Andrew Patner: The View from Here

My (radio) guest tonight: Sargon of Akkad, part 1 of 2 (well, his editors at the just-completed Chicago Assyrian Dictionary)

 
Tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com, in the first of a two-part program, I talk with Martha T. Roth, editor-in-charge, and Robert D. Biggs, a senior editor, of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of The University of Chicago, commonly known as the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary or CAD, a 21-volume completed in late spring 90 years after work began on the project at the institute in 1921.

Drawing on generations of scholarly work and translation on the ancient cuneiform script of the ancient west Semitic language known as Akkadian, the dictionary is really more of an encyclopaedia, or even a proto-website, of all aspects of life and thought in ancient Assyria and Babylon.  Since a free version of the CAD was posted online in June, the site has had well over 100,000 downloads, including many from Iraq, successor state to ancient Mesopotamia.  

Martha Roth is the Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor of Assyriology at The University and dean of the Division of the Humanities.  Robert Biggs is professor emeritus of Assyriology and has worked on the Dictionary for almost half a century.

The program will then be posted at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast, download, streaming indefinitely.  Part Two will air next week, Monday September 5, same time, same station.

See you on the radio! 

 

Grant Park and Kalmar close out season with superb Verdi, Amber Wagner is MVP

Chicago Sun-Times, Saturday August 20, 2011 5:22PM CDT

Grant Park closes out season with superb Verdi Requiem

Soprano Amber Wagner adds another notch to her belt

BY ANDREW PATNER

Grant Park Music Festival

▪Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday

▪Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park

▪Free admission

▪grantparkmusicfestival.com

We’ve probably used up the quota for the phrase “embarrassment of riches” in referring to Chicago’s choral and orchestral offerings this year. But with this weekend’s dramatically and superbly realized Verdi Requiem also serving as the season closer for the 2011 edition of the Grant Park Music Festival, we’ll do so one more time.

No city that already has had Riccardo Muti’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performing this masterwork in January 2009 would seem to be entitled to another presentation as good as Carlos Kalmar’s Friday night, to be repeated Saturday evening. (The 2009 dates marked Muti’s first concerts as the CSO’s official music director-designate, and the 2010 CSO Resound recording of this stunning event went on to win two Grammy Awards).

Like Muti, Kalmar sees this as a dramatic work, but as a younger man, it is perfectly reasonable that he at times gives greater emphasis to this theatrical side. Soloists enter and exit vocally as if in scenes. The two women especially give aria-like interpretations of their parts. This is never done for show. Kalmar also knows that this is a deep work, not a highwire act.

In that 40-minute stretch (of a 90-minute work) punctuated by thumping downpours of the “Dies irae,” Grant Park’s principal conductor and artistic director has just the right balance between the terrifying and the musical-lyrical and both orchestra and chorus (the latter prepared here by visitor William G. Spaulding), are with him every thunderous and tiptoeing step of the way. Orchestral brass deserves special kudos.

Some day we may learn that there is something that young American soprano and Lyric Opera of Chicago Ryan Center alum Amber Wagner cannot do. My guess is, though, that that day is a long way off in a career that is building ever up but also with great care. Wagner was a seemingly effortless marvel throughout the work. In the concluding “Libera me,” she took your breath away with her quiet and control in accompanied, a cappella, and city siren-punctuated solos.

Her colleagues in the vocal quartet were also young Americans. Although a bass-baritone, Lyric regular and Midwesterner Kyle Ketelsen was moving here in the bass role. Tenor Michael Fabiano was at his best in a tender “Hostias,” and mezzo Michaela Martens excelled in her several delicate duets with Wagner.

The seats and Great Lawn were packed with 10,000-plus people Friday, and this was, as Grant Park has had increasingly, a crowd of listeners. Very happy ones at that.

What a summer it’s been for the festival.  An embarrassment of riches.

 

Lyric Opera of Chicago season is on, after tentative AGMA contract agreement

Chicago Sun-Times, Wednesday, August 17, 2011 11:18AM CDT

Updated: August 17, 2011 11:22AM

CDT

Lyric Opera season is on, after tentative contract agreement

Opera company, AGMA committee plan one-year settlement

BY ANDREW PATNER

Threats of a management lockout or a strike by one of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s three major unions appeared to have been averted Wednesday morning when Lyric announced a tentative one-year contract agreement with the American Guild of Musical Artists, the AFL-CIO union representing principal singers, choristers, non-singing actors, and production staff at the Civic Opera House.

