Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Revised: CSO and Riccardo Muti 2012-2013 season announcement

[Revised, repaired, etc., February 7, 8:15PM CST]

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Monday February 6, 2012 5:10PM CST

Variety marks the CSO’s 2012-13 season, announced Monday

BY ANDREW PATNER

Riccardo Muti guarantees any orchestra or city he serves as music director healthy doses of passion, delivered with his own combination of detailed preparation, a broad sweep, and a long view.

At a new solo-format press conference Monday at Orchestra Hall, Mutiannounced the 2012-13 season, his third here, of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its ancillary presenting arms for chamber music, jazz, and touring ensembles.  Muti made it clear that despite his general aversion to thematic programming, the formal and informal multidisciplinary theme of one series next season, “Rivers: Nature, Power, Culture,” is what he regards music as all about.

Muti's programs: Muti will spend 10 weeks in residence, with large-scale works scheduled across his season, from a reprise of his sold-out performances of Orff’sCarmina Burana in a return to a free community concert at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park September 21 to Bach’s great Mass in B minor in April 2013 to his beloved Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces in June 2013.

The annual Symphony Ball gala concert September 29 brings back violin star Anne-Sophie Mutter, who was soloist and accidental guest conductor when Mutifell ill just before the CSO’s 2010 gala; music of Wagner, Mendelssohn (the violin concerto), and Tchaikovsky is on tap.

Along the way, Muti also will kick off a yearlong examination of “The Wagner Effect,” focusing on the towering music-drama composer’s influence, and present a series of major Beethoven and Brahms works, including Beethoven piano concertos with top players Radu Lupu (the First, January 2013), Maurizio Pollini(the Fifth, Emperor, April), and Leif Ove Andsnes (the Fourth, June).

Lesser-heard works by Italian composers Martucci and Respighi (September), Busoni (January), and Vivaldi (April and June) are on the music director’s schedule along with Scriabin’s The Divine Poem in June, a preview of the Scriabin (1872-1915) symphonies survey he revealed for 2013-2014.  That program will also feature CSO principal oboe Eugene Izotov in Bohuslav Martinů's 1955 oboe concerto.

The Scriaban series wasn’t Muti’s only unexpected leak.  He promised concert performances of Verdi’s opera Macbeth in 2013-14 and said that a 2012-13 international tour would visit Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, and Seoul. 

Muti also leads works of Dvořák (the rarely heard Fifth Symphony), Stravinsky, Bruckner (the First Symphony), Mozart, and Schumann (the Third Symphony,Rhenish) during the season and in run-outs to Ann Arbor, Michigan (September 27) and Urbana (April 20, 2013).  Three October dates (3, 4, and 5) at New York’s Carnegie Hall were already announced.

Muti also will lead a Civic Orchestra open rehearsal, preside over the second SoltiConducting Apprentice Competition and visit another area youth detention center, this time for boys and young men.  He will also participate in the CSO'sbiennial Chicago Youth in Music Festival.

"Rivers" series: Running across and through the CSO series and those of all other Symphony Center Presents areas, the "Rivers" series explores the way, for centuries, rivers have facilitated commerce and culture all the while inspiring composers, writers, and visual artists.  Works noting rivers from the Amazon, Nile, Rhine, and Moldau to America's own mighty Mississippi and Chicago's eponymous waterway, will be featured, culminating in a three-week spring festival and programs with The Art Instutute of Chicago and other cultural, educational, andenvironmental organizations to be announced.

Other highlights

♦ New music: After a three-week period this winter where he has been presenting three world premières including two commissions, Muti leaves the new music driving to others next season. Regular guest conductor Jaap van Zwedenoffers a world première CSO-commissioned Christopher Rouse trumpet concerto in December with principal Christopher Martin and the Chicago première of Liquid Interface by Mead composer-in-residence Mason Bates in May-June.

