Andrew Patner: The View from Here

CSO signs composers Bates and Clyne for two more years

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com Tuesday January 31, 2011 2:34AM CST

 

CSO composers Bates and Clyne signed for two more years

BY ANDREW PATNER

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s two popular Mead composers in residence Mason Bates, 35, and Anna Clyne, 31, have had their contracts extended for two years through the 2013-14 concert season.  

In a statement, CSO music director Riccardo Muti said, “They each have a unique voice. I am very proud that we have brought such fine young composers to Chicago and am happy that they will stay with us for two additional years.”

Since taking over curating duties last season for the CSO’s new music series MusicNOW, Bates and Clyne have driven a decided uptick in attendance at these concerts.  

The Bay Area-based Bates has established connections with area DJs and clubs, and even persuaded Muti to spend an electronica evening at a late night event he produced here. 

Clyne, a Briton who now lives in Chicago, has been heavily involved in CSO youth education projects including working alongside Muti with incarcerated young women at the Illinois Youth Center in suburban Warrenville.

Both composers have Muti-commissioned world premières on the CSO’s February programs. Bates recorded sounds at Fermilab in Batavia for Alternative Energy to be heard on this week’s subscription concerts beginning Thursday.  Clyne’s Night Ferry, inspired by the life of Schubert, is on the programs beginning February 9.  

Both works are to be played by Muti and the CSO  on the orchestra’s upcoming California tour.

CSO and Muti: 'Carmina Burana,' aber warum? Schubert dazzles, Smirnov fizzles

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday January 27, 2012 3:50PM CST

Carl Orff and Riccardo Muti, at rehearsals of Carmina Burana at the Berlin Philharmonie, June 1980

Riccardo Muti returns for a perplexing program with the CSO

The problematic 'Carmina' outclassed by Schubert; Russian overture fizzles

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

♦8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

♦Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue

♦Tickets, $19-$199.  Limited availability.

♦(312) 294-3000; cso.org

BY ANDREW PATNER 

RECOMMENDED

Riccardo Muti’s return to the podium Thursday night with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a three-week residency and a California tour was cause for both excitement and bewilderment. The first downtown CSO performance in 17 years of Carl Orff’s popular and populist Carmina Burana assured a sold-out house and an attentive audience. A world première of a new overture by an ex-Soviet composer piqued curiosity. And a too-neglected early Schubert symphony promised a showcase of the orchestra in an important focus of Muti’s repertoire.

That the 1815 Schubert D Major Symphony No. 3, D. 200, was the evening’s highlight was instructive. When Muti’s intense focus on every measure of a score and his gift for lyricism meet a work of the first order, listeners -- and players -- are in for a treat. The CSO’s top-flight wind principals seem to go even an extra mile for the music director; their solos and interplay here had listeners floating on air.

Take this same care and respect, and apply it to a trifle, such as Dmitri Nikolaevich Smirnov’s 2008-2011 Space Odyssey, derivative in style as well as title, and you get -- not much. But at least it’s the not much that was created by the composer. 

 Smirnov, 63, a prolific creator of some 160 numbered works and a close associate of CSO artistic programing adviser Gerard McBurney, supplied these seven minutes of impressions of space flight for the CSO’s upcoming tour to Russia. Simultaneously sprawling and episodic, and certainly coming near no new ground let alone breaking any, it rarely rose to the level of movie music. Smirnov is a brave survivor of both communism and post-Soviet cultural politics.  But an admirable character does not ensure compositional quality.

Nor, necessarily, does a repugnant character make for poor artistic achievement, although in the case of Carl Orff, it certainly does not help. Perhaps the basest musical opportunist of the 20th century, the Bavarian Orff, whose only ideology was self-advancement, thrived under Nazism, surfing the success of his 1937 Carmina Burana to fame, fortune, commissions for “Aryan” works, and protection from service on the Russian front.  At war’s end, he engaged in some of the tallest tale-telling about his life during Nazism, falsely claiming not only to have been anti-Nazi, but even to have been a resistance founder.

