Andrew Patner: The View from Here

CSO: Asher Fisch is top-flight sub for ailing Muti in 'Eroica,' Chávez, and a Wagner march

Here is my Saturday October 9 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday October 7, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Asher Fisch.

Asher Fisch

Conductor Fisch is excellent CSO sub for ailing Muti

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.

While they await word on music director Riccardo Muti’s condition, Chicago Symphony Orchestra administrators and the orchestra itself have been making the best of a difficult situation.  As the ailing Muti undergoes medical tests and consults with doctors in Milan, British conductor Harry Bicket filled in at Tuesday evening’s concert to good reports and this week Israeli Asher Fisch, in town to prepare performances of Verdi’s A Masked Ball at Lyric Opera of Chicago, is doing excellent  stand-in duty.

The program was much anticipated as it was to be the first chance to hear Muti lead a core repertory work as music director -- Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica. And Muti, an eclectic and mischievous program maker, had also slated the Carlos Chávez Sinfonía india, a major work of Mexican classical music, and Richard Wagner’s little-known American Centennial March, a very minor work of a very great composer, for the concert’s first half.

Fisch, 52, who worked extensively as a young man in Berlin with former CSO music director Daniel Barenboim and has an international opera conducting career, was asked to lead this unusual array without changes and he gamely assented.  Thursday night he proved himself more than worthy and an amiable and attractive guide for the audience as well.

CSO founder Theodore Thomas commissioned the Wagner march from the man he esteemed and advocated above all other composers for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876.  Its commission is a story of non-connecting egos and financial folly, and evidence that even a great artist can make a mistake.  Thomas gave a few more performances of the work after its unimpressive debut -- including with the CSO in 1900 -- and it then sunk back in to deserved obscurity.  Fisch gave a humorous introduction before leading the 12-minute bit of repetitive bombast as if it were the most important piece in the world.  The players took the same position.

The Chávez work, from 1935-36, is much more deserving of this sort of attention, although it too has its place as a piece of history as much as a pure composition.  Encouraged by Manuel de Falla of Spain and the North American musical guru Aaron Copland to combine folk elements from his native Mexico with then popular ideas of national and democratic music, Chávez made influential pieces of great interest but also of their time.  This brief, one-movement Indian symphony takes its material from two peoples of the state of Sonora and and one from Nayarit, all on the country's Pacific Coast, and weaves them into an exciting work with rhythmic, melodic, and timbral -- extensive percussion imitates indigenous instruments -- debts to native Mexican music.  Fisch and the CSO made you want to hear more works from this neglected voice.

The much-anticipated Beethoven proved remarkable.  With the experience of Bernard Haitink’s June CSO Beethoven Festival still fresh in the ears, Fisch offered an original and highly serious take on the piece.  Notching down both volume and speed, even from Haitink’s deeply insightful levels, Fisch brought out the rhythmic cells at work in each movement allowing you to hear the much-loved symphony both analytically and with joy.  Never adding anything to the score, he let Beethoven speak loudly when Beethoven wanted and found that rare merger of inevitability and surprise at every turn of the work.  The orchestra and its section leaders gave what he asked for and did so beautifully.  It would be great to have this talented and thoughtful conductor back soon for a program of his own design.

Riccardo Muti: health, privacy, contingency plans, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra

My Wednesday October 6, 2010 WFMT Radio Chicago and wfmt.com commentary on the current situation of Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

 

Todd Rosenberg Photography

 

Riccardo Muti: health, privacy, contingency plans, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
 

When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s new music director Riccardo Muti took a flight back to Italy Monday afternoon to seek medical care and advice after falling ill here over the weekend, he left a number of questions behind.

 

Why did he depart in the midst of his first residency as the CSO’s artistic leader to seek medical advice and care in Milan for a stomach condition rather than in Chicago?  What sort of privacy is a public artistic figure entitled to?  How well does the management of a large musical organization that has invested a great deal over the last two years in publicizing the Italian maestro, 69, as its new artistic and philosophical leader cope with such an unexpected development?