In an all-concertos program in December, Harry Bicket presents the Chicago première of a CSO commission by the other Mead chair holder, Anna Clyne, in a program that also marks the belated subscription concert début of the exceptional native Chicago violinist Jennifer Koh. Minnesota Orchestra music director Sakari Oramo brings Australian Brett Dean’s Amphitheatre with him in April 2013

♦ Return of Haitink and Boulez: Senior CSO conductors Bernard Haitinkand Pierre Boulez return in October and March each with two weeks of unmissable programs. Haitink has an all-Brahms concert with the Capuçon brothers in the Double Concerto for violin and 'cello and then offers Beethoven’s monumental Missa solemnis with leading soloists and the CSO Chorus.

Boulez starts off with a mixed 20th-century program including the CSO première of Messiaen’s 1959-60 Chronochromie and powerhouse Yefim Bronfman in Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto, followed later by Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll andParsifal Prelude, Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto with Michael Barenboim, son of former CSO music director Daniel, and the Adagio from Mahler’s uncompleted Tenth Symphony.

♦ Guest conductors: For­m­er Los Angeles Philharmonic chief Esa-PekkaSalonen continues to make Chicago a major U.S. conducting home with a performance of Act II of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, followed by a Sibelius andLutosławski concert with Green creative consultant Yo-Yo Ma as 'cello soloist.

Other returning guest conductors include Semyon Bychkov (Mahler’s Third Symphony in November), Charles Dutoit (two weeks in November), Mark Elder (November and February 2013), Juanjo Mena (Villa-Lobos and Toru Takemitsu, May), Carlos Miguel Prieto (Revueltas and Ginastera, May) and Mitusko Uchida(annual Mozart piano concerto survey, in March).

Four young conductors will début, highlighted by Chicago Sinfonietta music director and rising force Taiwan-born Mei-Ann Chen in May in a program which also holds one of the most intriguing premières of the season, the 1930s' MississipiRiver Suite by the late African-American Chicago composer Florence Price (1887-1953); Spaniard Pablo Heras-Casado, Russian Vasily Petrenko, and OssetianTugan Sokhiev also bow next season.

♦ Solt1 100: The October 21 centennial of the birth of legendary former CSOmusic director Georg Solti holds the draw of the Solti-founded World Orchestra for Peace with major international orchestral musicians conducted by ValeryGergiev and vocal soloists Plácido Domingo, Kiri Te Kanawa, and René Pape as well as awardees of Solti memorial foundations all hosted by Valerie Solti.

Other Solti colleagues including Mutter, Murray Perahia (piano recital October 14) and András Schiff (piano recital Nov. 4) appear next season and works by such composers associated with Solti as Richard Strauss, Wagner, Bartók, Mahler and, in later years, Shostakovich, are scheduled on CSO programs.

♦ Guest soloists: A large number of vocalists including English mezzo AliceCoote (Berlioz, Les nuits d’été, November-December), Argentinean mezzoBernarda Fink and American tenor Anthony Dean Griffey (both Missa solemnis), and Canadian bass-baritone John Relyea (King Marke in Tristan) début with the orchestra, as do young pianists Frenchman David Fray (Mozart, May-June) and Russian Daniil Trifonov (Tchaikovsky, November).

♦ Returning soloists and CSO Chorus: Garrick Ohlsson (February), PeterSerkin (May), Jean-Yves Thibaudet (May), and Yuja Wang (April).  CSO principal players flutist Mathieu Dufour taking up the Katchaturian concerto (Rampal arr., March) and English horn Scott Hostetler the Bach oboe d'amore (December).  Violinist Jaime Laredo joins his former student Koh (December) and Illinois-born Gil Shaham plays the Walton Concerto (November).  Americans soprano Christine Brewer (October) and mezzo Michelle DeYoung (February) also return.  The CSOChorus is featured throughout the season in works of Beethoven, Mahler, Bach Vivaldi, Mozart, and Verdi.

