Andrew Patner: The View from Here

CSO and Robertson: Keys to the City holds Ax and 'Emperor' and piano-related Hindemith and Rachmaninoff

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday March 25, 2012 8:07PM CDT

Emanuel Ax

CSO's eclectic first subscription concert in Keys to the City Piano Festival

Ax and Robertson mix Hindemith, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

with David Robertson

and Emanuel Ax, piano

Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's three-week Keys to the City Piano Festival 

moved in its second entry from one unusual potpourri to another, more orchestrally-driven one Thursday night.

Guest conductor David Robertson and guest curator and piano wizard Emanuel Ax were back on stage after Wednesday's one-night Festival opener and the focus was more narrow, although I doubt the three pieces on this week's subscription 

concerts have made up a single program before.

"Keys" looks to remind audiences and players of the relationship of the piano 

(or pianos) to orchestral works as well, and two infrequently played World War 

II-era compositions, Hindemith's 1940-43 Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber and Rachmaninoff's 1940 Symphonic Dances, Op. 45, fit with this goal.

Hindemith was a political exile from his native Germany when he pulled out 

various early-19th century Weber works, most originally written for piano duet, 

and shaped them into dance-friendly orchestra versions that could work as a 

ballet.  Parting company with choreographer Leonid Massine, Hindemith shifted 

his compositional focus more to musical content and this Robertson brought out 

in a performance of great clarity.  Historic performance exaggerations of the 

piece were abandoned and with principal flute Mathieu Dufour especially, 

appropriate colors were present in each of the four settings.

Rachmaninoff wrote a two-piano version of his final work as well and Ax has 

programmed that lighter, less lugubrious incarnation next week.  Robertson gave 

the orchestral work, also with balletic inspiration, in this case from Michel Fokine, who died in 1942, before he might have set it, its due with a crispness that would probably have pleased the composer.  Guest saxophone soloist Joe Luloff played the first movement solos with a haunting loveliness.

Ax can eat the Beethoven piano concertos for lunch.  But his gentle and playful 

nature has him preferring to share his meal with his orchestral colleagues.  In 

Beethoven's 1809 E-Flat Major Emperor Concerto No. 5, he was listening to 

the instrumental sections, or even watching them and their score stands, as much 

as he was playing this cornerstone work.  His spirit of inquiry and impishness 

had the most impact in the famous transition from the central Adagio movement to the Rondo finale and that whole spirited conclusion to the 40-minute work.  As 

so often, Ax made this, some of the trickiest and most wonderful music ever written, seem like cake, but cake for everyone's pleasure, not just his.

 

CSO's Keys to the City Piano Festival has a mixed opener with five pianists, four in one piece

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Thursday May 24, 2012 4:26PM CDT

CSO’s ‘Keys to the City’ fest gets a bumpy launch

 Jazz choice not a totally grand opener

 

Cyrus Chestnut plays Rhapsody in Blue Wednesday with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. | © Todd Rosenberg Photography

BY ANDREW PATNER

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra launched its three-week “Keys to the City” piano festival with a program Wednesday filled with bonhomie and whimsy but with decidedly mixed results.

Curators Emanuel Ax, one of America’s keyboard greats and perhaps the jolliest pianist alive, and CSO artistic vice president Martha Gilmer have been guided in part by a “more the merrier” principle in devising the festival’s near-myriad of concerts, recitals, symposia, do-it-yourself opportunities, family events, and demonstrations that will fill Orchestra Hall and Symphony Center through June 12.

Wednesday evening that emphasis meant Mozart’s 1779 E-Flat Major Concerto for Two Pianos, K. 365 stuck to its name in terms of instrumentation but featured four soloists rather than two.  In brief onstage comments, Ax explained that the first piano part, written by Mozart for his gifted older sister, Nannerl, would be taken by Israeli-American Orli Shaham and that, in a contemporary bow to chivalry, three different men would play opposite her.  Amusing, ahem, musical chairs took place during both place changes and page turning.