None of this background is mentioned in Phillip Huscher’s otherwise fine and contextual program notes on the score and this is a shame.  And while Muti and many others have discussed how the “O Fortuna” chorus and other sections of the hour-long Carmina have been used to promote products and sporting events, it was Joseph Goebbels who first recognized the oratorio's empty passion for passion’s sake.

Muti’s performance focus is, thoughtfully, on the texts, secular and often profane poems by 13th-century theology students in a monastery near Munich.  (Hence the title, “Songs from Beuern,” the village of the Benedictine monastery.)  Muti’s sense of their tragic nature and his special care with the score led Orff, then 84, to write the younger Muti that his 1980 Berlin performances of the work constituted “a second première.”

Certainly, Muti does not overdo things with this piece that has blasted through dorm rooms for decades. With 50 members of the Chicago Children’s Choir for the sexually charged “Courts of Love” section, Muti gets the precision and the jarring effects he seeks. But except for the intricate “Veni, veni, venias” double chorus, the Chicago Symphony Chorus itself appeared disengaged and not at its expected level; orchestral sections sometimes seemed manic.

I’m not sure why Muti chose to use a countertenor for the work’s “roasted swan” poem, when the sound of a strained natural tenor voice is what Orff intended. However, Croatian-born Max Emanuel Cencic was also underpowered, and Neapolitan soprano Maria Grazia Schiavo lacked the hypnotic quality necessary for her solos to be most effective.  French baritone Stéphane Degout, a charming Papageno in The Magic Flute at Lyric Opera this winter, was the strongest of the trio, though a bit uniform across his many changing roles. The audience gave the performance a five-minute ovation.

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Note: For reasons of space and flow within the review, I condensed the following section which appears above as the fifth paragraph:

Nor, necessarily, does a repugnant character make for poor artistic achievement, although in the case of Carl Orff it certainly does not help. Perhaps the basest musical opportunist of the 20th century, the Bavarian Orff, whose only ideology was self-advancement, thrived under Nazism, surfing the success of his 1937 Carmina Burana to cash prizes, commissions, and even protection from wartime service through the fall of the Third Reich.  He aggressively pursued the chance to write a substitute for Felix Mendelssohn’s “non-Aryan” score to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and then relentlessly promoted the now forgotten work throughout the war.  And at war’s end he engaged in some of the tallest tale-telling about his life during Nazism, falsely claiming not only to have been in the resistance, but to have been an actual founder of the White Rose movement for which his friend Karl Huber was guillotined in 1943.

WFMT Immersion Day February 11: "Great Opera Singers of the 20th Century" with Henry Fogel

    

Enrico Caruso, Luisa Tetrazzini, Giuseppe Di Stefano, and lecturer Henry Fogel 

WFMT Immersion Day: "Great Opera Singers of the 20th Century" with Henry Fogel

Something new at WFMT and you have a full year to experience it.  Join WFMT for an all-day seminar on Saturday February 11, 2012 from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm CST -- streamed live with audio and video -- featuring audio recordings by the greatest singers in history, photographs, DVDs, and more.

Live from the WFMT Studios, before a studio audience, the day will feature a lecture, discussion, and great music.  The seminar will be conducted by Henry Fogel, one of the world’s savviest vocal recordings collectors as WFMT listeners have come to know well over the years.  Henry is the former president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and of the League of American Orchestras and currently serves as dean of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.

Henry will lead a journey of great recordings of opera singers from the last century, including Luisa Tetrazzini, Rosa Ponselle, Mario Del Monaco, and Feodor Chaliapin, and what made these singers great.  He'll discuss their personal experiences with Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and Verdi and examine how opera singing has changed over the past 120 years.

