Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Chicago Sinfonietta with Mei-Ann Chen and Ann Hobson Pilot: double brava

Here is my Wednesday September 28 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Monday night's Chicago Sinfonietta concert at Orchestra Hall with Mei-Ann Chen, music director, and Ann Hobson Pilot, harp soloist.  You can see my recent Sun-Times feature on Mei-Ann Chen here.

 

Mei-Ann Chen, the new music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta, conducting a rehearsal at Wentz Concert Hall in Naperville. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times

Chicago Sun-Times, September 27, 2011 5:36PM

Mei-Ann Chen dazzles in Sinfonietta debut

New leader unites cultures in varied program

BY ANDREW PATNER

She talks the talk and she makes the music, too.

Mei-Ann Chen, the Tai­wan-born, American-trained conductor, has a winning way with words and in interviews and podium remarks expresses her passion for her art form and building programs and community.

Monday night, in her first Orchestra Hall concert and season opener as the new music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta, Chen, 38, showed that she is a vibrant and exacting musical leader as well.

Having sold out its Saturday program, the first at its new suburban venue, the 650-seat Wentz Concert Hall in Naperville, the Sinfonietta brought in more than 1,000 ticketholders to its historic downtown home Monday. A spirited opener of an arrangement by local composer Joe Clark of Jimmy VanHeusen and Sammy Cahn's “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)” for the Kennedy-King Marching Band and the Anima Singers of Greater Chicago, and an enthusiastic welcome from Chicago’s new culture commissioner, Michelle T. Boone, kicked off both a successful artistic event and a festive evening.

Twenty-first century multiculturalism is global and gender-conscious. That’s one of Chen’s mantras and her program of works by an overseas Chinese, a pioneering African American, the world’s leading film composer, an encore from her native Taiwan as well as Beethoven’s Fifth and a distinguished Black orchestra principal as guest soloist in two of the concert’s pieces fleshed out her claim.

The atmospheric “Saibei Dance” by An-Lun Huang and The Angel of Formosa by Tyzen Hsiao framed the concert and were given brisk readings that kept them from being too romantic. The mixed, largely African-American audience, with new contingents of Chinese and Taiwanese families, seemed transfixed by the East meets West exoticism.

Chen, who also heads the Memphis Symphony, has yet to make any instrumental appointments here. But more important, she took the lid off the talented ensemble she’s inherited and helped the players to deliver performances on a higher level than they’ve been able to show in recent years, before the retirement of the Sinfonietta’s legendary and pioneering founder, Paul Freeman. The Beethoven sounded as if this were an almost entirely new orchestra.

Harp soloist Ann Hobson Pilot brought history and virtuosity to the stage in William Grant Still’s Ennanga (1956) for harp, piano, and string orchestra, rich with Ugandan themes and inspiration, and in On Willows and Birches, the gentle yet intricate concerto written by film music titan and former Boston Pops music director John Williams in 2009 to mark Hobson Pilot’s retirement after 40 years from the Pops and the Boston Symphony Orchestra where she served as principal. She is a hypnotic advocate for an instrument usually on the sidelines of the symphony orchestra.

Throughout, Chen displayed the taut rhythmic drive and the crystal clarity that won her over with the group’s players and search committee during the last two years. Opportunities for additional interpretive depth will follow. The entire evening gave signs of great things to come for this rare talent and orchestra and their unique joint mission.

 

Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti: gala concert moves, Bronfman dazzles

Here is my Monday September 26 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Saturday night September 24, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra gala concert and Symphony Ball, with Riccardo Muti, music director, and Yefim Bronfman, piano.

 

Riccardo Muti leads the CSO on Friday at Orchestra Hall. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times

 Chicago Symphony Orchestra gala all business

Riccardo Muti’s remarks are missed at Verdi & Prokofiev concert, Bronfman dazzles

BY ANDREW PATNER

Overanalyzing opening-night gala concerts is not a particularly rewarding activity even as a parlor game for music critics.

Fortunately, the first three days of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra season with its music director Riccardo Muti have been such a whirlwind of complementary activity that Saturday night’s 90-minute “Symphony Ball” program can be seen in larger contexts.