While this might sound gimmicky, it turned out to be an interesting and enjoyable exercise, in part because of Ax’s choice of young colleagues and the way he apportioned the concerto’s three movements: Each section either matched the temperament of the performer or found him bringing his own stamp to it.  Israeli Benjamin Hochman offered an attractively brainy and rhythmically spiky opening allegro, Ax himself made subtle, soft poetry out of the slow movement, and American Orion Weiss marched joyfully through the rondo finale.  Shaham was a fluid, flexible, and smiling partner to all three of her artistic suitors.

A seductive improviser with classical and jazz training and an ear and touch for quiet passage work and unusual harmonies, pianist Cyrus Chestnut seemed a brilliant choice to take on George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.  Whether due to nervousness, poor preparation, or a slip in technique, though, Chestnut seemed to be giving two different performances over the same quarter of an hour. His improvisatory passages showed a keen understanding of the work’s concept and of music that came before and after its landmark 1924 première, with moments of Chopin and bebop arising naturally in these stretches.

But in the written passages that are the bulk of the work, Chestnut repeatedly missed and mussed notes, overpedaled, and had trouble getting volume out of the Steinway.  (This last problem was due in part to the odd decision to use the full-sized Ferde Grofé orchestration rather than the more appropriate -- for a jazz pianist -- original jazz band version.) Guest conductor David Robertson was ingenious in not only doing his best to work with Chestnut’s erraticism but also in leading a wonderful performance of the orchestral side of this ever-brilliant piece.

Robertson, music director of the St. Louis Symphony and soon to add the top job at the Sydney (Australia) Symphony Orchestra, framed the program with two orchestra-only Ravel works that also have famous piano versions, one of which, the 1919-20 La valse, will be heard in its two-piano version with Ax and a young colleague in a program of duo piano works next Wednesday.

Opening with the 1911 Mother Goose Suite that Ravel drew from his 1908-10 children’s four-hand piano duet, Robertson demonstrated the focused, contemporary sense of French music he honed in his near-decade as music director of Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble InterContemporain. This was even more apparent in his taut, wholly -- and appropriately -- unsentimental concert-closing orchestral La valse.

Robertson, who is married to Shaham, and Ax continue with CSO subscription concerts Thursday night, Friday afternoon, and Saturday night with Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto No. 5 bracketed by Hindemith and Rachmaninoff orchestra pieces.

 

My (radio) guest tonight: Emanuel Ax, previewing the CSO's Keys to the City Piano Festival, May 23 to June 12

Emanuel Ax

Tonight from 10 to 11 p.m. CDT on Critical Thinking on 98.7WFMT Chicago -- and via free streaming anywhere at wfmt.com -- I talk with the esteemed pianist and ever jolly conversationalist Emanuel Ax about the upcoming Chicago Symphony Orchestra Keys to the City Piano Festival which he is curating.

 

The Fest launches this Wednesday night May 23rd at Orchestra Hall and is chock full of concerts, recitals, comedy programs, youth showcases, exploratory presentations, an amateur performance competition, collaborative works, a symposium jazz, improvisation, participatory events, including the first free Chicago Piano Day on Sunday, May 27, and, seriously, more as it runs through June 12 with a truly all-star and all you-should-hear international, national, and local line-up.

  

In addition to Ax, participants include actor and piano buff David Hyde Pierce, pianists Cyrus Chestnut, Marc-André Hamelin, Reginald Robinson, Stephen Hough, Kristian Bezuidenhout, Jeremy Denk, Stewart Goodyear, Trevor Pinnock, Erwin Helfer, Jason Moran, Danilo Pérez, Benjamin Hochman, Valentina Lisitsa, Jorge Federico Osorio, Orion Weiss, Orli Shaham, Jonathan Biss, Mary Sauer, Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes, classical music comedy duo Igudesman & Joo, the CSO, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Women of the CSO Chorus, hosts Gerard McBurney and WXRT's Terri Hemmert, additional soloists  tenor Nicholas Phan, violinist Stefan Jackiw and 'cellists Pavel Gamziakov and Katinka Kleijn, and conductors David Robertson, Mei-Ann Chen, Ludovic Morlot, and Pinnock.

 

On tonight's broadcast, I toss in a couple of name that performance recordings (with answers at the end of the hour). 

A full Festival brochure can be found here as a .pdf.  And a fully updated schedule and press release is here.

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

See you on the radio!

