Andrew Patner: The View from Here

My (radio) guests tonight: Boris Papandopulo('s music) and Nicholas Phillips (piano)

1987 portrait by Paul Struck, courtesy Mrs. Zdenka Papandopulo

Tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CST on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago, and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com, we'll listen to several pieces from a new Albany Records CD recording of piano music of Croatian composer and conductor Boris Papandopulo (1906-1991) performed by Wisconsin-based pianist Nicholas Phillips.  

A leading figure in 20th century music in Croatia and the former Yugoslavia, Papandopulo was the son of a Greek nobleman and the Croatian soprano Maja Strozzi (1881-1962) for whom, as Maja de Strozzi-Pečić, Stravinsky said he wrote his Four Russian Songs of 1918-19. (Mme. Strozzi-Pečić is mentioned and praised by Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus.) The leader of important Croatian choral groups from the 1920s on, Papandopulo was the creator of many stage works and the director of the opera in many cities in his region and even a regular guest conductor in Cairo. His solo piano output is small but interesting and even pleasing in its combination of regional sounds and rhythms with wider 20th century tendencies.

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: young women step up in blissful 'Ariadne auf Naxos'

Amber Wagner (as Ariadne) and Brandon Jovanovich (as Bacchus) perform in the dress rehearsal of Ariadne auf Naxos at the Lyric Opera of Chicago Wednesday. | John J. Kim~Sun-Times

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com,

 Sunday November 20, 2011 4:46PM CST

Lyric’s ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’ achieves pure bliss

Wagner, Coote, Christy all rise 

'Ariadne auf Naxos'

Lyric Opera of Chicago

Through December 11

Civic Opera House, 20 North Wacker Drive

(312) 332-2244, lyricopera.org.

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It’s an opera about unexpected things clicking where in a successful production you shouldn’t hear a single click.  It’s a meshing of comedy and tragedy, onstage and backstage, love and laughter, theatre and life, and even life and its power over death.  It’s one of the most clever stageworks ever devised, and in the right hands and with the right voices, it can be one of the most moving.

The title can be confusing.  Ariadne auf Naxos, which opened Saturday night at the Civic Opera House, is the title of the “serious” opera contained in the story of a set of after-dinner entertainments given a bizarre scheduling shuffle and of the over-all work by Richard Strauss and his great librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The creative pair’s original 1912 production was even more difficult to stage and much longer, containing as it did an entire Molière play.

But by 1916, the two achieved the perfect version we know today.  A 40-minute Prologue holds the antic preparations at the home of “the richest man in Vienna” of a headstrong young composer’s new opera on mythological themes and the running about of a commedia dell’arte troupe dismissive of “high art.”  Members of both performing camps get a shock from their host when they’re informed that rather than rushing through their disparate offerings sequentially, they’re to present them at the same time so as not to run into a scheduled fireworks display. After an intermission, approximating the dinner of the rich man’s guests, the 80-minute operatic act itself shows the results of this enforced blending.

You might expect the next sentence to read “Merriment and hijinks ensure.” But Hofmannsthal’s complex conception and Strauss’s brilliant execution, while filled with joy and comedy at many levels, are much deeper than that; by the time the seriousness of the comedy and the joy of the tragedians is made clear, the opera, the story, and in this production, the staging are freed from any frame and float into a combination of emotional and music bliss and philosophical knowing.

The return of John Cox’s 1998 production to Lyric Opera is most welcome, for Cox, designer Robert Perdziola, and lighting artist Duane Schuler fully understand every aspect of the concept, libretto, and music; clearly, Cox’s associate director Bruno Ravella had coached this new cast to do the same.

Though this revival was planned well before his arrival in Chicago, Lyric’s new general director Anthony Freud’s worthy fingerprints were all about, too, from the ousting of the announced Ariadne/Prima Donna, the now problematic soprano Deborah Voigt, and her replacement with the remarkable rising star and Ryan Center alum Amber Wagner, to the breath-of-fresh-air supertitles by Colin Ure (Freud’s partner), to a more clearly (and honestly) marked cast list in the program.

Music director Sir Andrew Davis has long been what his fellow Britons call “a Strauss man” and his expertise and natural breathing with this lush score made him a superb guide for Strauss’s streamlined “court orchestra” of 37 players and for the very fine young cast.  Fully convincing musically and dramatically, English mezzo Alice Coote made you wish The Composer’s role was not confined to the Prologue. Theatrically, soprano Anna Christy’s Zerbinetta, the insightful comedienne who at first seems only a tart, was a perfect creation, and her connection to the score of her great aria was absolutely direct.  As Bacchus, the tenor-god who rescues the forlorn Ariadne from her deserted island stranding, Brandon Jovanovich had great physical and intelligent presence. Having seen some top-drawer work from him at Lyric and as Siegmund in San Francisco Opera’s “Ring,” I’d guess that he was just having momentary difficulties opening night with the closing sections of a notoriously hard and high role.