 

One Chicago newspaper has gone so far as to speculate, without any attribution, about Muti’s exact physical condition and has opened its website comment pages to anonymous and pseudonymous posts questioning Muti’s health and even his character and honesty.

 

Muti’s and the CSO’s spokespeople on the other hand have asked the media and supporters and ticketholders of the orchestra to respect Muti’s privacy and to show sensitivity to someone facing diagnosis and treatment procedures that can be physically invasive and painful.

 

Said a CSO spokesperson, “If you were to become ill in a foreign country with a different language, different practices, different food and drink, and far from your family, would you want to spend a potentially significant period of examination and recuperation there?  Or would you want to do so in your own country, with your own doctors, in a hospital you know and with your family around you?”  The spokesperson also emphasized that Muti did meet with area doctors at his hotel suite on Sunday and that they had endorsed his return to Italy.

 

Muti is extremely close with his family and his wife and three adult children are also his main advisors.  His daughter’s pregnancy has meant that she and her mother were not able to travel to Chicago at this time.  The Italian media, operating under certain legal restrictions on reporting on the health of individuals, have been quoting a Muti representative as saying, in Italian, that Muti will have "a minimal hospital stay, but in absolute calm.”

 

The CSO’s actions since Saturday have underscored its tremendous staff and musician loyalty and efficiency and its ability, at least in the short- to mid-term, to carry on at a high level both with day-to-day operations and with implementation of Muti’s broad vision for the orchestra in many Chicago communities.

 

As soon as Muti began to think that the stomach problems that he had been experiencing last week might require more serious medical attention, CSO artistic administrators began working their Rolodexes.  On Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours after Muti had to withdraw from Saturday evening’s “Symphony Ball” gala concert due to illness, they announced their impressive backup plan.

 

The orchestra's conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, a living legend at 85, will interrupt his conducting sabbatical to lead four performances of the Mahler Seventh Symphony October 14 to 17.  Although final approvals are being worked out, it appears that a PBS Great Performances taping and national broadcast planned around Muti’s programs for those dates will go on with Boulez and the Mahler program.  And two highly-regarded younger conductors who have appeared with the CSO before, Israeli Asher Fisch and Brit Harry Bicket, will take up the other four concerts on Muti’s schedule this week with no change in program.  Fisch will be leading a new production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball and Bicket one of Handel’s Hercules at Lyric Opera of Chicago this season.

 

A demonstration visit to Chicago’s new public high school for the arts, ChiArts, that Muti had planned went on as scheduled Monday morning at the insistence of CSO musicians.  Monday night at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park, an audience of more than 700, many of them much younger than a typical orchestra audience, turned out for the first CSO MusicNOW concert curated and hosted by Muti’s personal choices as new Mead composers-in-residence, Anna Clyne and Mason Bates.  (See my review below and/or here.)

 

Some have asked why the CSO does not have a system of assistant and staff conductors to stand in in emergencies, positions that have not existed here for some years.  Muti intends to consider such appointments, CSO Association President Deborah F. Rutter said on Monday evening, “but only after he has come to know the orchestra better and had a sense of who might be available for such posts.”  

Chicago audiences and musicians have preferred appearances of seasoned guest musicians to conductors in training in any event.   And as Muti is not scheduled to be back in Chicago until February, administrators believe that they have time to put additional contingency plans in place should they be necessary.

 

“We have had very few people calling or asking about ticket or program changes,” Rutter said at the Monday night MusicNOW concert.  “What we have had is nearly unanimous concern from audience members, musicians and the man and woman in the street that Maestro Muti makes a full recovery.”

CSO MusicNOW gets its groove back with Anna Clyne and Mason Bates

My Wednesday October 6 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Monday October 4, 2010, Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW program at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park.

