Andrew Patner: The View from Here

My (radio) guest tonight: Riccardo Muti is back and tells us about his busy summer and the current season

 
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, the latest in our ongoing series of conversations with Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti.  Recorded just yesterday afternoon, Sunday October 2, 2011, Il Maestro talks about his summer activities in Nairobi, Salzburg, and on tour with the CSO, his fall programs with the orchestra -- including his recent season-opening visit with the full orchestra to a South Side church and, later this week, a very unusual recreation of Gustav Mahler's last concert and public performance: a program in New York in 1911 of then-contemporary Italian composers -- and upcoming plans for various honors and tours as well as some comments on two recent important hires to the first desks of the CSO.

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

See you on the radio! 

Lyric Opera of Chicago: opener "Tales of Hoffmann" musically strong, but lacking investigation

Chicago Sun-Times, Monday October 3, 2011

Lyric's ‘Hoffmann’ strongly sung but production getting stale

Polenzani proves up to his big numbers

The poet Hoffmann (Matthew Polenzani) falls for Olympia (Anna Christy), a mechanical doll, in Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann by the Lyric Opera of Chicago. | Jean Lachat~Sun-Times

THE TALES OF HOFFMANN

◆ Through October 29

◆ Civic Opera House, 20 North Wacker Drive

◆ $34-$254

◆ (312) 332-2244; lyricopera.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Lyric Opera of Chicago has had only two previous leadership transitions in its 56 years, neither of them planned.

Co-founder Carol Fox was pushed out by the board in early 1981 and died a few months later, just 55.  Her beloved successor Ardis Krainik died essentially at the helm in early 1997, and was followed in the position by her own right hand, William Mason.

Mason’s voluntary retirement this year, after a lifetime with the company, has brought the first outside general director Lyric has known and, although he’s been working overtime since his appointment was announced in the spring, Anthony Freud officially took the company’s top job with Lyric’s season opening night and gala on Saturday.

Opera seasons must be planned years in advance and it’s hard to imagine that Freud, 53, devoted to innovation and with palpable passion for community building, would have launched his first season with Jacques Offenbach’s posthumous 1881 “opéra-fantastique” The Tales of Hoffmann, or at least with Nicolas Joel’s old-fashioned and largely recycled production.

Offenbach’s is a musical setting of Jules Barbier’s play imagining early 19th century German poet (and Nutcracker author) E.T.A. Hoffmann’s attempts to find love as he wrestles with art. It contains much beautiful French atmosphere and such beloved bits as the Venetian barcarolle for female duet and the aria of a mechanical doll who runs, literally, out of steam. And in the expert hands of French conductor Emmanuel Villaume, the 2 1/2-hour score (two intermissions add another hour to the evening) has rarely sounded as crisp, idiomatic, intelligent, and even exciting.

But to stage this dark and rarely performed comedy -- Lyric’s first since 1982 and only its third since 1976 -- without making a new investigation of the various completions, editions, and insertions to the score or asking a stage director to look afresh at the set of stories of empty loves (a doll, a dying and self-involved singer, a prostitute) leading to artistic insight is less than inspired.

That said, the singing is mostly quite strong here and the direction, by Joel assistant Stéphane Roche, of the individual performers is good. Wilmette native Matthew Polenzani is singing his first ever Hoffmann, and he has become a splendid purveyor of French style and idiom with technical skills that carry him through major numbers in the three acts, prologue, and epilogue. He does not yet have the tragic intensity of the late Alfredo Kraus, Lyric’s last Hoffmann, but the Spanish tenor was singing the role in his mid-50s, well into his career. It could come.

Lyric casts three young sopranos as the three love interests, each with her own act, a necessary choice in a world without a Joan Sutherland or a Beverly Sills who could take on all of them in an evening. Anna Christy has the mechanical French doll Olympia down physically and hilariously. She was near her vocal best, too, except when she ran into key trouble in her big coloratura moments. Alyson Cambridge seemed a bit underpowered in the unrewarding part of the Venetian courtesan Giulietta in Act 3. But Erin Wall, a Lyric Ryan training program alum who did portray all of the love interests in Santa Fe last year, was exquisite and convincing as the doomed German singer Antonia in the central Act 2.

Similarly, Milwaukee native and current second-year Ryan Center mezzo Emily Fons had the breakout performance as Hoffmann’s sidekick Nicklausse she had telegraphed could be happening with her “Lyric Stars at Millennium Park” appearance last month. As strong an actress as she is a singer, she also was that rare “trouser” performer who was convincing as a boy-man and without any unnecessary effects.