The cost for the all day stream is just $20 for the general public and $15 for WFMT's Fine Arts Circle members (and you all should be members!). And all subscribers to this seminar will have on-demand access to it for one year. Information and registration here.

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NOTE: There will be some DVDs used in the presentation.  In cases where streaming rights are not available, online subscribers will hear different audio in place of these DVD recordings.

 

My (radio) guest tonight: Riccardo Muti on his 2011-12 winter Chicago Symphony Orchestra programs

Riccardo Muti and the CSO with vocal soloists -- Verdi's Otello, April 2011.  © Todd Rosenberg Photography.

Tonight from 10 to 11 p.m. CST on Critical Thinking on 98.7WFMT Chicago -- and via free streaming anywhere at wfmt.com -- I talk with Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti about music of Carl Orff, César Franck, CSO Meas composers-in-residence Mason Bates and Anna Clyne, Schubert, and even Dmitri Smirnov, all of which is coming up on his three weeks of CSO subscription concerts from January 26 through February 11 and then on a four-city, five-concert Muti/CSO tour to California February 14 through 19.  Stick it out to the end and you'll hear some recollections of Muti's closest musical friends, the late Carlos Kleiber and the late Sviatoslov Richter, too, as well as how everything comes from Naples.

The program will then be available anytime for free podcast/download/streaming at wfmt.com/criticalthinking.

See you on the radio!

 

Lyric Opera of Chicago's 'Aida': not pyramid-shaking but better than many

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Sunday January 22, 2012 8:43PM CST

‘Aida’ star’s stamina enviable but intimacy lacking

Lyric Orchestra a stand-out again

Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, a Chicago area native, in the title role of a princess taken into slavery in the Lyric Opera presentation of Verdi’s Aida. | John H. White~Sun-Times

‘AIDA’

◆ Through February 8 (new cast March 6-25)

◆ Civic Opera House, 20 North Wacker Drive, Chicago

◆ $54-$254

◆ (312) 332-2244; lyricopera.org

BY ANDREW PATNER 

RECOMMENDED

Verdi’s Aida is many operas in one. Even for scholars, critics, and performers, it’s the opera remembered from childhood.  (Did we really see it with elephants?)

It’s grand opera with the “Triumphal March,” dancers, Egyptian soldiers and Ethiopian captives.  It’s dramatic opera with loyalties of love vs. country.  And it is, despite all of the trappings, intimate chamber opera -- heartrending solos and duets with spare instrumentation as two lovers wrestle with the pull of a father and a princess against the commands of their hearts.

All of these account for its enduring popularity (the work turned 140 on Christmas Eve) and allow for a good fit with traditional presentations. (Lyric Opera of Chicago now is presenting its fifth outing for the Nicolas Joel/Pet Halmen production created for Luciano Pavarotti in 1983.) Even when it’s done only adequately, audiences take away a certain satisfaction from the doom-laden tale of the captive slave loved by a prince who does not know she is the daughter of his enemy.  And its 3½-hour length including two half-hour intermissions allows for the audience meeting, greeting, and exchange of reactions that represent a night at the opera for many.

Saturday night’s opening of the run of the first of two Aida casts (a second set of the five principals takes over for March) offered vocal and dramatic results above adequate if not pyramid-shaking. Italian conductor Renato Palumbo is of the younger generations that have benefited from Riccardo Muti’s sweeping away of performance exaggerations and accretions to Verdi’s exquisitely created scores.  He and the excellent Lyric Orchestra played the score eloquently and with much inner drama. Stage director Matthew Lata, remounting the Joel/Halmen conception for the third time here, gets the balance between pomp and the crowds and the personal dilemmas of the protagonists.