 

CSO and van Zweden: beauty, excitement, and the Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Thursday May 17, 2012

Jaap van Zweden offers beauty -- and (too much?) excitement -- with the CSO

Pokorny makes the tuba sing in concerto

 

Conductor Jaap van Zweden; soloist Gene Pokorny

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

with Gene Pokorny, tuba

◆ 8 p.m. Saturday at Wentz Hall in Naperville

◆ Tickets, $127-$152

◆ (312) 294-3000; www.cso.org

By ANDREW PATNER 

RECOMMENDED

The upcoming NATO Summit has played havoc with the city’s cultural landscape. Sold by the mayor as a means of “showcasing” Chicago, the meetings now will mean that museums will be closed for a full three days, with no reimbursement of lost income, and live performances have been canceled or oddly rescheduled.

 Fortunately, the opening of a Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription program on a Tuesday afternoon rather than a Thursday night went off well, with audience members transferring smoothly mostly from their original Friday afternoon series to the new odd day and time.

Jaap van Zweden, this week’s guest conductor at Orchestra Hall, has moved in less than four years from knock-out last-minute substitute to regular member of the CSO roster. Former concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in his native Amsterdam, van Zweden, 51, has been music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra since 2008 and will take up the Hong Kong Philharmonic helm this fall. Local audiences have come to expect excitement and innovative programming from this intense but upbeat musician.

Excitement they got, especially in a second-half Beethoven Symphony No. 7 presented as almost a race against time.  If there was nothing new or innovative in the first half, there was much beauty, starting with a wonderfully paced and led opener of Shostakovich’s so-called Chamber Symphony for Strings in C Minor, Op. 110a (actually a 1967 string orchestra transcription, by the composer’s friend the late Rudolf Barshai, of Shostakovich’s 1960 String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110) and a rare performance of a most unusual concerto.

Shostakovich so liked Barshai’s version of his quartet that he not only gave it his blessing but added it to his official catalog. It’s a mainstay of chamber orchestras, but the CSO has presented it only once before, four years ago, with, of all people, early music man John Eliot Gardiner. Van Zweden avoided unnecessary ratcheting up of the score and any bathos in this heavily self-referential material (try counting how many times Shostakovich uses his four-note musical monogram in the original, and you could go mad).  Instead, he and the reduced CSO strings brought out its almost ethereal side.  Concertmaster Robert Chen and Kenneth Olsen in the principal cello seat for this concert offered wholly effective solos.

Ethereal is the word, too, for, believe it or not, the slow movement romanza of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto (1953-54), especially as played by its most famous interpreter, legendary former CSO principal Arnold Jacobs, in performance and on recording with a young Daniel Barenboim. This week’s soloist is Jacobs’s more than worthy successor and fervent disciple, Gene Pokorny, CSO principal since 1989.

For six minutes, Pokorny convinces you that there is no more beautiful sound or instrument than in this English-music almost-love-song slow movement from the bass end of the brass section.  The opening prelude, with its astonishing run-filled cadenza, and the rapid finale are as convincing and hold their share of humor. But to be made to cry -- in a good way -- by a tuba is a rare pleasure.  This week’s program marks the work’s first performances here since those by Jacobs in the 1970s.  Too long a wait, especially with a musician of Pokorny’s caliber on hand. The humble soloist -- wearing a red tie picturing The Three Stooges -- earned several curtain calls.

There’s certainly no one way to play Beethoven’s beloved A Major Seventh.  But I still have a number of what admittedly were late career or summing-up interpretations in my head by other conductors on this stage and was a bit taken aback by van Zweden’s pedal-to-the-metal version. He held it together, though, and had such section leaders as Chen, flute Mathieu Dufour, clarinet John Bruce Yeh, and bassoon William Buchman and their seatmates racing along with him. The audience erupted in cheers and “bravos” at the end of the famous finale. Me, I prefer the van Zweden who brings excitement through depth as well.

The program was repeated as an intermissionless Wednesday Afterwork Masterworks concert and again Thursday evening. Orchestra, conductor, and soloist travel to the bright and intimate Wentz Concert Hall at Naperville's North Central College Saturday night, far from summiters and and their protestors.