 
Mason Bates and Anna Clyne (photo: Denise Anderson)

MusicNOW season opener keeps customers satisfied 

BY ANDREW PATNER

Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti may have returned to Italy unexpectedly for medical care this week, but his vision for the CSO is actively being realized in his absence.

The season's first CSO MusicNOW contemporary music concert saw a large house of 700 on Monday night at the Harris Theater, with an even larger proportion of the young and hip than usual.  Surely many had turned out to see how Muti's personal picks as the CSO's new Mead composers-in-residence, British-born Anna Clyne, 30, and Virginia native Mason Bates, 33, might revive a once-cutting-edge program that had fallen into predictability under its incurious previous curators Osvaldo Golijov and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

By the time the crowd hit the free pizza and beer in the Harris lobby after the 90-minute program, it seemed a happy one indeed and filled the antiseptic building with a jolly buzz.  Right out of the gate, Clyne and Bates have been getting to know the local scene and and listening to Chicago composers -- something not seen here since Daniel Barenboim's new-music appointee Augusta Read Thomas held the Mead post.  Monday at the Harris, there was the sense that MusicNOW was the place to be for both makers of new music and their fans.

Although the program itself was mixed -- as programs of new works can be -- the performance generated coherence and connection that seemed equally due to the amiable, informative public personas of hosts Clyne and Bates and the enthusiasm of the performers, largely CSO musicians.

Chicago was directly represented by Rio de Janeiro native Marcos Balter, who earned his doctorate at Northwestern and now heads the composition program at Columbia College.  His 2009 string trio Vision Mantra drew thrilling support from CSO players Baird Dodge on violin, Li-Kuo Chang on viola, and Jonathan Pegis on 'cello, but was later overshadowed by a more complex work for string quartet from Ana Lara, a Mexican composer.  Lara's 2000 Bhairav is named for the Indian raga that inspired this post-minimalist weaving of repeated and modified long lines.  Dodge and Pegis were joined by violinist Rika Seko and CSO viola Max Raimi for Bhairav, which at 10 years old, was the most "ancient" work on the all-21st century program.

Both of these distilled works overshadowed the rambunctious, overly busy Li Po (2009) by the young European-trained Mexican composer Enrico Chapela for 18 players, expertly conducted by Cliff Colnot.

The standouts of the evening came from the hosts themselves: Clyne, with her touching multimedia steelworks (2006), and Bates, with his intense and brilliant pairing of organ and electronica, Digital Loom (2005), with young Quebecoise organist Isabelle Demers as soloist.  CSO players Cynthia Yeh on percussion, Jennifer Gunn on flute, and John Bruce Yeh on bass clarinet donned workmen's black jump suits as they interacted intensely with a sound-triggered set of film excerpts designed by Luke DuBois and sounds and voices of the last steelworks in Brooklyn, as recorded by Clyne.

The Bates work gave a sense of what might have happened if Olivier Messiaen and Virgil Thomson had kidnapped a highly skilled Episcopal church organist from Virginia and put her or him on an acid trip.  Bates, who also has worked as a DJ, understands and admires the power and unique sound qualities of the organ.  His intricate and unexpected weaving of its voices with his creations of techno, dance, and drum 'n' bass was powerful on many levels.

The next MusicNOW program is set for Monday, December 13 with a major focus on modern and contemporary works at CSO subscription concerts throughout October and November.

Lyric Opera of Chicago's 'Macbeth': the eyes have it better, director Gaines trumps singers

Here is my Monday October 4 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Friday October 1, 2010 Lyric Opera of Chicago season opening night new production of Verdi's Macbeth.  Performances continue through October 30.

The eyes have it better at 'Macbeth'

OPERA REVIEW | Gaines's design makes up for vocal flaws

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Lyric Opera of Chicago launched one of its most eclectic seasons in years Friday night with a new production of Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth that offered more theatrical success than musical triumph.  Chicago Shakespeare Theater founder and director Barbara Gaines brings her characteristic flow of plot and naturalness in characterization to her first ever opera staging.  And she and her design team have created an eye-catching world and effects that work with and not against the opera and rarely distract us from the musical and dramatic presentation.