The large supporting cast moved gracefully in their vocal and stage positions.  The trio of nymphs, soprano Kiri Deonarine (Echo), mezzo Jamie Barton (Dryad), and soprano Nili Riemer (Naiad), were particularly effective. Veteran German baritone Eike Wilm Schulte’s Music Master, tenor Edward Mout’s Dancing Master, and Ryan Center star tenor René Barbera’s Brighella stood out among the many character roles.

But Strauss kept his slightly misleading title in part because this opera was, for him really about Ariadne, as character, spirit, woman, and soprano -- the most important things in his world.  And Wagner’s Chicago début in this role was one for hailing.  The music just poured naturally from her at all times, whether in mournful or soaring sections.  Like her character at opera’s end, she is going places, and currently they appear to have no limit.

CSO 'Beyond the Score': re-visit to Strauss's 'Heldenleben' itself heroic; Bychkov shows elegant hand

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday November 18, 2011 8:00PM CST

In Depth: The CSO, Semyon Bychkov reveal nuances of Strauss’s iconic tone poem

'Beyond the Score': 'Ein Heldenleben'

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

8 p.m. Saturday (with Poulenc and Ravel works, without ‘Beyond the Score’)

3 p.m. Sunday

Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago

(312) 294-3000, cso.org

BY ANDREW PATNER 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Exactly six years ago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra launched its “Beyond the Score” series, a multimedia live educational presentation that puts major concert works in context. Analytical and entertaining presentations are followed by the piece being performed again without commentary but with an additionally enlightened and attentive audience.

“Beyond the Score” has taken off even beyond the high hopes of its creators, CSO artistic vice president Martha Gilmer, who serves as executive producer, and creative director Gerard McBurney, the British musicologist, composer, and theatre veteran.  Not only is each season’s three-program series now presented on two dates, Friday as well as Sunday afternoons, but orchestras nationwide also are hiring McBurney, his scripts, and his heavily researched and time-synched projections for their own presentations, netting the CSO additional income in the process.

This season’s “Beyond the Score” lineup kicked off Friday with a revisit to the very first piece that the series examined, Richard Strauss’s autobiographical 1898 tone poem Ein Heldenleben (“A Hero’s Life”), which received its U.S. première by the CSO here in 1900.  On the podium, guest conductor Semyon Bychkov (as he also is for the regular CSO subscription concerts this week). This is no retread but a total reimagining, with the first half’s presentation drawing on the lessons of six seasons of experimentation and improvement.

Working with Chicago actors Stef Tovar (made up as a dead ringer for Strauss at the turn of the last century) and David Darlow, Chicago Opera Theater Young Artist program alum soprano Leila Bowie, and stalwart Chicago pianist Elizabeth Buccheri, McBurney goes well beyond the illustration of the still young composer’s very healthy ego (Strauss himself is the “Hero” of the work’s title and story) to demonstrate the cultural and political swirl that drove the German-speaking parts of Europe at that time and later consumed them.

Through McBurney’s narration, remarkable projections gathered by Alison McBurney and Hannah Whitley, and keen performances by Tovar and Darlow, the program explores the explosion of commercial department stores, the development of personal cameras by Eastman Kodak, the Continental appetite for caricature, Nietzsche’s revolution in person-centered philosophy, Freud’s self-described discoveries in psychology and of the unconscious (like the merchandising moguls, seeking to determine "What does a woman want?"), and Bismarck’s view of warfare as a natural state of national expression and diplomacy. Musical examples and sources, from Strauss’ many previous tone poems (a programmatic form he developed, and once seen as avant-garde) to songs written about and for his soprano wife, Pauline, are clear, never overreaching, and integrated seamlessly into the hourlong program.

Having the CSO on hand and onstage to provide snippets, excerpts, and themes is sort of like having a kid who brings his dad with him to school for a show-and-tell on “What My Parents Do” when the kid’s dad is Steve Jobs.  Versed in the format and largely big fans of the series, the CSO players are attentive and enthusiastic in their many demonstrations.  After intermission, Bychkov (left) led a performance of the 50-minute work itself so clear, elegant, and unshowy that it seemed more to confirm all that had been discussed previously than to illustrate it.

Concertmaster Robert Chen gave Pauline Strauss eloquent representation in his many solos.  Sitting in the section’s first chair, associate principal horn Daniel Gingrich upheld the great CSO Strauss tradition.  English horn Scott Hostetler’s limpid playing was matched by his other wind colleagues.

The “Beyond the Score” series returns later this season when CSO conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez takes up Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in February and music director Riccardo Muti himself makes his “BTS” debut in June with nothing less than Beethoven’s Fifth.

Semyon Bychkov photo by Sheila Rock

Updated: Fabio Luisi stays chill between new MET conductor post and Vienna Symphony tour, picks up more Levine dates

UPDATE: Formatting fixed, I hope.  And on Friday afternoon, in a further sign of the problematic nature of James Levine's ability to continue in a leadership role at the Metropolitan Opera, the MET announced that Fabio Luisi would now also take over Levine's January and February 2012 New York dates, including the new Goetterdaemmerung (January 27 to February 11, which is also an HD transmission date) and the MET Orchestra Carnegie Hall concert with soprano Renee Fleming January 15.