 

CSO MusicNOW got its groove back -- and then slipped this season: concert 4 review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Tuesday May 15, 2012 

MusicNOW ends season with the now-usual hodgepodge

Too random, too loud for such a necessary CSO series

BY ANDREW PATNER 

The MusicNOW series is one of the most exciting things the Chicago Symphony Orchestra does.  It’s also one of the most frustrating.

Over the years, a large, youthful, and attentive audience has gravitated to these four new music programs at the Harris Theater each season.  Free pizza and beer after the shows truly seem to be conversation enablers rather than the ticket-sale enticements they started out as.  Literally hundreds of people are in the Harris lobby going at it about music, composers, and performance for at least an hour post-concert.  Invited DJs provide a talk-party ambience.

 At the same time, while musical execution by players mostly from the CSO is usually top-flight, presentation and format in the hall itself have become uneasy. Printed programs were jettisoned this year, replaced by a flimsy piece of paper, no bigger than a party flyer, with some website addresses on it.  Painfully amateur videos (often with barely intelligible audio) replace both notes and the onstage interviews that were a founding pillar of the series’ concept.  And this season, the repertoire selections by Mead composers-in-residence Mason Bates and Anna Clyne have seemed almost random.

The last installment of the 2011-12 season Monday night offered the usual hodgepodge of works by unconnected young composers with an extra layering of unneeded amplification and just unnecessary loudness.  Why chamber pieces need to be amplified in the Harris I don’t know.  And why pieces by Clyne (for live clarinet and electronic recording) and Ireland’s Irene Buckley needed to be played at ear-splitting volume might even be a legal matter.

The program opened with a refreshing change, “Sirens” (2009), an a cappella choral work by Bates, whom audiences know more for electro-acoustic pairings. But even here, only three of the piece’s six parts -- settings of a Renaissance Italian sonnet, Heine’s “Die Lorelei” and words from the Odyssey -- were offered. Conductor Duain Wolfe and the 12 members of the CSO Chorus were almost listless, compared to the tight and even haunting interpretation by the all-male Chanticleer, which commissioned the work.

Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Tres Homenajes: Compadrazgo” (2007), a piano quintet that celebrates Peruvian landscapes and people, inspired by a Latin idea of unspoken camaraderie, had moments, particularly the central adagio painting the life of an ecologically fragile coastal island. Buckley’s all-electronic (was it merely a recording itself?) “Rotation of the earth” (2010) and Clyne’s “Rapture” (2005) have a magnetism in recorded versions that seemed lacking here, especially with the volume settings. Having Brooklyn digital artist Joshue Ott make sketches projected on an overhead screen during these two works didn’t help the argument for their live performance, though clarinet soloist John Bruce Yeh’s playing was heroic.

By the time Brooklyn-based Sean Shepherd’s sextet “Lumens” (2005) wrapped up the bill, my ears were exhausted and my head hurt.  Which was a shame because the piece presented an intriguing blend of lyrical lines woven together in complex ways.  Cliff Colnot was the ever-steady conducting hand.

Next year’s series will have a work by a major composer on each concert and the addition of some Chicago voices. Let’s hope that everyone can still have fun if the music and the audiences are treated more seriously as well.

 

Lyric Opera of Chicago: 2011-2012 another break-even season, Andrew Davis renewed as music director to 2020-2021

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Monday May 14, 2012 9:32PM CDT

Lyric Opera breaks even for 2011-12

Davis extended as music director through 2020-2021

BY ANDREW PATNER 

Lyric Opera of Chicago prides itself on its fiscal and institutional stability. So its report of a balanced budget for its 2011-12 season, delivered Monday at the company’s annual meeting, came as no shock.

More remarkable was the contract extension for music director Andrew Davis through 2020-2021, announced three years before his current contract expires.

Davis, 68, joined Lyric as music director in 2000.

In an interview, Lyric’s general director Anthony Freud called his collaboration with Davis “one of the great joys of my professional life.” At at time when many other opera houses, most notably New York’s Metropolitan Opera, have uncertain musical leadership, Freud acknowledged Lyric’s unusual position of having a resident music director and principal conductor who plays an active and collaborative role in planning and executing all aspects of the company’s artistic life.  Davis’s wife, former singer Gianna Rolandi, directs Lyric’s highly respected Ryan Opera Center training program.