The agreement between Lyricand AGMA leaders is subject to final ratification by union members and the full Lyric board. Lyric spokeswoman Susan Mathieson Mayer said in a statement that Lyric expects this to occur by Aug. 26. In-person voting could begin at an AGMA meeting Wednesday evening in Chicago, but some ballots also must be sent out and returned by mail.

All scheduled performances this season are expected to proceed as planned, Mathieson Mayer said, including the September 10 free concert, “Stars of Lyric Opera at Millennium Park,” which could have been subject to picketing.

Details of the proposed contract are to be released after ratification. AGMA said last week that Lyric had threatened an August 22 lockout of its members.

Recent AGMA contracts have been for four-year periods, with the last one expiring April 30. The union had proposed a one-year status quo contract this time so that a future long-term agreement could be negotiated with incoming general director-designate Anthony Freud who takes up his position October 1, the same date as opening night of the 2011-2012 season.

AGMA’s New York-based national executive director Alan Gordon had issued a blistering press release last week accusing Lyric’s board of threatening “economic warfare” against his members. He also said that management had wanted a multi-year contract with numerous work week, salary, and benefit cuts, “take it or leave it.”

Speaking from New York, Gordon said, “After difficult negotiations, the AGMA committee determined that it would be prudent to make an investment in Lyric’s fiscal health and future by coming to this one-year agreement and has recommended its approval to our members.”

Chicago Sinfonietta: Mei-Ann Chen makes auspicious début as 2nd-ever music director

Chicago Sun-Times, Monday, August 15, 2011 6:38PM CDT

Chen a perfect fit for Sinfonietta

New music director says "Hello" at free Millennium Park concert

BY ANDREW PATNER

 

Steve Robinson g.m. of WFMT with Mei-Ann Chen,music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta | Photo courtesy of Robert Carl

In taking the reins of any group, it’s rarely easy to follow a founder.

You might think things would be even more difficult for a young Asian woman in becoming only the second music director in the 25-year history of the Chicago Sinfonietta, a group started in part to advance African Americans in classical music.

But Sunday evening at the Pritzker Pavilion, Taiwanese-born Mei-Ann Chen made the transition seem as natural as a beautiful summer day in Millennium Park.

Chen, 38, has led the Sin­fonietta before to strong positive responses, two years ago as a part of her audition, and last season as a part of the baton passing from founder Paul Freeman, whom Chen calls “my wonderful musical hero.” But this was the her first real chance to say hello to Chicago from the podium.

After seeing and hearing her talk to an audience, vamp, crack wise, and move about the stage to greet soloists with genuine enthusiasm, it’s clear that, along with her strong musical abilities, Chen has real people skills, non-threatening self-confidence and a serious understanding of the Sinfonietta’s mission as “a national model for inclusiveness and innovation.”

She seems to be just the conductor the orchestra needs, too. In a 90-minute free program before a focused and cheering audience, Chen led movements of works by Afro-British and African-American composers; a collaborative work with the Sones de México folk ensemble; a suite of excerpts from the 1959 Chinese But­terfly Lovers Violin Concerto, transcribed for the stringed erhu; the latter half of Dvořák's Ninth Symphony, From the New World; and in an unusual but effective spot as a program closer, Leonard Bernstein’s jaunty overture to his Candide.

In all of these works, from Samuel Coleride Taylor's 1899 Dance nègre through the rondo of the 1953 Sinfonietta No. 1 for strings by his namesake, the much-missed Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, to the Mexican, Chinese and Euro-American classical staples, Chen displayed both a crispness and a sense of shading and nuance that allowed these fine musicians to be heard at their best. That she showed keen understanding of these varied styles and true finesse in an outdoor venue new to her should mean great things for this new partnership.

The six members of Sones played seductively in Gustavo Leone’s orchestration of leader Victor Pichardo’s Encuentro: Poema Sinfonica, a suite of Yucatecan dances inspired by the early 16th century encounter of a Spanish sailor with Mayan culture. Betty Xiang has been Chicago’s erhu star for 20 years, and she again was in her East meets West element in Chen Gang and He Zhanhao’s concerto.

“I never planned to make a career so linked to a mission,” Chen told the audience. “I became a conductor actually to express myself, as I was a very shy child. But this group and its connections to the communities of Chicago is such an inspiration, my goal is to make this the mightiest and most impactful boutique orchestra in America.”

The cheering crowd at the Pritzker seemed convinced that she’ll do just that.

The Sinfonietta’s six-program 2011-2012 season begins Septtember 24 at its new suburban home, Wentz Concert Hall at North Central College in Naperville, and September 26 downtown at Orchestra Hall. Info: (312) 236-3681 or chicagosinfonietta.org.

