Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Riccardo Muti and company find receptive audience at Cook County juvenile detention center -- My Sun-Times story

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Sunday September 30, 2012 9:10PM CDT

Riccardo Muti and company find receptive audience at juvenile detention center

BY ANDREW PATNER

The youths incarcerated at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center on the West Side are not as cut off from the outside world as the inmates of the infamous old Audy Home were.

But it’s not every day that they spend two hours with a world-famous conductor, a pair of international opera singers and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Brass Quintet.

And that’s what 54 of them did Sunday afternoon in the chapel of their facility at Hamilton and Roosevelt.

When Riccardo Muti was announced as CSO music director-designate in 2008, he said he wanted to take music “everywhere,” to reach out to “all communities,” to go to people “not accustomed to the type of music that we make.”

He wanted, he said, “to take the orchestra to a prison.”

Whether he ever succeeds in bringing the full 100-plus CSO to a Johnny Cash-style concert for the imprisoned, as he starts his third season as CSO artistic leader he has again made it clear how serious he is about this mission.

Two years ago, Muti visited the Illinois State Youth Center for girls in west suburban Warrenville along with some members of the CSO Chorus, playing the piano for the residents, accompanying vocal selections and talking to the girls about their dreams.

Preparations for the visit Sunday involved recruiting the right singers and CSO musicians to connect with the overwhelmingly male, largely black and Latino youths, ages 10 to 17, awaiting adjudication for criminal charges, ranging from disorderly conduct to theft, rape, manslaughter and homicide.

Muti took them as seriously as any paying concert audience as he accompanied Eric Owens, the charismatic African-American bass who recently starred as Alberich the dwarf in the Metropolitan Opera’s internationally telecast “Ring” cycle, and golden-voiced Cuban-American tenor Raul Melo in arias by Verdi, Bellini, Mozart, Puccini and a song by Tosti.

The young people focused on these performances better and more quietly than many an audience at Orchestra Hall or on the CSO’s European tours. “We wish you good luck,” Muti told the assembly. “We think of your dreams.”

“You could feel their attention,” Muti said afterward. “I know these things after almost 50 years.”

The youths also attend the Chicago Public Schools-administered Nancy B. Jefferson Alternative High School on site, and so teachers and supervisors had a sense that they were ready for such a visit.

Owens, who flew in Sunday from San Francisco, where he opened Saturday night in a run of Bellini’s “The Capulets and the Montagues” at San Francisco Opera, said afterward, “I had to be here. This is the most important work I can do.”

Melo, who flew in Sunday from Charlotte, N.C., where he is in rehearsals for Puccini’s “Tosca” with Opera Carolina, said, “This is a real honor.”

When CSO trumpeters Christopher Martin and Tage Larsen, horn David Griffin, trombone Michael Mulcahy and tuba Gene Pokorny followed Muti, Owens and Melo with a brass arrangement of Aaron Copland’s music for Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” and Kerry Turner’s original “The Casbah at Tetouan,” the audience’s focus remained. But bodies started bobbing, legs started bopping and at least a few heads of dreads started shaking with the music.

“What do you want to know from us?” Muti asked.

“What inspired you to become musicians?” “How much does the tuba weigh?” “What’s the difference between how you play the trumpet and the trombone?” came the questions.

The post-CSO strike topical question did not go unasked: “How much y’all make? What kind of wages you pull down?”

Just before the youth were applauded as enthusiastically for their intense listening and questions, one girl turned to Muti and said with a big smile, “I know this man. He probably doesn’t remember me. But we met in Warrenville and went out of the lockup together. I know him.” Muti walked back over to her for a hearty handshake.

Then a young man’s voice came from one end of the space that had been transformed into a temporary recital hall.

“I don’t know what you all was playing or what you was saying. But you all did your thing. You really did your thing.”

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CSO and Riccardo Muti: after the strike, it’s on with a gala concert -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Sunday September 30, 2012 8:16PM CDT

After the strike, it’s on with a gala concert for Muti and the CSO

BY ANDREW PATNER

Jitters, relief and joy seemed present in equal measure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s gala concert and Symphony Ball fund-raiser Saturday night at Symphony Center and the Fairmont Chicago Hotel.

“How grouchy do you find our musicians are right now?” one longtime CSO patron of a liberal bent asked me at the post-concert, pre-dinner cocktail hour.

For his part, music director Riccardo Muti said, “Stay close to your orchestra,” to loud applause from the black-tie audience during impromptu remarks from the podium after leading the CSO and superstar violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter in nearly 90 intermissionless minutes of music. “They represent Chicago to the world.”

Last week’s 48-hour strike by orchestra musicians was never mentioned directly in the speeches at both venues Saturday. But outgoing CSO Association chairman William A. Osborn, credited by both sides of the dispute with helping to reach a settlement when he unexpectedly joined negotiating sessions Monday afternoon, did make an odd set of comments onstage Saturday. Referring to the players as “our world-famous orchestra,” the retired Northern Trust banker, added with a chuckle, “I’m going to call you that from now on.”

Was Osborn’s “from now on” line in contrast with the slogan adopted by CSO management during his highly successful six-year tenure, “World’s Best. Chicago’s Own”? That was the line that some observers said tripped up the trustees when they wanted the musicians to shift down to second- or third- or fourth-best in compensation while still being expected to be tops in commitment and execution.

But grouchiness was undetected Saturday. Music, conversation and dancing were the order of the evening.