Speeches -- and stage decorations -- were cut to a bare minimum at both Orchestra Hall and the subsequent Hilton Chicago dinner dance, and this was, for a change, unfortunate. As Muti demonstrated Thursday night at the wildly successful Apostolic Church of God South Side community concert and in impromptu remarks after the first work on Friday afternoon’s subscription season launch, he has a special way of connecting with audiences of every kind.

With a house and then a ballroom filled with monied donors and guests who might not otherwise be attending CSO concerts -- and with this season marking the 120th anniversary of the orchestra’s founding -- management missed an opportunity to reach out in this way to potential new attendees. Even popular CSO Association President Deborah Rutter was offstage.

Muti’s eclectic repertoire interests, though, are on full view this first month of the musical year: The next two weeks bring re-creations of historic concerts commemorating Franz Liszt and given by Gustav Mahler, and we’ve already heard film music by Muti mentor and teacher Nino Rota and a little-played early opera overture by his beloved Verdi.

Saturday offered a repeat of the 1845 Joan of Arc overture, even more crisp and varied in its sound in an actual concert hall acoustic, and only the second-ever CSO performance of the half-hour ballet, The Four Seasons, that Verdi wrote for the first, Paris, version of The Sicilian Vespers10 years later. (Another Italian, Riccardo Chailly, programmed it at Ravinia 16 summers ago.)

The ballet music is probably best known today, if known at all, from the ballet Jerome Robbins set to it and other Verdi excerpts on an all-star cast at New York City Ballet in 1979.  Unrelated to the opera which initially housed it, the ballet music is light but filled with rich melodies and characterful sections.  Muti has taken the work all over the world and it is in many ways a lesson in how he instructs both an orchestra and an audience in his view of proper, serious Verdi performance, along with some rather dramatic restored-to-health podium moves.

Under his critic's hat, Hector Berlioz noted early on that the "Spring" and "Summer" sections "give the virtuosi of the opera orchestra a chance to display their talents," and it was extremely fitting that both the brand-new CSO principal clarinet, Stephen Williamson, and his oboe counterpart, Eugene Izotov, are alumni of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, where they overlapped for three seasons. In all three programs this week, Williamson has sounded like a marvel, with an alluring tone and entrancing soft passage abilities. The long wait for the right successor to the retired Chicago mainstay Larry Combs appears to have been worth it.

The most serious work of the night was the central Prokofiev’s G minor Second Piano Concerto, and it is itself more of an exciting, if often aimless, virtuosic showcase. As soloist, the ever-phenomenal Yefim Bronfman showed how this often banged-about score can be played with both technical and musical finesse. The 2010 winner of Northwestern University's Jean Gimbel Lane piano performance prize, the Tashkent-born artist gives a recital of Brahms, Liszt, and more Prokofiev on Tuesday night at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall in Evanston.

Under the direction of the recently formed Women's Board, the crowd was a younger, hipper one than at galas past.  Co-chairs Annette Dezelan and Lisa Walker Rudnick announced at the dinner that some $1 million dollars had been raised for operations, education, and community programs.

Chicago's maestra: talking with Mei-Ann Chen, new music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta

Here is my Friday September 23 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com conversation with Mei-Ann Chen, new music director -- and only the second ever -- of the Chicago Sinfonietta.  Information on the Sinfonietta's season-opening concerts with Chen in Naperville and downtown Chicago is below.  If you've never been to a Sinfonietta concert these should be excellent introductions.

 You can see Rich Hein's wonderful Sun-Times photo gallery of Chen in action here.

  

 

 

Mei-Ann Chen, the new music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta, conducting a rehearsal at Wentz Concert Hall in Naperville. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times

Chicago Sun-Times, Friday September 23, 2011

Breaking Barriers: Chicago Sinfonietta’s Mei-Ann Chen revels in her ‘great good fortune’

BY ANDREW PATNER

 

Chicago Sinfonietta

◆ 8 p.m. Saturday, Wentz Concert Hall, 71 East Chicago Avenue, Naperville

◆ 7:30 p.m. Monday, Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago

◆ Wentz, $35-$45; Downtown, $26-$50

◆ chicagosinfonietta.org, (866)-811-4111

 

It’s hard to squeeze in a brief talk with the Chicago Sinfonietta’s new music director Mei-Ann Chen.

It’s not because she’s so busy with a whirlwind schedule of rehearsals, planning sessions, studying scores, and meeting not only with musicians and composers but also cultural and community leaders throughout the city.