Recalling casts even solely from Lyric’s own history with the piece is not fair to today’s Verdi singers and to the admirable job Lyric has done in recruiting two casts committed to this repertoire and its vocal demands.  For many, Chicago area native soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, taking up the title role at Lyric for the first time, is the great hope for Verdi today.  I have found her at her best in lesser-known works such as the Metropolitan Opera’s recent revival of the mid-period Stiffelio or Lyric’s 2009 offering of the early Ernani.  Her technique and stamina are enviable, but in works we know better, a certain one-size-fits-all sound does not allow for the personal and intimate characterization necessary for a Verdi heroine. Nor did her acting or singing ever say “AIDA.” The opening-night audience rewarded her richly at evening’s end.

Sicilian tenor Marcello Giordani holds his own throughout the impossibly demanding part of Radames, and whether they always connect in the first three acts, he and Radvanovsky offer the proper, shared delicacy in the Tomb Scene finale. American Jill Grove seems to have become Lyric’s house mezzo and this has been a very good thing, even if her nuanced, jealous princess Amneris does not quite match her successes or depth in the Austro-German repertoire. American baritone Gordon Hawkins, an impressive Porgy at Lyric, holds the stage as Aida’s captive father Amonasro. American bass Raymond Aceto is a solid Ramfis, the high priest.  Ryan Center second-year bass Evan Boyer has a lovely voice not quite powerful enough for the King of Egypt in the cavernous Civic Opera House.  First-year Ryan mezzo Cecelia Hall was a lyrical offstage priestess.  Michael Black’s chorus, Kenneth von Heidecke’s principal dancers, Eric Weimer’s onstage trumpets, and Jason Brown’s lighting all animate the space and time.  Alas, there are no elephants.

 

Updated: Lyric Opera of Chicago's 2012-2013 season: serious works and a little star powder

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Tuesday January 17, 2012 6:38PM CST

(Incorporating revisions and corrections as of January 18.)

 

Lyric expands to nine: Anna Netrebko, Renée Fleming's Blanche DuBois, new Elektra and Meistersinger, among highlights of Lyric Opera’s 2012-13 season

BY ANDREW PATNER

A second season is still transitional in the long-range scheduled world of opera programming.

In fact, the first season at Lyric Opera of Chicago that will be fully planned by the company’s new general director Anthony Freud is that of 2015-16, three and a half year’s away.

But the 2012-13 season, Lyric's 58th, announced Tuesday afternoon at the Civic Opera House bears more of Freud’s fingerprints than might immediately be obvious and, in its seriousness, commitment to American artists, and well-balanced variety is one the manager told a press conference he happily takes “full responsibility” for.

Previous commitments by now retired general director William Mason and Lyric board chairman Richard P. Kiphart also give Freud an extra boost for next season: a ninth opera added to the eight operas that have been the norm for the last 14 years.

As previously announced, Lyric creative consultant and diva soprano Renée Fleming, who joined the press event from New York via Skype, will star in spring 2013 stagings of André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, written for her.  In a canny move, tickets for the Chicago première of Streetcar will at least initially be available only to subscribers.

A similar “Subscribe Now!” hook is being used with the often-awaited Lyric début of the other superstar on the schedule, Russian soprano Anna Netrebko slated as Mimi in the March dates of Puccini’s La bohème.

The six-month season (with 68 total performances down from 72 this year) is heavy on serious works with only one out and out comedy, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (in a Dallas/Covent Garden production), which itself has some major international singers in German soprano Marlis Petersen and Italian bass-baritone Ildebrando D’Arcangelo in the title role. And high tenor René Barbera is one of a number of Ryan Center alums (he'll be done with his third year in the program after the current season) cast in important roles next season.  November 25 to December 15.

Other works on the schedule are:

• Richard Strauss’s scorching Elektra opening the season in a new David McVicar production with American soprano Christine Goerke making her Chicago début and American mezzo Jill Grove as Clytemnestra.  October 6-30.

• The first of two Verdi works, Simon Boccanegra, this with Thomas Hampson, Italian bass Ferrucio Furlanetto, whose belated Lyric début, in the title role of Boris Godunov, was a hit of the current season, and Bulgarian soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, Desdemona in Riccardo Muti’s critically-acclaimed 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert performances of Verdi's Otello, makes her house début.  October 15 to November 9.