At the same time, Freud announced the start of a new strategic planning process “to generate new revenue streams from both operating and contributed income,” retain artistic strengths, increase community engagement and build "an even firmer financial foundation."

This season’s balanced budget was achieved in part by a planned tapping of $3.8 million from a non-renewable rainy-day fund.  

But Lyric surpassed by $500,000 its $20.6 million fund-raising goal, which was $3.4 million more than last year’s, making it the second-highest level of contributed income in its history, after the 2004-05 50th anniversary season. The company has now been in the black for  24 of the past 25 years.

Lyric’s operating expenses of $57.4 million also were also up from last year, by 7 percent. Season capacity at the almost 3,600-seat Civic Opera House was down, from 91 percent to 88 percent, but ticket revenue for an eight-production season with four additional performances (72 regular presentations, two student-matinée performances, and one subscriber-appreciation concert) was up $1.3 million from last year to $25 million.

Lyric sold about the same number of subscription and individual tickets this season as last, 233,113 to 229,775.  A women’s board wine auction was cited as one of the most successful fund-raising event in Lyric’s 57-year history.

Fully audited statements are to be issued in August.

Presiding over his first annual meeting as general director, Freud credited Lyric’s strong family of donors and board leadership, singling out president and CEO Kenneth G. Pigott, a Chicago investor who also chaired the search that led to Freud’s appointment. Freud also praised Pigott’s predecessor and current Lyric chairman, investment banker Richard P. Kiphart, for launching the rainy-day “Campaign for Excellence” fund.

But Freud also cautioned that “extraordinary additional marketing efforts were needed to reach our excellent individual ticket sales number this year.”  He called it “the wave of the future” for the once almost advance-subscription-only company.

A Briton, Freud shares his predecessor William Mason’s and Lyric creative consultant soprano Renée Fleming’s enthusiasm for American musical theatre as a part of Lyric’s renewed mission. He pointed out that this season’s 13 performances of Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat sold at 95 percent capacity and that close to 50 percent of the single-ticket buyers were first-time Lyric attendees.

He also noted that in her new position, Fleming had already met her goals “to curate a world première, expand Lyric’s educational and community-engagement programming, foster new community partnerships, and initiate new marketing efforts.”

For 2012-2013, Lyric’s calendar will expand to include 16 post-season performances of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! in May 2013.  That will create a 14-month fiscal year ending June 30 rather than April 30.  Total operating expenses for fiscal year 2013 are therefore projected to increase by more than $8 million to $65.7 million and the fund-raising goal will be hiked by $2.3 million to $22.9 million.  Four performances of a ninth production, André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire also will increase expenses but, along with Oklahoma!, will up ticket sales as well.

Pigott announced that union negotiations were proceeding as planned with the orchestra and the alliance representing the chorus, other singers, and dancers for contracts that expired April 30.

As Freud has in the past, Pigott offered unusually positive comments on labor relations: “Our union members are a major source of artistic excellence and pride to the company. I am optimistic that they will continue to partner with us to ensure a strong and viable financial future for Lyric.”

 

My (radio) guest tonight: Studs Terkel, my 2005 interview with him on music and his long-running WFMT radio program

Studs Terkel, 1912-2008 -- "Curiosity did not kill *this* cat!"

This Wednesday May 16 marks Studs Terkel's centennial.  He came closer to reaching 100 than he had ever expected, making it to 96, and with all of his marbles.

Tonight from 10 to 11 p.m. CDT on Critical Thinking on 98.7WFMT Chicago -- and via free streaming anywhere at wfmt.com -- I'll rebroadcast my 2005 WFMT interview with Studs discussing his then new book, And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey.

Studs talks about his disc jockey days in general and the music editions of The Studs Terkel Program which aired for 45 years, from 1952-1997, on WFMT. 

It is also the only interview that I know of with Studs where he discusses in detail his passion for opera and opera singers including Rosa Raisa, Lotte Lehmann, and "his" diva, Claudia Muzio. 

We play opera scenes with Raisa, Lehmann, Muzio, and a song by Studs's old friend Woody Guthrie as well.

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

See you on the radio!

