlon of three early jazz-influenced works by Erwin Schulhoff, Wilhelm Grosz, and Darius Milhaud with pianist Di Wu, singers Ronnita Nicole Miller and Brian Mulligan, and members of the Chicago Chamber Musicians.  You'll miss the great pantomime performance of Milhaud and Jean Cocteau's Le boeuf sur le toit, but you'll hear everything just fine.

The program will be posted at wfmt.com/criticalthinking later this week for free podcast/download/streaming.

Muti at Salzburg 2010 1 -- the flow of time and looking towards Chicago

Here is my Monday August 16, 2010, Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com initial feature on Riccardo Muti at the 2010 Salzburg Festival.

Muti, fighting for his art

SALZBURG FEST | After opera struggles, maestro eager to get 'serious' in Chicago

BY ANDREW PATNER

SALZBURG -- At T minus one month and counting, Riccardo Muti is spending a lot of time preparing for his new position as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  He has built in some downtime next month, but he's also fulfilling longstanding commitments such as a Brahms German Requiem in Stockholm on September 2, and keeping up historic institutional relationships, especially here in this culture-driven and picturesque Austrian town.

This month marks Muti's 40th consecutive summer as an opera and orchestral conductor at the prestigious Salzburg Festival, a unique record in the world today and one unlikely ever to be matched.  And on Tuesday morning he will conduct his 200th Salzburg performance with the famed Vienna Philharmonic, the last of three performances of Prokofiev's score for the classic 1944 Soviet film Ivan the Terrible.

[Riccardo Muti meets the press at the Salzburg Festival in 2009.   He's marking his 40th summer as a Salzburg conductor.  (Associated Press)]

 

His friend Gérard Depardieu, the French film star, will serve as narrator, and a delegation from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra administration and its trustees will be on hand as Muti is honored for this milestone by both the Philharmonic and the festival.

"When I came here," Muti said in an interview last week in a rehearsal room above the Large Festival Hall where the Philharmonic gives its concerts, "I was 30 years old.  There were musicians in the orchestra who had played under Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler, under the giants.  I called the members of the orchestra 'professors.'

"In these 40 years, I have seen not only that generation of players pass away, but also a whole new generation join the orchestra and retire -- they go to pension at 65 in Vienna -- and new ones come in each year.  Now I am the professor, and they seem like my children."

The passage of time has its drawbacks.  "I was trying to get the players to capture the excitement of the score.  'Think of the film, think of the drama, think of the fear that the great actor Nikolai Cherkasov instills in every scene as Ivan -- the Terrible.'

"They were blank-faced.  Silent.  'You know.  The film, a masterpiece of the cinema, by Sergei Eisenstein.'  No, it seems they did not know it.  As one is older, one has to teach more and more, it seems."

[Conducting the Gluck opera Orfeo ed Euridice at the Salzburg Festival, Muti found the director unreceptive to his ideas.  (Getty Images)]

Then there are the battles that characterize life in European festivals, especially here in Austria.  For the Gluck opera Orfeo ed Euridice ("Orpheus and Eurydice") that Muti is conducting here this year, the festival assigned him a senior German stage director, Dieter Dorn.

"I start from the text in any piece I work on," Muti said, over lunch at his summer home in Anif, a nearby village.  "For this first version of the opera, from 1762, Gluck chose an Italian text, by Ranieri de' Calzabigi -- a Neapolitan, as I am -- and a great poet, as I am not.  This was not just a man who prepared libretti [texts] to order for operas, he was a great man of letters.

"Well, Mr. Dorn did not seem to know this or to care.  He had arrived at our first meeting without indicating that he had ever even looked at the Italian.  When you sing, a word determines everything.  'Prima le parole e poi la musica' ('first the words and then the music') not because the words are more important but because this takes us to how the composer himself worked.

"And he had no interest in what my ideas, as the conductor of the piece, might be.  From there it went even further downhill."