But in one of the hardest operas to cast vocally -- and one whose cast consists almost entirely of its lead couple -- Lyric runs into the same difficulties that many other companies face in a world where true Verdi baritones and sopranos seem harder and harder to find.  The distinguished American Thomas Hampson brings his well-known intelligence and care to the title role, especially with the Italianized Shakespeare lyrics.  But his voice does not have the depth that this role requires, and his elegance belies his character's increasingly animalistic behavior.  It's not surprising then that the singer's greatest moments are heard in Macbeth's aria that comes closest to introspection, Act Four's "Pietà, rispetto, amore" ("Compassion, respect, love") sung as Birnam Wood begins its fateful march on him and his tyranny.

[The Lyric Opera's production of Verdi's "Macbeth" -- the first opera staging by Barbara Gaines of Chicago Shakespeare Theater -- impresses while still suiting the work. Photo: Rich Hein/Sun-Times]

In her Lyric debut, German soprano Nadja Michael enacted both sides of her reputation -- a striking, athletic physical presence paired with a voice that frequently seems out of control or oddly matched to the score.  Costumed by Virgil C. Johnson to bring out Michael's own fierceness and that of her sick and scheming character (and her resemblance to Annie Lennox), Michael consistently undercuts her hold on your visual attention with a voice too often too large and almost always at least slightly flat.  Those fortunate to have seen the late Piero Cappuccilli and Grace Bumbry (Lyric's first Lady Macbeth, in 1969) and Shirley Verrett in these roles had to wonder how Friday's audience was able to fully appreciate Verdi's great and so often subtle accomplishment in this, one of his breakthrough works as both a composer and dramatist.

Beyond the not inconsiderable vocal aspects, however, Gaines makes this a production well worth experiencing.  As she does at her theatre on Navy Pier, she has a sense of how to make material fresh without arrogantly applying unrelated ideas or trendy theories.  She might elevate the role of the future-predicting witches, but this actually follows Verdi's own work with these scenes expanding the three soothsayers into a full three-part women's chorus.  But her main focus is on the joint and jointly destructive psychology of literature's most-loved dysfunctional power-mad couple.  If Hampson and Michael don't always hit the right energy level in their scenes together, you can't fault Gaines, who gets the weird blend of sex and power behind these two schemers.

Set designer James Noone's reference to Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion as a sign of "power" is not always clear, but the work is impressive and free of unnecessary complexity. The idea of the Macbeths' room in the castle as a sort of isolation chamber is effective, too.  Flying characters do so smoothly and the fire-representation technology has hit a new high here.  Johnson’s costumes sometimes seems to move between Braveheart and Star Wars, but this is both ancient Scotland and the basis of many an archetype after all.  The young Slovak bass Štefan Kocán is a stern Banquo.  Italian-American tenor Leonardo Capalbo has a breakthrough here as Macduff, but Uzbek-born Konstantin Stepanov is a pale Malcolm. 

Conductor Renato Palumbo did not quite reach the levels of Verdian insight that he brought to last season’s Ernani, but he kept up a stirring pace.  Donald Nally’s chorus somehow bettered even its own remarkably high standard.

 

CSO gala sans Muti: orchestra, Anne-Sophie Mutter go on when music director falls ill

Here is my Monday October 4 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Saturday evening October 2, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra gala concert.  Riccardo Muti subsequently withdrew from his remaining October CSO engagements as well due to illness.  See my news story below.

Anne-Sophie Mutter steps in to lead as well as play the Beethoven Violin Concerto.  Todd Rosenberg Photography.

Treasures to be found at CSO's Muti-free shop

REVIEW | Even with conductor out sick for gala, orchestra excels

BY ANDREW PATNER

What could have been an evening of embarrassment and misfortune turned into a display of artistic and civic community and solidarity Saturday night when Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti fell ill before the CSO's gala "Symphony Ball" and could not go on.