• A new Francisco Negrin production of Massenet’s Werther, not seen here since 1978, with area native and local favorite Matthew Polenzani making his role début opposite Lyric débutante French mezzo Sophie Koch who has won acclaim as Charlotte.  November 11-26.

• The winter holiday offering, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, first and last seen here in 2001-02, revives the dark but highly effective Richard Jones production.  Freud is particularly excited about this revival both because he commissioned it when he was chief at Welsh National Opera (before taking the top job at Houston Grand Opera) and “it was the first opera I ever saw, as a boy at Sadler’s Wells” in his native London.  December 7 to January 19, 2013. 

• Popular soprano Ana María Martínez will sing the initial Bohème dates in a production from San Francisco new to Chicago.  Greek-American tenor Dimitri Pittas (début) and Maltese sensation Joseph Calleja share Rodolfo’s role and Ryan Center alum Elizabeth Futral takes on her first Musetta.  January 21 to March 28, 2013.

• Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, not seen here since 1999, gets a new McVicar production (via Glyndebourne and San Francisco, though no McVicar himself for this one) with James Morris, Johan Botha, rapidly rising Ryan alumna Amanda Majeski, and Bo Skovhus leading the cast.  February 8 to March 3, 2013.

• The other Verdi, Rigoletto, brings three awaited Lyric débuts from European singers: Polish baritone Andrzej Dobber and Serb Željko Lučić sharing the title role and Russian soprano (and Houston Studio alum) Albina Shagimuratova as Gilda, in a revival of the 2005-06 "traditional" Lyric production.  February 25 to March 30, 2013.

• Fleming’s Blanche DuBois is joined in the aforementioned Streetcar -- which will receive a theatrical but black-box treatment with the Lyric Orchestra on stage as well -- by Ryan alum Susanna Phillips as Stella, New Zealand baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes débuting here as Stanley Kowalski, and tenor Anthony Dean Griffey returning to the part of Mitch which he created in the opera’s 1998 world première.  March 26 to April 6, 2013.

Lyric music director Andrew Davis conducts the three first works (Elektra, Boccanegra, and Werther) and then returns for Meistersinger.  Stephen Lord of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis returns for Pasquale and two young American conductors début: Ward Stare for Hansel and Gretel and Freud protégé Evan Rogister for both Rigoletto and Streetcar.  Popular French conductor -- and regular Netrebko collaborator -- Emmanuel Villaume has the Bohème.

A complex array of raised, lowered, and frozen ticket prices results in an overall price increase of only 2.5 percent but with substantial savings available to all subscribers and lowered prices for some main floor and balcony seats. Family tickets will be offered for the first time, for Hansel and Gretel and for a special family matinée of Don Pasquale, and a first-time college and university performance of Streetcar will have a $20 ticket price for the understudy cast.

Season brochures will be mailed to subscribers February 2. 

 

Chicago Sinfonietta: Mei-Ann Chen and "siblings" lead her first annual King Day concert -- Hallelujah! (with added photo)

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Tuesday January 17, 2012 3:38PM CST

Music Director Mei-Ann Chen leads the Chicago Sinfinietta in 2011

Chicago Sinfonietta raises the bar on its annual King concert tradition

BY ANDREW PATNER 

Is there anything quite like a Chicago Sinfonietta concert at Orchestra Hall?

America’s most diverse orchestra, founded by an African-American conductor-scholar 25 years ago, now led by a Taiwanese woman, performing at a very high level music from three centuries with influences from at least as many continents before a large, predominantly Black audience?  An annual birthday tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. that is substantive, moving, and joyous?

It’s hard to imagine anything that compares.  And this year’s King concert Monday night, following a sold-out matinée Sunday at Wentz Concert Hall of North Central College in Naperville, managed to raise the bar on this already enviable tradition.