Many critics found Dorn's staging merely dull.  Some Americans, including Anthony Tommasini of The New York Timesand myself, were just happy that the modern German stage tradition of nonsensical time changes and gratuitous nudity, sex, and violence added to productions was absent here.  But Muti can -- and did -- cite literal measure and verse as to where he saw the director straying from his proper task.

"They say I am hard.  Uncompromising.  Inflexible," he said with a slap of his hand on the table.  "No.  I am serious, yes.  Serious about the art I make.  Why else should I be doing this work at the age of 69?

"I am looking so much forward to Chicago.  A city where people speak directly and an orchestra where I do not see a lot of intrigue, but a seriousness.  And one that knows that being serious about art and music does not in any way exclude feeling, experiencing, and communicating the great joy that is in the works that we play and the love that we have for what we do."

And with that, the pastas was served, and another day was crossed off the calendar before Muti arrives in Chicago on September 15.

News and notes from Salzburg and Chicago 2: Germany's David Afkham, 27, is first Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award winner

 

David Afkham.  Photo: Chris Christodoulou 

David Afkham, 27, a protégé of former Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal conductor Bernard Haitink, was announced today as the first recipient of the Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award.  The award comes with a €15,000 cash prize, about $20,000, from Swiss-based Nestlé, S.A., and is distinct from many other such competitions in focusing on contemporary music as well as the standard repertoire. 

As a part of the award, the German-Parsi Afkham, a native of Freiburg who studied piano and violin there and in Weimar, also will lead the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra at the Salzburg Festival this Saturday, August 14, in a concert of Ligeti, Beethoven, and Shostakovich with Austrian pianist Till Fellner as soloist.

Afkham, currently assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and a Dudamel conducting fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was selected from 81 candidates (including 16 women) aged 22 to 35 in a multi-tiered process which culminated with three finalists leading the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, Portugal. 

He was the unanimous choice of a nine-member jury chaired by Cleveland Orchestra and new Vienna State Opera music director Franz Welser-Möst that included pianist Mitsuko Uchida, Peter Alward of the Salzburg Easter Festival, former Edinburgh Festival director Brian McMaster, and representatives of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the German Orchestra Union, the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, as well as Markus Hinterhäuser, intendant of next year's 2011 Salzburg Festival.  Hinterhäuser worked closely with jury patron Pierre Boulez in designing the prize.

Afkham came to Haitink's attention four years ago when the veteran Dutch conductor began a series of master classes at his home base in Lucerne.  "Where to start?" the boyish Afkham said at a press conference today in Salzburg.  "I immediately recognized that this was not only a musical maestro I wished to learn from, but also someone from whose example I could learn much as a person."  Subsequently working as an assistant to Haitink over two seasons in Chicago and across Europe, Afkham also led performances of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago as well as family concerts of the CSO itself. 

In a Chicago Sun-Timesreview of a Civic concert led jointly with Haitink in December 2008, shortly after Afkham won the International Donatella Flick Competition, I found that the then-25-year-old conductor "showed maturity and care" in Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration.  He was also a guest that month on my radio program Critical Thinkingon 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and wfmt.com.  You can hear that conversation here.

For his Salzburg Festival prize concert, Afkham has programmed Ligeti's 1961 Atmosphères, the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, and the Shostakovich Tenth Symphony in E minor, Op. 93, premièred in 1953. 

"It is a huge responsibility as young conductors to be conscious of contemporary music," Afkham said at the Salzburg press conference.  "It takes time to develop context and parameters for these works, but we really must consciously work to combine them in study and programming along with the great Beethoven symphonies and Haydn we learned in music school.  You have to work to keep your mind open to these things, even when it is not easy."

Hinterhäuser, himself an important performer of contemporary piano music, new music presenter, and concerts director at the Salzburg Festival for the last four years, told the press conference that in Lisbon the jury had seen Afkham display "good rehearsal and performance technique and a secure self-awareness."

The award is to be given annually.