Grant Park: Carlos Kalmar believes in Franz Schmidt's odd oratorio

Chicago Sun-Times, Saturday August 13, 2011 5:30PM CDT

A strange oratorio gets grand treatment by Grant Park Orchestra

Kalmar believes in Franz Schmidt's "Seven Seals"

 
Franz Schmidt (1874-1939)

BY ANDREW PATNER

 Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus

with Carlos Kalmar and vocal soloists

Repeats Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

Jay Pritzker Pavilion. Free. 

RECOMMENDED

You’ve had the experience. While traveling, or perhaps during a holiday time visit to a friend’s family, you’re offered a local, traditional specialty to eat, something of which the makers are very, very proud and that they assure you can be had nowhere else.

Often the dish is basically inedible. Almost always it is at the least an acquired taste.

Music has its equivalents of this phenomenon. German and Italian pop songs come to mind. In the classical world, perhaps the greatest, and certainly one of the largest, examples is the 110-minute oratorio from the New Testament Revelation of St. John the Divine, The Book with Seven Seals, by the Austrian Franz Schmidt.

Written from 1935-1937 and calling for large orchestra, male and female choruses, five to six vocal soloists including a heldentenor (a Wagnerian “heroic tenor), organ, and even a xylophone, the work was given its première in Vienna in 1938, just eight months before Schmidt died in 1939 at 64.

The temporal parallel to the rise of Nazism and the Anschluss with Austria, the subsequent Apocalypse the Germans rained down on Europe, and Schmidt’s naive flirtations with welcoming the Nazis when so many of his colleagues fled, shunned, or were persecuted by them have seen some ascribe to this work a depth and a taint neither of which is apropos.

This is, rather, a provincial work of great ambition with a number of effective passages by a second-tier composer. It is well worth hearing, however, both because it is being given a rare, effective, and even definitive performance by Carlos Kalmar and the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus and for how it shows the difference between a diligent and experienced composer such as Schmidt and the geniuses of his country whom he held himself up against, Bruckner and Mahler (to say nothing of his contemporary Arnold Schoenberg who left in the dust Schmidt’s attempts to extend late Romanticism into mid-century).

Kalmar this weekend joins the ranks of Austrian and adopted Austrian conductors who have tried to make a case for The Book, including Josef Krips, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Franz Welser-Möst, and Fabio Luisi. (Various members of the Estonian Järvi conducting family are Schmidt advocates, too.)

With the assistance of the Austrian Consul General of Chicago, Thomas Schnoell, and the Austrian cultural ministry, Grant Park was able to secure five Austrian singers who clearly share the Festival artistic director’s devotion to the piece. Christopher Bell’s superb chorus received the bulk of its precise preparation from William G. Spaulding, the American chorus master of Berlin’s Deutsche Oper. Toss in the remarkable setting (but cut Friday's over-boosted amplification) of the Pritzker Pavilion and Schmidt could not have been better served.

Hoping to offer as much of the strange often hallucinatory-seeming book as possible (in its German translation), Schmidt challenged himself to make musical sense out of a text of shifting dreamscapes. At times he succeeds as with passages of the narration given a Wagnerian lyricism by tenor Robert Künzli (that is when they do not go on forever as in the second of two major parts) or the briefer choral passages (those not mired in excessive fugues that sound like compositional exercises) and just about all the parts for the (here) four other soloists.

Bass Albert Pensendorfer has three passages as The Voice of the Lord all of which are wholly winning, and his duet with tenor Alexander Kaimbacher of two men still living after the Fourth Horseman has ridden through was moving, as was the duet of daughter and mother in the wake of the Third Horseman’s carnage with soprano Edith Lienbacher and mezzo Christa Ratzenböck.

But Schmidt, who early in his career wrote an opera based on Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, does not always have the dramatic insight or musical vision to make sense of the larger text or its format. Scenes of bloodshed are set to light and bouncy tunes. Sometimes it sounds as if the circus is coming to town, at others as if a Warner Bros. animated animal is tumbling down some stairs. But then he wins you over as when a touching male a cappella thanksgiving follows a heavy Hallelujah chorus and is followed in turn by John’s solitary farewell. David Schrader plays the organ solo introductions to the two parts eloquently.

It’s a jumble alright. And sometimes a mess. But it’s played and sung with passion, insight, and love. And it's doubtful that you’ll have another chance to hear it again. Certainly not at this level. Here: Take just one more bite.

 

Singers' union alleges lockout threat by Lyric Opera of Chicago: picket signs in Grant Park?