While a sold-out black-tie audience of about 2,500 -- who made the evening a $2 million fundraising success -- waited in its seats for half an hour, unsure what was causing the delay, CSO management and board leaders huddled with Muti and the players backstage to establish an alternative plan.

CSO board chairman William A. Osborn and president Deborah F. Rutter then explained that the concert would go on, sans conductor.  Guest soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter, making her first CSO Orchestra Hall appearance in 21 years, would lead the scheduled Beethoven Violin Concerto herself, no small undertaking.  And Mozart's C Major Symphony No. 34, K. 338, would be carried over from this week's subscription concerts with concertmaster Robert Chen leading the orchestra from his chair at the head of the first violin section.  Out were two Muti specialties, Rossini's William Tell Overture and Liszt's tone-poem Les préludes.

While no one could discount the initial air of disappointment in the Hall, particularly after the intense publicity focus on the launch of Muti's tenure as the CSO's 10th music director, the resilience of the orchestra itself soon made up for the temporary setback and offered attractions of its own.

With an empty chair on the podium, the Mozart reverted more to the genial and more breezy style that recent CSO principal conductor Bernard Haitink brought to the composer than the tighter control Muti exerts.  Haitink has frequently called Chen the finest concertmaster today, and his combination of buoyancy and authority with his colleagues did not contradict this endorsement.

Mutter's leadership of the Beethoven, a work that belongs squarely to the conductor-required era, was more problematic and certainly one of the longest performances of this much-loved work, with the slow movement in particular taking on the quality of a requiem.  But Mutter was a hero for even agreeing to go forward, and her always remarkable tone and fierce technique gave her fans and the rest of the audience much to cheer. 

The somewhat spontaneous encore that followed, with her and Chen leading the slow movement of the Bach Double Violin Concerto, allowed the accomplishment of the evening to sink in: A great orchestra came together to make music as a body regardless of circumstances.  This was indeed something to celebrate and an example of what made Muti take the Chicago position in the first place.

Muti withdraws from remaining October CSO concerts: returns to Milan for medical evaluation

My Monday October 4, 2010 Chicago Sun-Times and Sunday October 3 suntimes.com story.  See my review of Saturday's CSO gala concert above here.

 

 Riccardo Muti and the CSO/Todd Rosenberg Photography

 

Muti cancels remaining fall season due to illness

Boulez, Fisch, and Bicket step up

BY ANDREW PATNER

 

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s new music director Riccardo Muti has had to withdraw from his remaining two weeks of fall concerts due to illness, the CSO announced Sunday evening.

The news comes in the midst of a whirl of concert successes at the start of the Italian conductor’s inaugural season as music director.  Muti, 69, and normally in excellent health, fell ill Saturday afternoon shortly before he was to lead the CSO in a gala “Symphony Ball” concert.  (Reviewed here.)

 

During an afternoon rehearsal he told the musicians that he was not feeling well and several of them said he appeared very pale.  After much discussion behind the scenes, Muti and CSO management decided 20 minutes after the sold-out black-tie Orchestra Hall concert was to have begun Saturday evening that Muti would not go on and that the concert program would be revised to be played without a conductor.

 

In a statement Sunday, the CSO said that Muti is “suffering from extreme gastric distress.”  A CSO spokeswoman said that Muti wanted to meet with his own doctors in Milan to assess his condition and possible treatment.

 

“I cannot express the depth of my regret that I am unable to complete this first residency as music director,” the CSO statement quoted Muti. “I have had the privilege of making marvelous music together with this great Orchestra, and I am confident that we will continue to do so when I return again.”

 

CSO Association President Deborah F. Rutter added, “While we are all very sorry, the most important thing is that Maestro Muti makes a complete recovery,” according to the statement.  “This decision was a very difficult one for him to make.” 