♦ Special CSO concerts: The 100^th anniversary of The Rite of SpringNovember 14 and two performances of Fantasia: Live in Concert with scenes from the 1940 original and the 2000-sequel film, November 24 and 25.

♦ Piano series: Ten Sunday afternoon programs also include Louis Lortie(January 20), Angela Hewitt (February 10), Paul Lewis (conclusion of his acclaimed late-Schubert survey, March 3), Pierre-Laurent Aimard (all-Debussy, April 7), Evgeny Kissin (April 28), Chicago area resident Jorge Federico Osorio(May 5), Marc-André Hamelin (May 19), and young German-Japanese Alice SaraOtt (June 2).

♦ Five concert chamber series: Cellist Alisia Weilerstein with pianist InonBarnatan (October 28), Anne-Sophie Mutter with Lambert Orkis (March 10), Emerson String Quartet and guests (April 10), Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra with Steve Schick, works of John Cage, Takemitsu, Knussen, Copland, and a world preière new piece by Alaskan John Luther Adams (April 21), and Yo-Yo Ma and CSO Friends (May 15).

♦ Visiting orchestras: In addition to the World Orchestra for Peace andGergiev, visiting ensembles and conductors are the Philharmonia of London withSalonen (November 7) and the Dresden Staatskapelle with its new principal conductor Christian Thielemann and violinist Lisa Batiashvili (April 14).

♦ Jazz and Special Concerts: Highlights include the Chicago première of  a Symphony Center Presents co-commission, The Great Flood, a film by Hyde Park native Bill Morrison with a score written and performed by jazz guitarist BillFrissell, kicking off the season-long “Rivers” project, October 12; Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble (October 13); Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, formerly a youth ensemble and now, likeDudamel, all grown up (December 2); the annual CSO Brass marathon afternoon concert (December 9); The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge and conductor Stephen Cleobury at Fourth Presbyterian Church on North Michigan Avenue (April 3), and the return of Max Raabe & Palast Orchester, this time in a Cole Porter and Irving Berlin café and dance hall program (April 5); and Orbert Davis and his Chicago Jazz Philharmonic in a Chicago River work of Davis inspired by former Sun-Timesman Richard Cahan and Michael Williams’s book The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed its River and the Land Beyond (May 24).

 

CSO and Muti: new 'Energy' from Mason Bates, boost from Honegger, meticulous Franck

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday February 3, 2012 7:02PM

Muti and the CSO revel in the brave new worlds of ‘Alternative Energy’

 

Composer Mason Bates gathering sounds at Fermilab. © Todd Rosenberg Photography

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

◆8 p.m. Saturday; 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

◆ Symphony Center, 220 South Michigan Avenue

◆ Tickets, $43-$207

◆ (312) 294-3000; cso.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

A music director’s selection of an orchestra’s composers in residence reveals much about the conductor’s interest in contemporary music and how it relates to the general repertoire and to the public. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played a role in establishing what is now an accepted tradition when John Corigliano was selected in 1987 to work alongside music director Sir Georg Solti as the CSO’s first composer in residence.  Corigliano’s technical virtuosity and populist sympathies matched Solti’s own tastes, which also had brought major new works from Michael Tippett and David Del Tredici.

Daniel Barenboim ap­­pointed two women composers; first, fellow Israeli ShulamitRan and then the American Augusta Read Thomas.  Both were American-trained extenders of European Modernist traditions, but they also continued Corigliano’s worthy cheerleading for an eclectic range of mostly younger colleagues.  An odd interregnum followed when the CSO was without a music director with two non-resident composers, Osvaldo Golijov and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Riccardo Muti shook things up when he picked two young artists with keen interests in electro-acoustic music and multimedia to share the Mead composer-in-residence post: American-born Mason Bates and British transplant AnnaClyne.