Launching his third season with trademark unusual repertoire last week, a visit to a Cook County juvenile detention facility Sunday afternoon, three season-opening concerts at New York’s Carnegie Hall this week and the CSO’s first trip to Mexico next week, Muti had his customary tricks up his white-tie sleeves with works that on paper looked predictable.

Though he has expressed sus­picions about Richard Wagner’s operas, and much Germanic music in general, Muti is superb in bringing out the intense musicality of these works. The 1841 overture to the “Flying Dutchman,” the first entry in the Wagner canon, and programmed to mark the centenary of former CSO music director Georg Solti, made one long for the insight and lightness Muti would bring to a CSO concert performance of one of Wagner’s Bayreuth operas. The conductor’s impishness was evident in following the “Dutchman” opener with Mendelssohn’s 1844 Violin Concerto. Just a few years after Mendelssohn’s death in 1847, Wagner would unleash his vulgar attack on the composer for setting back the German arts by inserting “Jewishness in music.”

Mutter’s Mendelssohn was at times Germanic but certainly never vulgar and always alluring; she offered one of the speediest performances ever of the work yet one that was ever respectful and that explored technical finesse while turning the score’s intricacies into one rather remarkable long line. Having saved the day at the 2010 gala when Muti fell ill just before concert time, the ever-glamorous Mutter was entitled to her individual take this time.

The banishment of vulgarity is a constant Muti mission. His rare indoor closer of Tchaikovsky’s "1812" Overture (of 1880) was both an aural and visual refined treat from the CSO’s small choir of six cellos and violas that lay out the insinuating initial theme to the competition of French and Russian national melodies to the ringing of church bells at Russia’s triumph over Napoleon. Only the use of synthesized 16 cannon firings undercut this rescaling of what is too often merely a party piece.

“Stay close” to this orchestra, Chicago, as it builds on its many strengths with this unique partnership with this special artist.

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Chicago Symphony Orchestra strike is over, but if you missed my analysis . . . My WFMT report

here's my 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and wfmt.com report that aired live Monday morning September 24, Chicago time. 18 minute audio:

http://blogs.wfmt.com/andrewpatner/2012/09/24/special-report-cso-strike/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=special-report-cso-strike

CSO and Riccardo Muti in third annual free 'Concert for Chicago' offer powerful and delicate 'Carmina Burana' -- My Sun-Times review

NOTE: After this review was filed on
Friday night, Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians went out on strike late Saturday afternoon.

Chicago Sunday Sun-Times and Saturday suntimes.com, September 22, 2012

CSO/Muti Free "Concert for Chicago"

Millennium Park review

By ANDREW PATNER

A free one-time outdoor concert of "Carmina Burana" with the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Riccardo Muti might conjure up an image of a
huge crowd with dicey musical results.

The opposite obtained early Friday evening when what was technically the last
night of summer was one of the few rainy ones of that season. in 2910, Muti
launched his first season as CSO music director with a Millennium Park concert
that drew 25,000 people. The uncooperative heavens kept this year's numbers to
about 7,000 with many in ponchos and even tents on the lawn, and umbrellas
everywhere except in the front of the fixed seats at the Pritzker Pavilion.

On the other hand, musical results were much greater than those at Orchestra
Hall in the same work at the beginning of the calendar year. A new set of
soloists included two -- Italian soprano Rosa Feola and Norwegian baritone Audun
Iversen -- who were marked improvements over the subscription concert guests.

But it was the tremendous warmth and focused comfort of the orchestra and a
chorus that was on fire this time around that set this performance apart.
Whether because of increased familiarity and experience with Muti's combination
of passion and analysis with this piece or in anticipation of taking the work
and forces to New York to open the Carnegie Hall season the first week of
October, this was a fully engaged presentation of the controversial hour-long
work inspired by secular poems from a medieval Bavarian monastery.

Feola had an attractive sound from her first entrance, but as the evening went
on she became increasingly seductive and even delicate. Iversen displayed
confidence across the wide range called for In his parts. Florentine
countertenor Antonio Giovannini faced the same challenges that his January
predecessor did: the voice category just does not offer the needed strain -- and
slight perversity? -- of a high natural tenor singing these dark lyrics.

Duain Wolfe's chorus, almost somnolent in the indoor performances, here had the
rhythmic energy and control, a care with words, and an attractive sound across
all sections. Memets if the Chicago Children's Choir, standouts last time
around, here were much more equally matched. The orchestra, from principal
Mathieu Dufour's haunting flute solos to the delicacy of the tiny orchestra-only
"round dance" to the many full-throttle passages that never became vulgar, gave
a commited performance perhaps better than the 1937 Nazi-era German piece
deserves.

Muti,who has made to clear how dear "Carmina" is to him, came as close as he
ever has to demonstrating that this is a work of power and pessimism rather than
banal celebration. The only time that he seemed to be even more engaged during
the program was when he was vigorously conducting the not yet soggy audience in
a full-throated season-launching sing of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

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Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians go on strike Saturday night; your correspondent is home ill

Obviously a conspiracy.

;-(

To my two (three?) readers

I am hoping to have this site rebooted and up and running again with new material soon.

Meanwhile, you should be able to find my reviews, articles, and other posts on my facebook page which is an "open" page and does not require your being my facebook "friend" to read or open links.

Googling "Andrew Patner" should lead to most of my Chicago Sun-Times pieces and just about *all* of my WFMT Radio reviews, essays, interviews, and other programs can be found at:

http://wfmt.com/criticalthinking

I can also be reached directly at [email protected].

Thanks for your patience and thanks for reading and listening!