As unlikely as it might sound, music director Mei-Ann Chen, 38, has shown she was born to lead this group and these historically-conscious concerts. As passionate and in control as she appears on the podium, so is the sense of connection that she has felt with the United States, with Black American history, and with King in particular since coming to this country as a teenage music student. She plays and speaks from the heart, the body, and the head, and the audience and the players have embraced her.

Her own wide embrace extends to sharing she stage as often as possible with what she calls “new sisters and brothers.”  In the course of the program, the Sinfonietta may have broken its own records with three women conductors and three African-Americans on the podium in one evening.

The program embodied Paul Freeman and Chen’s visions of universal music: the first half held Hungarian Zoltán Kodály’s 1933 ethnographic-inspired Dances of Galánta, Beethoven’s lesser-heard 1814 “Fidelio” overture, and Charles Ives’s remarkable 1906 two-ensemble Central Park in the Dark. Philadelphia-based conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson, a University of Chicago graduate music alum, led a well-thought-out Beethoven, and took the brass and wind “interruptions” of the Ives nightscape, that, with Chen’s string evocation of the underlying summer night, made for one of the best Central Park's I’ve heard.

The second half featured Harambee: Road to Victory, a brief but buoyant world première by longtime Chicago new music mainstay Nicole Mitchell, recently relocated to the University of California-Irvine.  Unable to perform the solo flute part herself here due to a family emergency, Mitchell had an able replacement in young Chicago native Kedgrick Pullums (left,  photo by Rieny G. Cualoping, from Sunday's Naperville concert, courtesy of ENERI). Johnson (above) also led this piece, which brought the Apostolic Church of God Sanctuary Choir to the stage.  Mitchell lately has been blending her own improvisations with scored jazz and classical ensembles, and this work continued that exploration.

The roof then was nearly blown off when Chen, the choir, and orchestra collaborated on the first of four contemporary gospel numbers, “Total Praise” by Richard Smallwood, orchestrated by Willetta Greene-Johnson, who, along with the Apostolic’s minister of music H. Chip Johnson, Jr., also conducted a selection. Chen returned for the finale, and despite her claim to “knowing nothing about conducting gospel music,” more than held her own with the disciplined and highly effective singers.  Excellent soloists, varied in style, included Rev. Ivory Nuckolls, James Hudson, and Travis A. Newsome.

The Freeman tradition of an audience sing-and-sway-along to “We Shall Overcome” closed the concert. It displayed the same humor and warmth that Freeman, whose life and career were greatly influenced by a chance airport meeting with King, brought to the tradition. Despite the ravages of the world outside, the hall became a place of real fellowship. “Surely Dr. King is smiling down on this,” a beaming Chen said toward the concert’s end. I’d say not just King, but the people’s music champion Kodály, the American excavator Ives, and the great musical humanist Beethoven himself.  Glory be.

 

My (radio) guest tonight -- the words of writer James Alan McPherson

  

By popular request, 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 I'll be repeating my May 2011 reading of a favorite short story by James Alan McPherson, "A Matter of Vocabulary" from his 1969 collection Hue and Cry.

 A longtime faculty member at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at The University of Iowa, McPherson, born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1943, was in the first class of MacArthur Fellows in 1981, and received the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his second book of stories, Elbow Room. He turned to writing full time after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1968 at age 24. I first met Jim when I was a boy in 1968 and he and his work have both meant a great deal to me on many levels since then.  Alas, his masterpiece, "A Solo Song: For Doc," also included in Hue and Cry, can't be read on the radio due to some of the language.  

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

See you on the radio!

 

CSO: Elder’s salute to the Bard goes off the rails, actor captures Falstaff but music misses

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday January 13, 2012 2:32PM CST

 

Elder’s CSO salute to the Bard goes off the rails

Actor Greg Vinkler captures Falstaff, but musical direction misses

Repeats at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday

Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue

Tickets: (312) 294-3000 and cso.org

 

BY ANDREW PATNER

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

 

In boxing, you could call it a split decision.