Various events are planned for Wednesday May 16 and afterwards.  I am hosting one at the Chicago History Museum where Studs was Distinguished Scholar in Residence fot 11 years after leaving WFMT.  It will run from 6:30 to 8 p.m. or so and there is a nominal fee.  Information is here.

My  live audience interview program with Studs during the  June 2004 reunion weekend at The University of Chicago can be heard  here.

 

Detroit's excellent Alexander Hanna named new CSO principal bass

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Monday May 14, 2012

New CSO principal bass appointed 

Hanna of Detroit, 26, heads to Chicago

BY ANDREW PATNER

Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti has appointed Alexander Hanna to the David and Mary Green Principal Bass chair, effective June 4.

Hanna, 26, is currently principal bass of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, a post he has held since 2008, immediately after graduating from the Curtis Institute of Music.  

The CSO principal bass position has been vacant since Joseph Guastafeste retired two years ago after nearly half a century in the post.

Hanna won auditions this winter and then had a successful two weeks sitting in the position with the orchestra under Muti in March subscription concerts.  He also led the section on the CSO's recently completed two-week tour of Russia and Italy.

An active performer and teacher around the country, the Bowling Green, Ohio, native has also been principal bass of the Tanglewood Music Center, Verbier, and other top summer festivals. 

 

Lang Lang in recital, as presented by Lyric Opera of Chicago: well how about that?

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Sunday May 13, 2012 10:16 PM CDT

In Lyric recital, pianist Lang Lang goes easy on the antics

Maturity combines with magnetism in large venue success

Lang Lang performs before a near capacity crowd Saturday at the Civic Opera House. | Robert Kusel photo

BY ANDREW PATNER 

“Are you going to the circus?” was the question I heard most often in the run-up to Saturday night’s piano recital by international classical superstar Lang Lang at the massive Civic Opera House.

A rather frenetic radio campaign by presenter Lyric Opera of Chicago touted the performer as a “dervish of the keyboard” and promised an overhead camera and live screen projection of “Lang Lang’s hands.” And a tendency to spectacle by the Chinese-born, Curtis Institute (Philadelphia) graduate that has run through his phenomenal, almost 13-year career was a reasonable cause for worry by some.

But those who have watched this young man closely -- he turns 30 just next month -- since his last-minute, major venue début at Ravinia in 1999 know that he is a performer of many parts. When he wants to focus his unique and even breathtaking technical ability and share his artistic investigations rather than crazy hairdos, onstage antics, or over-the-top programming or interpretation, he can hold an audience as few others can with playing that is remarkably musical.

Perhaps because he truly values his connection to Chicago -- not only his Ravinia début and early mentorship from Christoph Eschenbach but his later much tougher schooling from former Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Daniel Barenboim -- or perhaps because he knows how to value an event historically, it was clear from his first walking out on stage Saturday that he was in serious, though not solemn, mode.

Love him or roll your eyes at him, Lang Lang is all about sincerity. And in presenting major works of Bach, Schubert, and Chopin he was wanting both to demonstrate his desire to be accepted as an artist and to do something more. I think that he wanted to show the near capacity crowd of more than 3,500 and the critics and potential naysayers among them the power of an old-fashioned piano recital, the possibility of a single person on a stage and the silent attention of several thousand people creating a communal artistic event.

Amid uncertainty since the concert’s announcement last summer of how a piano recital would fit in to Lyric’s purpose and whether the large house could be sold, new general director Anthony Freud appeared down to the wire to be taking a big public relations and financial risk.  The apparent box-office success instead would show him to be remarkably canny and forward-thinking.  The evening took me back -- in feel, if not in every aspect of onstage execution -- to the excitement and involvement that would come from Vladimir Horowitz’s Sunday afternoon recitals at Orchestra Hall or Claudio Arrau’s rare appearances at the Auditorium Theatre. When an all-ages, all-backgrounds crowd -- certainly the largest representation of Chinese ticketholders at a major concert in Chicago -- sees how important a piano recital can be, all aspects of classical music benefit.

This is Lang Lang’s current standard recital program, and in its hold-the-shenanigans version it succeeded musically as well.  His is big, old-fashioned Bach playing -- and you can put up all of the historically informed performance arguments you like without taking a thing away from a slow-movement Sarabande in the B-Flat Major Partita No. 1, BWV 825 that shows how he can combine complexity with a slowing down of time.  His offering of Schubert’s last sonata, also in B-Flat Major, D. 960 was astonishingly well-balanced and flowing, none of the start-and-stop for effect that he can easily slip into.