Chicago Sun-Times, Thursday August 11, 2011 7:44PM CDT

 Singers' union alleges lockout threat by Lyric

Says it could picket Grant Park free concert next month

BY ANDREW PATNER

Contract negotiations between Lyric Opera of Chicago and its three major unions normally take place in relative quiet until a season curtain is about to go up.

But with more than seven weeks until Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann is set to launch Lyric’s annual gala evening Octoer 1, the executive director of the national union that represents the company’s principal singers, chorus members, dancers, non-singing actors, and production staff claims Lyric has threatened its members with a lockout later this month.

The Thursday statement from Alan Gordon of the New York-based American Guild of Musical Artists, an AFL-CIO affiliate, also said “the fall season [is] in peril” and that “members should be prepared to picket” the free September 10 “Stars of Lyric Opera in Grant Park” concert.

AGMA’s last four-year concert expired April 30. Union members had authorized a strike in 2007 but a contract was signed shortly before opening night.

Lyric representatives had not previously seen the statement until informed of it by the Sun-Times. The company’s chief spokeswoman responded: “Lyric Opera is in contract talks with AGMA right now. It has always been the company’s policy not to negotiate in the press and so we have no further comment to make at this time.”

Gordon, a controversial figure currently locked in a bitter dispute with the increasingly shrinking New York City Opera, states that his union and the company differ on the number of work weeks, wage cuts, benefits, and health and safety provisions.

The union is also proposing a one-year status quo contract so that a longer agreement could be negotiated with incoming general director-designate Anthony Freud, who takes up his job on opening night, rather than retiring longtime chief William Mason, Gordon wrote.

He says Lyric has threatened an August 22 lockout if a contract is not signed, a claim that Lyric would not confirm.

“We would not be making these public statements if our members’ livelihood was not being threatened with a lockout,” Gordon said.

AGMA’s national president, James Odom, a tenor in the Lyric Chorus, said, “I’ve never seen this type of intransigence. We, too, prefer to keep negotiations at the table, but when faced with an overt threat of a lockout -- particularly just having gone through an actual lockout of our union with [the] Joffrey [Ballet] here -- we can’t just do nothing.”

Gordon also sent a letter to principal artists engaged for the upcoming season -- naming Renée Fleming (now also a member of Lyric’s management and a vice president of its board), Matthew Polenzani, Catherine Malfitano, and David Cangelosi -- saying, “If Lyric locks out AGMA members, you MAY NOT work for Lyric, you may not cross an AGMA picket line and you may not perform on opening night or thereafter until there is a negotiated collective- bargaining agreement in effect.”

Similar hardball tactics have enmeshed Gordon in a series of Federal labor complaints and counter-complaints with City Opera in New York, whose perilous financial and presenting situation is a far cry from Lyric’s strong fiscal health, ticket sales, and ownership of its own theatre.

The Lyric Opera Orchestra and its union, the Chicago Federation of Musicians, have a separate contract with the company that runs through the 2011-12 season.  Civic Opera House stagehands are members of IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and are also not involved in the current negotiations.

 

My (radio) guests tonight -- Steve James, Alex Kotlowitz, and Cobe Williams on their new film, "The Interrupters"

 
Ameena Matthews in a scene from The Interrupters (Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz, 2011)

Tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com, I talk with Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Kartemquin Films), Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here), and Cobe Williams (the CeaseFire project) about their new and already acclaimed documentary, The Interrupters. 

Made in Chicago, the film looks at the efforts of a remarkable group of those formerly in trouble with the law to work to bring the cycle of violence in the inner city to a halt.  The Interrupters starts a two-week run of 26 screenings this Friday August 12 downtown at the Gene Siskel Film Center of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  The filmmakers and those whose stories were filmed will be present at a number of the screenings.  Details at the Film Center link.  Some screenings are already sold out!  At least one Chicago commercial run, on the city's South Side, begins August 26 

The program will then be posted at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast, download, streaming indefinitely.

See you on the radio!

 

Lyric Chicago's Ryan Opera Center singers sparkle at Grant Park: comedies of Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini

My Saturday evening suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday August 5, 2011 Grant Park Music Festival opera scenes concert.

Ryan Center singers sparkle in Grant Park program

BY ANDREW PATNER August 6, 2011 6:22PM CDT

Grant Park Music Festival

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

▪7:30 p.m. Saturday

▪Harris Theater, 205 W. Randolph

▪Free

▪grantparkmusicfestival.com

Over the years, the giant Lyric Opera of Chicago and the small-budget but hugely attended Grant Park Music Festival have had an up-and-down relationship. Depending upon who was in charge of various constituent parts of the two groups, joint programs could be thrilling, deadly dull or non-existent.