Loyalty and devotion -- whether to teachers, composers, institutions, or pieces of music -- is a key part of Muti’s makeup.  His commitment to showcase the works of Bates and Clyne even before they had written any pieces specifically for him and the CSO is strong; he has studied their scores with the intensity others might reserve for Wagner or Schoenberg. With the world première of Bates’sAlternative Energy Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, Muti showed his commitment worthwhile.  (Clyne’s Night Ferry makes its world-première bow next week.)

Bates, 35, whose roots are in American composition, liberal arts, and nightclub DJ work, has produced his most convincing, integrate, and appealing large-scale work to date with electronics -- which he ran himself from an onstage laptop -- strategically placed within the score and in their sounding on speakers across the hall.  The four movement, 24-minute work Alternative Energy surveys modern man’s use and abuse of energy -- from tinkering to Tevatrons to nuclear dependence and meltdown to a distant future’s return to nature and fire -- while exploring different propulsions of musical energy and even toe-tapping rhythms.

Principal percussionist Cynthia Yeh was almost a compositional collaborator in helping select, test, and create instruments from auto junkyard scraps. Concertmaster Robert Chen showed himself wholly at home in American and Chinese fiddling. Bates kept himself and his technological and techno contributions in the background, letting the listener focus on his careful structuring and tight scoring across the orchestra.

Some might regard the effects as reminiscent of next-generation film scoring or computer gaming, but I found any such parallels a legitimate evocation of thezeitgeist. Muti was alert to each measure and idea, at times appearing to physically revel in discovering a new world.  A happy audience and orchestra welcomed Bates back onstage for three curtain calls.

Arthur Honegger’s 1923 Pacific 231, Symphonic Movement No. 1, not heard downtown since the CSO’s greatest new-music advocate of all time, Frederick Stock, led it in 1930, is itself an exercise in musical representation of propulsive energy.  Its six-minute length made it a perfect prelude to the Bates work.

César Franck’s 1886-1888 Symphony in D minor, once a staple of high-school orchestras and mid-20th-century LP recordings, is another of those works thatMuti devotedly has brought back to life throughout his career. With an impassioned, detailed performance of the work’s never-ending recycled themes, he almost made us believe that there was something there. Scott Hostetler’s seductive English horn was with him all the way.

 

Revised: Two routes for two composers: CSO and Riccardo Muti play world premières by Mason Bates and Anna Clyne

February 3, 11:15AM: This post has been revised to correct and amend typing and editing errors on my part in the section on Anna Clyne's new work.  Apologies to Anna!

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Wednesday February 1, 2012 8:30PM CST

Mason Bates visits Fermilab in Batavia last year to record sounds for his work Alternative Energy. The 22-minute work premières Thursday evening. | © Todd Rosenberg Photography

The Current Sound

Tones recorded at Fermilab juice up composer’s piece for CSO

Mason Bates takes an exterior route whle Anna Clyne follows interior paths for her subsequent première
 
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

◆ Thursday through Tuesday

◆ Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue

◆ $34-$207

◆ (312) 294-3000; cso.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

Composer Mason Bates is a fusion of All-Americanness and 21st century globalism.

At 35, and long resident in the San Francisco Bay Area and before that in New York City, he still speaks with an only slightly modified variant of the unique drawl of Richmond, Va., where he grew up.  He has a last name for a first name, a choirboy’s features, and what looks like a perpetual tan.

One of two Mead composers in residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Bates made his formal studies at Columbia University and the Juilliard School with teachers who pushed for American voices in a world they regarded as overrun by European influences.

Yet his early embrace of electronics and his “night job” as turntable spinner under the play on words name DJ Masonic shows the influence of Europe’s inhalation of American club dance sounds and its transformation of those beats and effects into a sort of international Esperanto background music.  A listener wandering into CSO performances last season of Bates’s Music for Underground Spaces or The B-Sides would have a hard time identifying the composer’s national, or even hemispheric, origins.

This could change with the world première performances Thursday through Tuesday of Alternative Energy, the first work Bates has written expressly for the CSO and its music director Riccardo Muti.