Chopin’s second book of 12 Études, Op. 25, has been a Lang Lang calling card since he was a little boy.  Here, in the last ones, we did get some theatricality at the piano bench, an occasional “Taxi!” gesture with a raised right hand, and even a once-trademark moony stare at the audience.  And he certainly delivers no trace of Polish origin in these dauntingly difficult miniatures. But it’s hard to think of anyone else who makes their complexities seem so flowing and inevitable. While the screen projection could have been more logically focused and with fewer zooms in and out, it actually served to broadcast this fluidity and surely helped those sitting in the three tiers of balconies at the back of the house.

A gentle encore of the third étude from Chopin’s earlier Op. 10 set and a beyond virtuosic -- even operatic? -- rendition of Liszt’s “La Campanella” from his own Paganini Études were the alpha and omega encores on the American Steinway “D.”  Lang Lang and Freud had a plan. And they pulled it off.  Good for them.

 

Civic Orchestra of Chicago and Ryan Opera Center -- CSO and Lyric training programs shine in first joint concert

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Tuesday May 8, 2012 4:58PM CDT

Ryan Opera Center and the Civic Orchestra make beautiful music together

BY ANDREW PATNER 

 The Ryan Opera Center of Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Civic Orchestra of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have parallel missions in training young professional classical musicians and giving them performance opportunities. But the two had never worked or appeared together until they present a “collaborative concert” Monday night at Orchestra Hall under Lyric Opera music director Andrew Davis.

The concert was a part of a continued coming out for the Ryan Center, one of the country’s top apprentice opportunities, along with those in San Francisco, Houston, and at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.  In addition to their supporting and other stage roles with the main company at the Civic Opera House, participants have sung often with the Grant Park Orchestra, and during Brian Dickie’s wise stewardship of Chicago Opera Theater, they became a regular source for major casting there.

But the Civic pairing marks a new opportunity. Though that orchestra has done some operatic material in the past (CSO principal trombone Jay Friedman led a remarkable Act 1 of Wagner’s Die Walküre back in 1998), as with many symphonic ensembles, opera hasn’t been a part of its daily bread.

The program Monday of full acts from Puccini’s La bohème and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, along with an orchestra-only opener of “The Dance of the Hours” from Ponchielli’s La gioconda, underscored the importance of such crossover and collaboration for the performers and provided great pleasure for the focused and appreciative audience.

The Civic had home court advantage and safety in numbers. Still, the continuing discipline and prep that the members get from their principal conductor Cliff Colnot was on constant display; this probably meant that Davis had an easier time working with the Civic on the support and flexibility that an opera orchestra must show regularly. Once again, the Civic demonstrated that it is as fine as many a regional full-time orchestra.

Ryan singers have one-year appointments, which are usually extended to two terms and can run to a maximum of three seasons. For the Ryan’s current 11 singers, the concert Monday was their first work as a unit, and they proved as balanced and coöperative a group as any yet fielded. There were no apparent superstars in the making, but producing them is not the central purpose of such programs.

Third-year bass Evan Boyer showed some of his best and most stylish work as Colline in the final act of Bohème and as Figaro in the second act of the Mozart. Second-year baritone Joseph Lim displayed attractive confidence and clarity, especially as Schaunard in Bohème, a role he will perform next season at Lyric as well. Second-year tenor Bernard Holcomb and first-year baritone Will Liverman were well-matched as bohemian best friends Rodolfo and Marcello.

As Mimi, Canadian first-year soprano Tracy Cantin made sure there were no dry eyes when her character dies. In the Mozart, Cantin as the Countess, second-year soprano Kiri Deonarine as Susanna, and mezzo Cecelia Hall in the trouser role of Cherubino were stand-outs. Meanwhile, Ryan Center director Gianna Rolandi contributed effective semi-staging, especially in the Puccini, and her young singers were absolutely game. Lyric’s William Billingham took the reduced but still essential harpsichord part in the Mozart.

Let’s hope that this is the beginning of a strong partnership.