Rather it’s because she has so much to say -- and all of it is interesting.

There’s the great-grandfather, a master noodle maker from Fujian province in southeast China, who took his craft to Taiwan where Chen was later born and spent her childhood.

There’s her decision at the age of 10 to become a conductor when there was no possibility for a young Taiwanese girl to study or find a role model in the field.

Or her last-minute audition at age 16, in a closed basement hotel bar in Taipei, that got her invited to a high school program affiliated with the New England Conservatory in Boston.

Or the times when she was so eager to make a bigger sound than she could on the violin and piano, her original instruments, that she blew into the metal on her music stand as if it were a trumpet mouthpiece.

When you experience what is almost a torrent of enthusiasm coming from Chen, who is also music director of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, former music director of the Portland (Ore.) Youth Philharmonic, and was an assistant conductor of the Atlanta, Baltimore, and Oregon orchestras, you have a sense of why she knocked out the search committee when the Sinfonietta was looking for a successor to the only artistic chief it had ever had in its 24 years, founder Paul Freeman.

And then there’s the obvious question: How did she do it?  She has had to break through many significant barriers. “After I received my doctorate from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I received more rejection letters from orchestras than the number of notes I had ever actually conducted professionally,” she often recalls. And now she’s succeeding a legendary African-American conductor and music scholar to lead an institution with a strong focus on Black and Latino musicians, composers, and audience members.

“Of course these are real questions,” Chen, 38, said in a conversation Wednesday in the Sinfonietta’s downtown offices. “And they have many answers. One is that in the 21st century, multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusion are increasingly global matters, and matters of gender as well as background.

“But another is that I can hardly begin to describe the great good fortune -- maybe Beethoven would even say fate -- that so much of my career has already been in working with African-American communities and musicians and organizations with strong interests in these communities. For my orchestra in Memphis, this is key. The history and contributions of African-Americans in Memphis and Chicago is enormous.  And also in Atlanta -- the city that so shaped Martin Luther King -- Philadelphia, and Baltimore.  These opportunities are a large part of what attracted me to the Sinfonietta, along with the significant Hispanic communities here, and of course, the wonderful musicians in the orchestra. Paul Freeman, my generous predecessor and a mentor, has given us an unbelievable blueprint. And if you look at our first season of programming together, you will see that our plans in these areas are deep and ongoing ones.”

In fact, it’s rather astonishing how many areas come together in the group’s first concerts, kicking off Saturday at the Sinfonietta’s new home for its suburban performances, the state-of-the-art Wentz Concert Hall at North Central College in Naperville, and Monday at its longtime Chicago base, Orchestra Hall.

Chen notes with pride that the Sinfonietta will have “the tremendous honor of sharing the stage” with Ann Hobson Pilot (left), the first African-American woman to hold a prin­cipal position in a major American orchestra, who recently retired as principal harp from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops after 40 years.

“And she will bring us the Chicago premieres of the concerto written for her to mark her retirement by none other than John Williams,” Chen said. “And she will be playing a 1956 work by William Grant Still as well, really the founder of the African-American classical composition tradition.

“I also look forward to sharing with audiences again a work by a Chinese composer resident in the U.S., An-Lun Huang, which was introduced to me by a non-Asian American and has become a kind of signature work for me, the Saibei Dance. ”

Then, what else when we speak of fate? Beethoven knocking at the door with his Fifth Symphony, “the work that made me want to be a conductor when I was just a little girl, and that is loved by first-time concertgoers and the lifetime veterans.”

New works and commissions from American composers, as well as classics, are important to Chen, as is working with other minority or unconventional artists. Her collaborators this season also include the Harlem String Quartet, Chicago composer-flutist Nicole Mitchell, and Adler Planetarium astronomer-video artist Jose Francisco Salgado, a native of Puerto Rico. Mexican Hector Guzman and African-Americans Harvey Felder and Jeri Lynne Johnson are guest conductors this season.

“I’m so excited,” Chen said. “And on August 14, I was so touched to be conducting the Sinfonietta on the stage at Millennium Park at our free ‘Hello, Chicago’ concert before several thousand people.”

She's been so busy, she hasn’t found a place to live of her own yet. “But I will! I can hardly wait to call Chicago home.”

 

Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti open fall season -- South Side!