Lyric mainstay and international veteran James Morris is 64 now, and the bass-baritone shows some natural wear singing the dark side’s four representatives who torment Hoffmann and those who would please the poet. But he also gives a lesson in character presentation and vocal effect throughout the work. Character tenor David Cangelosi is in demand worldwide now but always seems at home when he returns to his Chicago launching pad. He adds the wacky science-fiction inventor Spalanzani, maker of Olympia, to his Lyric successes.

Mezzo Jamie Barton, another “Lyric Stars” comer, was a haunting offstage voice of Antonia’s mother.  I found Ryan grad tenor Ridell Rosel over the top too often in the four servant roles. Current Ryan singers Bernard Holcomb, Paul La Rosa, Joseph Lim, Evan Boyer, and Emily Birsan, and bass-baritone alum Christian Van Horn, nicely rounded out the large cast, and this season’s chorus master Michael Black did a fine job with his charges, especially the men.

Ezio Frigerio has reimagined his sets that go back to the 1970s (yes, this is “the production with a train on stage”), Franca Squarciapino designed now well-traveled period costumes, and Jason Brown re-created Vincio Cheli’s dark lighting. The deeper question of “Why?,” or as Hoffmann so often asks, “Pourquoi?” goes unanswered, though. Let’s hope that changes as Freud asks his own questions.

 

Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Riccardo Muti plays tribute to Liszt with a tribute

Chicago Sun-Times, Monday October 3, 2011

 
 Chicago Symphony Orchestra re-creates 1911 homage to Liszt

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

◆ 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

◆ Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan

◆ $29-$209

◆ (312) 294-3000; cso.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Europe and Britain can be anniversary-mad in their concert programming. The Bach Year, the Beethoven Year, the Wagner Year, the Britten Year: 50th, 100th, 150th, 200th commemorations of composers’ birthdays and that rather creepy German formulation “deathdays” can swallow up a season and actually diminish in-depth reflection, as has just happened with the double marking of 150 years since the birth of Gustav Mahler and a century since the great symphonist’s death.

Ever doing things his own way, and fond of bridging European and American traditions, Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti has come up with unusual and attractive solutions to note historic figures and events.  For the last week of his fall residency, beginning Thursday night, he will re-create Mahler’s last concert as a conductor -- with the New York Philharmonic, as it happened -- before his untimely death in 1911.

Before that, Muti has found a rather ingenious way to mark the 200th birthday of a composer who mattered much more to audiences a century and more ago.  For Franz Liszt, Muti is leading the very program that his CSO predecessor Frederick Stock gave with Chicago pianist and pedagogue Rudolph Ganz in 1911 at Orchestra Hall for the Hungarian composer-pianist’s centennial. In doing so, Muti, players and soloists took us into the whole idea of commemorations and of classical fandom.

Liszt (1811-1886) is often held up as an experimentalist and visionary against his friend and son-in-law Richard Wagner (1813-1883).  Stock and Muti honored the connection with Wagner’s bombastic and mercifully brief 1864 “Huldigungsmarsch” (Homage March), which Wagner himself never even orchestrated. But this underscored the concept of “Great Men” putting their stamp on each other.

The more serious works on the program were actually tied to another Liszt influence and contemporary, Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). In 1865 the two men presented Liszt’s first piano concerto, with the composer at the keyboard, and Liszt’s 1854-57 A Faust Symphony grew directly out of Berlioz’s friendship and Goethe-inspired music.

Muti invited his close Italian colleague and Liszt devotee Michele Campanella to make a rare U.S. appearance in the 20-minute piano concerto. Campanella, whose only previous CSO outing was 25 years ago in a real rarity, Ferrucio Busoni’s concerto, is something of a fanatic: he is playing only Liszt this year in his many international engagements. But he’s the sort of a fanatic who takes you somewhere near what the composer might have intended rather than into the extremes of personal or stylized passion.

Campanella had some very uncharacteristic wrong notes in some of the piece’s mighty runs, perhaps because he was debuting the new Yamaha concert grand with the very unmusical name of CFX, but otherwise he made this overplayed, too often manipulated piece attractive and brought out its unusual structure of continuous development.

In addition to his very legitimate musical pioneering, so much of Liszt is about taste, or the lack thereof. Some regard his 75-minute Faust work, with its admittedly ingenious idea of having each movement sketch a different character from the poem -- Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopholes -- as his great orchestral accomplishment. I find it bloated and repetitive, especially in contrast to Berlioz’s parallel creations.

The men of the CSO Chorus, drilled effectively by Duain Wolfe, and a slightly overreaching Eric Cutler in the brief but crucial tenor solo made a notable contribution.  And as he always does with Liszt, Muti came as close as anyone can to finding the work’s heart, inspiring brilliant wind solos, and making it sound like real music.