 

On extremely short notice, the CSO has engaged an impressive line-up of substitute conductors for its ailing leader, highlighted by the orchestra’s distinguished conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, 85, leading four performances of the Mahler Seventh Symphony October 14 to 17.  The Mahler replaces a program featuring Muti signature works by Cherubini and Hindemith as well as a commissioned world première by Chicago-based composer Bernard Rands.

 

Repertoire for the other scheduled concerts remains unchanged with top-flight British early music conductor Harry Bicket leading the last Mozart and Haydn program of the current subscription week on Tuesday night (October 5) and versatile Israeli Asher Fisch taking over the next set of three subscription concerts of works by Beethoven, Wagner, and Carlos Chávez October 7 to 9.  Both Bicket and Fisch are engaged for major productions at Lyric Opera of Chicago this season as well.

 

An open rehearsal in the Pilsen neighborhood with the CSO’s Civic Orchestra of Chicago scheduled for Saturday October 9 will be rescheduled as will the Cherubini, Hindemith, and Rands works.  Muti's next CSO residencies are slated for February, April, and May 2011.

 

In the statement, bassist Steve Lester, chair of the CSO players’ union, added, ”The health of our music director is our first concern and we wish him a full and speedy recovery.  The first concerts with our new music director have been extraordinary and we look forward to his return.  The musicians of the Orchestra would like to thank the public for their unprecedented support for the Orchestra and our new music director.”   

CSO and Muti: Mozart and Haydn in G minor and later in major in the 1780s.

Am Hof, Vienna, c. 1780 

Here is my Saturday October 2 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday September 30, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra Mozart and Haydn symphonies program with Riccardo Muti conducting.  The program repeats Tuesday night October 5 at 7:30 p.m. 

 Back to school with Riccardo Muti

CSO | Mozart, Haydn pairings a musical education

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Repeats Tuesday, October 5 at 7:30 p.m.

Given Riccardo Muti's whirlwind of activity in his first weeks as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, some might see his programming two pairs of symphonies by Mozart and Haydn this week at Orchestra Hall as a sort of sorbet service between main courses. Far from it. All musical presentation is serious business for this conductor.

In selecting three less frequently played works (both Haydn pieces are very belated CSO premières) and in joining a later, ostensibly familiar Mozart symphony with them, Muti the educator is on display.

So is Muti the revisitor to earlier ideas of presentation.  Heard Thursday, this intensive look at just a 17-year span of late 18th-century Austro-Hungarian composition reflects his continuing changes to the CSO's trademark repertoire.

As with his predecessors Bernard Haitink and Daniel Barenboim, Muti is no fan of "historic performance practices" -- he calls this wing of the early music movement "the vegetarian school" -- but does also use a reduced orchestra of just 40 strings.

He gets us to see and hear connections that are important to him: How Mozart's first symphony in a minor key, the so-called "little" G minor, No. 25, K. 183 of 1773, sounds as if it might have grown right out of Haydn's own G minor Symphony No. 39, written just a few years before. Or how the conscious and unconscious back and forth between the two composers  in the 1780s -- Mozart's C major, No. 34, K. 338, and Haydn's F Major No. 89 -- provides the building blocks of tension for the greatest symphonist of all time, Ludwig van Beethoven, who would take up his orchestral pen just four years after Haydn laid his own down.

To Barenboim and Haitink's great accomplishments in making the CSO more flexible, Muti adds an additionally organized elegance and structure.  As he plays more of these composers, the CSO will breathe even more naturally with him.  As it is, the orchestra's enthusiasm and joy in this collaboration is palpable; Robert Chen's leadership of the strings warms the heart, and the dance of Eugene Izotov and Lora Schaefer's oboes and Mathieu Dufour's flute matches Muti's own new focus on the podium.

Note: Joseph Guastafeste, the CSO's principal bass since his appointment by Fritz Reiner in 1961, retired Friday.  A ceremony will be announced to honor one of the CSO's most senior and longest-serving members.