Chicago Sun-Times, Sunday November 6, 2011 and suntimes.com Thursday November 3, 2011 5:48PM CDT

 

Fabio Luisi will lead the Vienna Symphony

at the Harris Theater on Monday. | Barbara Luisi

Conductor Fabio Luisi a good bet for now at the Met

A rising sleeper brings his Vienna orchestra to Chicago

BY ANDREW PATNER

VIENNA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA and eroica trio

 CONDUCTED BY FABIO LUISI

When: 7:30 p.m. Monday

Where: Harris Theater, 205 East Randolph Drive

Tickets: $20-$45

Info: (312) 334-7777; harristheaterchicago.org

 

The days when opera conductors made front-page news would seem to have been long supplanted by today’s pop-saturated sense of arts and culture.

That it’s a rather buttoned-down, bookish and bespectacled, pug-owning Northern Italian father of three, relatively unknown until recently in many major cities, who has been bucking the tendency to sideline reporting on the classical world only makes Fabio Luisi’s current run of publicity all the more unexpected.

Over the last year, Luisi, 52, found himself increasingly called on by New York’s Metropolitan Opera to step in — often with very short notice — for the company’s longtime music director James Levine as the former artistic leader of the Ravinia Festival found himself plagued by one physical ailment or accident after another.

The Genoa-born and -trained musician probably was as surprised as anyone when two months ago the Met’s general director, Peter Gelb, asked him to take the principal conductor post from Levine, who remains, technically at least, music director there. Certainly some of the other opera houses and concert halls where Luisi in turn had to cancel to conduct at the Met were caught off guard. A series of accusations, counter-comments and substitution chain reactions followed.

Prior to these prominent dates, Luisi, who brings his Vienna Symphony to the Harris Theater in Millennium Park on Monday, had led a number of ensembles and opera houses that are not exactly household names, including the Graz Symphony and the Niederoesterreicher Tonkuenstler-Orchester (both in Austria), the Middle German Radio Symphony in Leipzig, Switzerland’s Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and, with controversies of his own, both the opera and the orchestra in Dresden.

But Luisi developed a reputation for working quickly, having a wide-ranging repertoire and bringing a lyrical, Italianate touch even to heavy Austro-German repertoire. Whether Gelb and his board eventually will offer him the top job in New York, he clearly can work with the many demands of the giant organization and its overstuffed schedule.

Taking up works from Alban Berg’s “Lulu” to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” as well as “Siegfried” from Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at Lincoln Center “has been a very good experience,” Luisi said by phone from his Met dressing room last week. To move back and forth between Mozart and Wagner is a reminder “that we can play Wagner’s music as music. You can take all of this ‘pan-Germanic’ pathos out of these operas, drop this very slow and heavy pace and find the music there, which is Wagner’s great gift.”

Continuing with the sort of language that was a part of his trouble in Dresden, Luisi, who speaks fluent German (which he admits is thus far much better than his rather charming English), says “you can bring out the intensity in this music, but also its flow.

“I think that by making the orchestra and the audience listen to some of the subtleties that are so much a part of Wagner, I can help actually push things forward and we can free ourselves from this bad and wrong tradition, this myth of the superior sound of the German orchestras. It’s not true and it’s not real,” Luisi said. “These so-called traditions come only from the 1920s and ’30s. These great composers came from the 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries!”

Luisi sees musical globalization as having both good and bad sides. Certainly his career has benefitted from air travel, increasing standards of training around the world and professional mobility. But he resists the idea that a uniform sound of orchestral music is a necessary outcome of the iPod world.

“The only important fact that we actually have is the score,” Luisi said. “The musical score itself. If we are now freeing ourselves of false ‘traditions,’ these new times let us really go back to the scores with study and work and a developed intuition.”

Luisi is in his eighth season of a 10-year run with the Vienna Symphony, usually in the shadow of the historic Vienna Philharmonic, “but we are the orchestra that is devoted to the symphonic repertoire” while the Philharmonic must focus on its opera commitments. Playing more traditional repertoire at Vienna’s fabled Musikverein and more unusual and contemporary fare at its Konzerthaus series a few blocks away, “there is just no work that they do not know or are not eager to learn. It has been a wonderful relationship.”

At the Harris, the Viennese will play works from the Musikverein side of their identity: the Brahms Second Symphony and Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with the interesting “casting” of the all-female Eroica Trio in the solo parts. Luisi is looking forward to working with the three guest musicians, but he knows that more questions are waiting for him as he balances his new work in New York with his upcoming role as musical chief at the Zurich Opera.

“All of these things — press inquiries and claims, contract negotiations, managements — are a part of my job, and these are necessary and good experiences. But I know that no one has made the lengths of commitment for each year that I am making in both New York and Zurich. And anyone who wants to consult the calendar will see that there is no overlapping. These are very good schedules.”