Here is my Saturday September 24 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday September 22, 2011 season-opening concert of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with music director Riccardo Muti and principal flute Mathieu Dufour at Apostolic Church of God on Chicago's South Side, as well as of a part of Friday afternoon September 23's first subscription concert downtown.  The three main works of these programs are repeated Tuesday September 27 at Orchestra Hall at 7:30 p.m.

You can see Scott Stewart's wonderful Sun-Times photo gallery of the Thursday night event here.

 

Riccardo Muti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a free concert at the Apostolic Church of God Thursday evening. -- Scott Stewart~Sun-Times

Chicago Sun-Times, Friday September 23, 2011 6:04 PM CDT

CSO leader Riccardo Muti shares his ‘soul’ at South Side concert

By ANDREW PATNER  

Verdi, Ibert, and Tchaikovsky works repeat Tuesday September 27 at 7:30 p.m.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Riccardo Muti’s track record on keeping promises to Chicago has been strong. He starts his second year as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra -- much of his first year having been lost to now-resolved health matters -- with an impressive checklist of accomplishments.

After saying that he would like to bring the orchestra to area prisons, he and CSO musicians and singers are well into their second year of work with incarcerated girls at the state youth facility in Warrenville.  A first recording with the CSO scored two Grammys.  A just completed six-city, 10-concert European tour was a critical and audience hit.

And Thursday night Muti opened the CSO’s 2011-2012 season not with a gala (that comes Saturday night), a subscription concert (that came Friday afternoon), or even at Millennium Park, scene of last year’s free concert welcoming the Italian conductor.

Rather, the full orchestra rode down to the South Side, where it took to specially constructed risers in the massive sanctuary of the Apostolic Church of God at 63rd and Dorchester in Woodlawn. More than 5,000 people -- from the church, the neighborhood, neighboring Hyde Park, and elsewhere -- snapped up the free seats and filled both the main worship space and a spillover chapel that accommodated some 1,500 who watched via the church’s own closed-circuit television service.

Isabelle Brazier, whose late husband, Bishop Arthur Brazier, built the landmark congregation over decades, extended an invitation to CSO Association President Deborah Rutter recently when Mrs. Brazier realized that the CSO was looking for a site for this fall’s community performance. The Braziers had hosted the Civic Orchestra, the CSO’s professional training wing, in three historic appearances from 2003 to 2005, and before that, the CSO had helped to launch a successful, ongoing classical orchestra program for youth at the church.

In keeping with these connections, there was no pandering here. The program was vintage Muti in its unusual array of European works close to his heart and a concerto with one of the orchestra’s main principals as soloist. In introductory remarks to the members of this historic African-American congregation, Muti said that he and his colleagues had “come to share their feelings, their love, and their friendship.” The heart, he concluded, to shouts of “Yes!” and “Amen!,” “has only one color.  And that is the color of the soul.”

The overture to Verdi’s early (1845) operatic setting of the story of Joan of Arc is no repertoire staple; the CSO just turned 120 and this was its first encounter with the piece. But it already contains the elements that would propel the composer’s later great overtures to classic status, and no one plays Verdi like Muti does.

Mathieu Dufour last presented Jacques Ibert’s 1932-33 flute concerto six years ago as a farewell to Daniel Barenboim. This is another case of a performer at the top of the world pack lifting a lesser work to its greatest possible heights. No technical, musical, or interpretive task is beyond Dufour’s ability, and he gave a breathtaking and very personal performance of his French compatriot’s banal 20 minutes of perfume and puffery.

Muti’s Tchaikovsky also has a very direct personal communication. It would be much easier to play the E minor Fifth Symphony as audiences are used to hearing it, and just let the big themes carry the piece while perhaps throwing in some tempo manipulations for effect. But Muti studies Tchaikovsky and takes him as seriously as Pierre Boulez does Schoenberg; the results are similarly revelatory. Demonstrating the complexity in Tchaikovsky makes his works more beautiful not less.

This was not only one of the largest audiences for a CSO concert, but also one of the most attentive and focused. Even in the dry acoustics of this modern, spare, Pentecostal worship space, the sense of communication between players, conductor, and listeners was palpable. Muti and his musicians seemed deeply touched by the many ovations from the multi-racial and truly all-ages audience. In one last set of remarks after several bows by the group, Muti promised to bring the orchestra back to Apostolic but also reminded community members, to hearty laughter, that communication “goes in two directions” and that “we have a quite wonderful concert hall downtown.”