This week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts offer unusual programming: a neglected masterwork, an all-time audience favorite and two rarities, Russian and English musical takes on the Bard, with gifted actors from Chicago Shakespeare Theater animating the textual sources.

But much was undercut Thursday night by slipshod execution by guest conductor Mark Elder, who organized this week’s program as well as last week’s more successful all-Berlioz with Shakespeare venture.

The work that came off best, a Thomas Beecham extraction from Frederick Delius’ English opera A Village Rome and Juliet (1906), was also the slightest. The eight-minute excerpt, “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” (the destination the name of an inn) is the sort of “light music” still enjoyed by some in Britain and once the province of several now-defunct local commercial classical radio stations.

What followed, however, was not limited to paradise. As beloved as some works by Edward Elgar are, his later Falstaff, Symphonic Study, Op. 68 remains a rarity in concert. Daniel Barenboim, then just 29, was stunned that the CSO had never played this deeply insightful 1912-13 portrait of Shakespeare’s merry (and fat) knight until he led it here in 1972. Barenboim was responsible for its most recent Chicago performances in the mid-1990s as well.

Barenboim’s performances emphasized the 35-minute work’s harmonic development -- albeit still well within Elgar’s tonal world -- and complexity, and he showed a love for every skipping eighth note and every sighing or smiling cadence. Elder instead took a bulldozer approach, stating in stage comments beforehand that this is “a brisk” work and chiefly a clever bit of program music.

If there had been any measure-by-measure or harmonic analysis, Elder did not communicate his discoveries to the players. The decision to project written signposts of the work’s “plot” similarly distracted from the musical depth and originality, parallel in accomplishment to the tone poems of Strauss. The music should tell the stories. That’s the composer’s achievement here.

For his part, Chicago actor and Door County, Wisc., Peninsula Players Theatre artistic director Greg Vinkler knows the part of Sir John Falstaff as one of the great humane works of art. His boasts, his postures, and his ultimate deflation by his onetime charge when the boy becomes the man and king, Henry V, were in turn hilarious and devastating. As Prince Hal/Henry, Jürgen Hooper was a perfect foil. (This week, unlike last, the amplification for the spoken-word scenes was just right.)

Four selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Musical Pictures from The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (1903-04) opened the second half, presumably as a lead-in for Tchaikovsky’s late 19^th-century Romeo and Juliet, with three of the four “Kitezh” selections having CSO premières Thursday night. The wholly unidiomatic direction seemed to connect these Russian fantasies more with Delius than with the two unidentified but colorfully costumed balalaika players at the stage’s front.

It was brave to conduct Tchaikovsky’s “Fantasy-Overture after Shakespeare” just over a year after CSO music director used it as a triumphant calling card for his new post at his free concert in Millennium Park.  In the event it was foolhardy, too. This was the biggest train wreck at a CSO concert in almost 15 years. An increasing lack of coordination from the podium left sections and solo players wrongly exposed; by the final sections of the tightly knit 20-minute piece, the leadership and playing were wholly out of phase. There’s a big difference between having great ideas and making them work in reality.

 

My (radio) guest tonight: Riccardo Muti, WFMT's first-ever Artist of the Year!

Tonight from 10 to 11 p.m. CST on Critical Thinking on 98.7WFMT Chicago -- and via free streaming at wfmt.com -- the first broadcast of my full conversation with Riccardo Muti recorded on December 28 when WFMT general manager Steve Robinson and I informed him by telephone (he was in the Folomites, in Italy) that he was the recipient of the first-ever WFMT Artist of the Year Award. We discuss a wide array of topics from old and new music to the fight for culture and for engagement with young people. The program will then be available anytime for free podcast/download/streaming at wfmt.com/criticalthinking. See you on the radio!