The two motherships parted a few years ago, and Lyric now presents an annual “Stars of Lyric Opera” concert with its own orchestra at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion (this year set for September 10).

Friday night for a packed house at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park, though, it sure looked and sounded as if everyone has kissed, made up, and was showing off their best artistic abilities when ensemble members of Lyric’s professional training program, the Ryan Opera Center, joined with the Grant Park Orchestra and its principal conductor and artistic director Carlos Kalmar for a well-designed evening of seriously accomplished delightful comic opera acts from Mozart, Donizetti, and Rossini.

The program, which repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, even had Lyric’s public and customer relations star (and valued author and raconteur) Jack Zimmerman as narrator, offering hilarious and original deadpan verse to accompany the Mozart rarity The Impresario (Der Schauspieldirektor) and succinct but equally uproarious summaries for the two acts from the Italian opera entries.

Thirteen Ryan members, ranging from six first-year singers through five second-year returnees to two third-year “seniors,” offered remarkable balance and control in works heavy on trilling, patter, ensemble, and near-infinite finales.  The mistaken identities, comic asides and stage timing of Act 2 of Donizetti’s 1843 Don Pasquale and Rossini’s 1817 La Cenerentola (Cinderella) were catnip for these young singers -- each of whom made you want to hear her or him again and soon.  All will appear, usually in small roles, in Lyric productions in the 2011-12 season.  But more than once, a cover or understudy from the Center has gone on for the billed performer, and a star has been born at the Civic Opera House.

René Barbera, a third-year tenor from San Antonio, Texas, is already well on his way to wider attention; his natural high tenor brought him three top awards, best male singer, best zarzuela interpreter, and audience favorite in Placido Domingo’s annual Operalia competition, held last month in St. Petersburg, Russia.  A natural bel canto tenor, he made “Povero Ernesto!” his own to open the Donizetti.

Korean-born first-year baritone Joseph Lim, a 2011 Grand Finals winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, was given tiny character parts in the Mozart and Donizetti, but handled them as if a veteran.

First-year sopranos Kiri Deonarine of New Jersey and Emily Birsan of Neenah, Wisconsin, duked it out as the dueling divas of Mozart’s brief 1786 divertissement. First-year Detroit tenor Bernard Holcomb was suitably torn between them as the title character. When Zimmerman rhymed “catty” in introducing the work’s trio with “sugar daddy,” the audience awarded him with applause equal to that showered on the young singers.

Third-year baritone Paul La Rosa of New Jersey was back on his game as Dr. Ma­l­atesta in Don Pasquale, with first-year bass-baritone David Govertsen of Wheaton in the title role and second-year German soprano Jennifer Jakob as Norina showing good potential.

Second-year Louisville native bass-baritone Evan Boyer had a breakout evening as the class “A” jerk Don Magnifico in Rossini’s Cinderella tale, untwisting Italian tongue-twisters and looking as if he was having a good time doing so as well.  Birsan and first-year mezzo Cecilia Hall of North Carolina were in-the-mood evil stepsisters. 

Second-year tenor James Kryshak of New York State has already shown his stuff with the main company, and here was able to demonstrate his agility with the high Rossini line as Ramiro, the disguised prince. Second-year baritone Paul Scholten, of Muskegon, Michigan, was a sympathetic Dandini, Ramiro’s valet.  Govertsen also reappeared as the tutor Alidoro but this closing act belonged to second-year mezzo Emily Fons of Milwaukee as Angelina, the despised but large-hearted cinder-sweeping stepdaughter (Fons has a big role in the Lyric season-opening Tales of Hoffmann by Offenbach coming up).

Whether the sublimity of Mozart or the wicked decorations and staccato rhythms of Donizetti and Rossini, orchestral leadership is essential to repertoire that has to come off sounding much lighter and easier than it actually is. Kalmar, who has done more opera conducting in Europe than in the States, shifted gears naturally between styles and genres, and the Grant Park players were right with him -- and the singers -- every inch of the way.

My (radio) guest tonight -- Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki

 

Krzysztof Penderecki backstage at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.  Photo: Jean Lachat~Chicago Sun-Times 

Tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com, I talk with the esteemed Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, 77, in a conversation recorded last month when he was in Chicago to conduct his own  Concerto Grosso No. 1 for Three Cellos and Orchestra (2000) and Beethoven's Eroica Symphony at the Grant Park Music Festival.  I also play several of his most important works from the first 15 years (1959-1974) of his international composing career. 

The program will then be posted at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast, download, streaming indefinitely.

Here's my recent preview piece on his visit to Chicago and my review of the concert, both from the Chicago Sun-Times.

See you on the radio!