The maestro appointed Bates and his fellow Mead composer Anna Clyne to their positions and this week extended the appointments for two more seasons.  Muti is also taking Bates’s piece and Clyne’s Night Ferry on the CSO’s California tour this month and the Bates work to New York’s Carnegie Hall in October.  (Bates also will host a new CSO lounge party called “POST” after Friday’s concert.)

“This is my biggest commission to date,” Bates said by phone recently from Miami, where he was presenting one of his techno/classical “Mercury Soul” concert-cum-party evenings. “At 22 minutes, it’s my long­est work for full orchestra.  I thought it was very important that this piece take note of Chicago and the Midwest, because they are giving it birth in idea and performance.”

Staying in close contact with Muti -- “We shared a lot of trans-Atlantic phone calls!” -- Bates created a work that tells a story of the evolution, or devolution, of man-made energy. Its opening movement evokes a turn-of-the-last-century junkyard inspired “both by places I’ve driven to around Chicago, and by that great American tinkerer, Henry Ford.”

“Ford’s Farm 1896” is followed by “Chicago 2012” with sounds Bates gathered on site from the recently closed Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in exurban Batavia, as well as others Chicago has sent out into the world via its development of house and other club music.  An explosive meeting of acoustic and electronic music takes the work through a nuclear meltdown in China in 2112; a coda of bird song and tribal voices closes out the piece in a 23rd-century Iceland as the Earth starts a repopulation.

“Maestro Muti really helped me to stretch here,” Bates said. “Both in crafting the electronics and their sound from laptop [which Bates operates onstage with the orchestra] to speakers with the same care as the orchestra’s acoustic parts and in bowing to classical antecedents, such as the idée fixe that Berlioz used in the Symphonie fantastique -- except we’ll be doing this with a fiddle tune and junkyard car parts.”



Anna Clyne and a part of the planning timeline painting she created and used.  © Todd Rosenberg Photography

Anna Clyne’s new work delves into depths of Schubert

A few blocks from Orchestra Hall, in a sunny courtyard studio at the happily eccentric Fine Arts Building, composer Anna Clyne has created an almost purpose-built home where she wrote her new work, Night Ferry, to receive its world première performances February 9 to 11.

Riccardo Muti had suggested that Clyne might look to Schubert for inspiration in some way, as he was planning an otherwise all-Schubert program. The London-born, Scotland- and New York-educated composer, 31, went to work. 

In an unusual process, Clyne, one of whose entrées to Schubert came when growing up as a cellist and playing his chamber music, researched the brief life of the Viennese genius who at his death at 31 in 1828 had produced some 1,000 works.  Examining his interior life, she came to accept the hypothesis that Schubert suffered from cyclothymia, a rapid-swinging form of manic-depression.  

An elegiac poem by Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney in memory of the American poet Robert Lowell, a severe manic-depressive, gave her imagery and a title: “You were our Night Ferry,” Heaney wrote of Lowell, moving “wilfully across/the ungovernable and dangerous.”

From there, Clyne created a timeline wrapped around the walls of her studio and made a mostly abstract painting -- “I am not a visual artist!” she said, laughing. “This was a tool of exploration and creation -- of a journey” paralleling the sections of another poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 epic Rime of the Ancient Mariner, even though the work itself is entirely instrumental and has no voices or text.

The CSO’s individual players gave her “inspiration as to the sounds and musical voices for the piece, and Maestro Muti gave me the confidence and support to write a large-scale 20-minute orchestral work.” Muti, who in studying the score  told me that “though there is not a note of Schubert and no direct reference to his music in her score, I believe that she has a real affinity with Schubert.”  Still, he had encouraged her to make a piece entirely of her choosing, one that became a kind of interior journey, in contrast with Bates’s also independent project which could be seen and heard as more exterior music.  And this is what commissioning a work should truly be about.