My (radio) guests this week (and last): John Conroy and Michael Miner on Chicago's torturing cops, wrongful convictions, and the state of journalism today

Michael Miner (above, left) and John Conroy (below, right)

Tonight on Critical Thinkingon 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago, and via free streaming over wfmt.com, we present the second part of an extended discussion with writer John Conroy and editor and columnist Michael Miner on Chicago's police torture and wrongful conviction scandals and the state of journalism today.  In part one, available any time for podcast, download and streaming here, we reviewed the case of recently convicted perjurer John Burge, the former Chicago Police Department commander who tortured perhaps 200 or more Black men over a period of 20 years on Chicago's South Side.  Tonight we continue to put the Burge case into the larger context of news media that have neither the interest nor the resources to research and cover such stories and the former Cook County State's Attorney and now Mayor of the City of Chicago Richard M. Daley who has never lifted a finger to address these issues or the crimes committed while he was the state's chief prosecutor in Chicago.

For a view of John Conroy's two decades of work on this story, the vast majority of it for the Chicago Reader where Michael Miner was his editor on many of his landmark stories, and his fate in the new media landscape, see Don Terry's excellent piece in the July/August 2010 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review here.

That's Critical Thinking, tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT and then posted indefinitely at wfmt.com.

 

News and notes from Salzburg and Chicago 1: the State of Salzburg shows Friedrich Cerha the money

Friedrich Cerha in Salzburg, August 4, 2010 -- photo: apa 

Composer Friedrich Cerhahas been one of the great forces in Viennese music since the 1950s – writing, experimenting, commissioning, presenting, and conducting compositions; preparing editions in and founding an early ensemble for early music; and doing the same with works of the Second Viennese School: If he had done nothing else in his long and active life than complete (1962-1978) the orchestration for the third act of Alban Berg’s 1929-1935 opera Lulu, enabling the full work to be heard for the first time at last in 1979, he would have a permanent place in history.  (This year's Salzburg Festival, which is not involved in the State Prize, is presenting a new production of Lulu through August 17.  I'll see it tonight.)

 

But as a fascinating and iconoclastic composer himself, Cerha was born too late in a city and country once synonymous with new music but which from the Anschluss through postwar reconstruction and beyond no longer cared about such things.  Presented today with the third Salzburg State Music Prize – his award, dated 2011, comes with €60,000, about $80,000 – the 84-year-old artist told a press conference on the Monchsberg, “The prize comes too late.”

 

Reminding both the presenters and the public that (in my approximate English paraphrase), “for 50, 55 years I worked through my youth and career and Austria showed me only its hostility and icy rejection.  Now I have more awards and honors than I can count.  But," he added with a wry smile, "whatever other debilities age has caused in me, I still have a healthy vanity -- so I’m happy to accept the prize.”

 

The Vienna-based Kairos label has just issued the world première recording of his landmark 90-minute Spiegel [Mirror] I-VII, written at the beginning of the 1960s but not performed in full until 1972, along with recordings of 1988’s Monumentum and Momente of 2005, with Sylvain Cambreling, Dennis Russell Davies, and Cerha himself conducting major new music orchestras of Baden-Baden/Freiburg and Vienna on a 2-CD set.  In an accompanying detailed booklet, 18 (!) composers from Boulez to Lachenmann to Kurtág to G. F. Haas and beyond express their excitement at hearing the work in full due to this project.

 

Elena Mendoza

 

A younger composer in their ranks is Elena Mendoza, born in Seville in 1973, trained in Germany, and based in Berlin.  She received the Salzburg State’s sort of up and comers "Promotion Prize" of €20,000, about $26,500, and a commission for the 2013 Salzburg New Music Biennale.  Kairos has brought out her work as well, on a 2008 CD.  Jurors for both prizes were Heike Hoffmann, the new artistic director of the Salzburg Biennale, conductor Johannes Kalitzke, and critic Julia Spinola, critic with the prestigious German newspaper, the FAZ.

 

The 2011 Biennaleis set for March 3 to 27.  The first recipient of the prize, established in the Mozart year 2006, was Salvatore Sciarrino of Italy.  The second winner, two years ago, was the Swiss Klaus Huber.