Friday afternoon, back downtown at Orchestra Hall, Muti repeated the Ibert and Tchaikovsky, but instead of the Verdi overture, offered a major suite of music by his teacher and mentor, Nino Rota, written for the classic 1963 Luchino Visconti film The Leopard. Our views of movie music have changed in recent years and allowed us to hear the quite serious underpinning of many popular scores and appreciate the craftsmanship and aspirations of such individual composers as Rota.  Just as he has done in reminding us how important Italian opera composers truly are, so Muti checks another item off his rich list of intentions by giving us Rota with great respect.

 

Lyric Opera of Chicago: stars under the moon in substantial free Millennium Park concert

 

Emily Fons (left) sings with Renée Fleming at Saturday’s Millennium Park concert. | DAN REST~LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO

Chicago Sun-Times, Sunday September 11, 2011 7:32 PM CDT

Lyric’s tantalizing taste

Opera stars and newcomers under the moon at Millennium Park

Concert heralds a promising season

BY ANDREW PATNER

Saturday night’s edition of the now annual “Stars of Lyric Opera at Millennium Park” concert at the Pritzker Pavilion had a lot to pull together and did so with great success and, dare we say it, passion.

Chicago’s grand opera company was unrolling its new marketing campaign, “Long Live Passion,” complete with banners, tote bags, and the troupe’s name in lights atop at least one Michigan Avenue skyscraper. The free concert serves as a preview of a new season and its artists, and jam-packed seating and Great Lawn areas apparently held 16,000 folk including hundreds of standees along the concrete pathways.

The waxing moon, to hit full, harvest status Monday, illuminated the focused crowd also witnessing new general director-designate Anthony Freud’s first public role; he was poised, polished, and welcoming in his remarks. Young singers from Lyric’s Ryan Center program took the stage along with internationally known performers and some new, lesser-known guests who showed impressive mettle.

The event also served as a citywide commemoration of the September11 anniversary, and the clear prominence of superstar soprano Renée Fleming in her new role as Lyric’s creative consultant was harnessed for that function as well. Fleming, who reminded the crowd that she had been in Chicago 10 years ago to the day (rehearsing the new production of Verdi’s Otello that opened the 2001 Lyric season), sang a well-modulated (but kitschily orchestrated) “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel as a tribute and as musical launch to the two-hour program.

Fleming was back for a rather over-milked “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi but was much more genuinely appealing in the late sub of the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s season-opening (October 1) Tales of Hoffmann with superb mezzo Emily Fons (her nuanced performance of Nicklausse’s romance from the Offenbach was an evening highlight).  And Fleming closed the program with a not over-giddy “Jewel Song” from Gounod’s Faust.

Fons and recent multiple-competition winner tenor RenéBarbera -- wholly assured both in his signature high C’s-parading “Ah, mes amis” from Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment and his side of the duet from the same composer’s Lucia di Lammermoor -- were the two current Ryan Center reps.  

Soprano Susanna Phillips, an alum who will take the title role in Lucia here this fall, delivered a jolly “Je veux vivre” from Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet.Another Ryan alum, tenor Matthew Polenzani (prepping now for his own title turn in Hoffmann), though down with a cold, delivered a stirring final act aria from Massenet’s Werther.

Hoffmann's French conductor Emmanuel Villaume showed his special ability to shift gears rapidly from style to style with the fine Lyric Orchestra. 

At 64, bass-baritone James Morris brings a long history to the stage, even if understandably past his vocal prime, and his authority showed in excerpts from Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani and, with young Croatian baritone Ljubomir Puškarić, debuting in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov this fall, Bellini's I Puritani. 

 

On the up and coming side, mezzo Jamie Barton, debuting here this season, was a rich-voiced showstopper, both in "O mon Fernand" from Donizetti's La favorite and in the added duet from Delibes's Lakmé with dependable returning soprano Anna Christy.

Remembering September 11 . . . and September 10: my WFMT radio commentary



 

 

A few words (about seven minutes) on two days, 10 years ago.  My WFMT (audio) commentary is here.

 

 

 

My (radio) guest tonight: Sargon is back! As are the editors of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, in part 2 of 2

 
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 second 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 One aired last week, Monday August 29, and is also available online, anytime.

See you on the radio!