Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW: Anna Clyne's latest -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Wednesday February 27, 2013

Anna Clyne.  By Denise Anderson/Boosey & Hawkes

MusicNOW offers world première of Anna Clyne’s ‘As Sudden Shut’

Large, young, enthusiastic crowd at Harris

BY ANDREW PATNER  

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW offered a tight program to one of its largest and most youthful audiences Monday night at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park.

Curators Anna Clyne and Mason Bates, each CSO Mead composers-in-residence, have clearly developed a following in Chicago. They blend brief but often spiky concerts with pre- and post-performance scenes at the Harris, the latter with free pizza and beer and musicians present. On May 10, they’ll also host their third Mercury Soul night at Metro nightclub in Wrigleyville.  In addition to turning out works for the full CSO to play (Bates’s Alternate Energy has toured to good response with Riccardo Muti and the orchestra to California and Carnegie Hall), the two young artists have clearly fulfilled their mission to build up an interest among their contemporaries and those coming up behind them.

MusicNOW has also given young conductors a showcase in addition to its expert principal conductor Cliff Colnot. Chicago resident Edwin Outwater has had success with the concerts and American-Israeli Benjamin Shwartz (right), 33, currently shuttling between Germany and the United States was on the podium Monday for three of the four works. He displayed a combination of attractive easygoingness with a stick-to-the-score authority. And he doubled as a good commentator in a brief video introducing the evening’s longest work, REMIX by Austrian G.F. Haas.

The four works grew in length and numbers of players leading up to the Haas. A happily chugging 2011 4-minute string quartet by Dave Maric, 42, from the United Kingdom, “Run Chime” was a great, cleverly-crafted, curtain-raiser, and could find a place as an encore.

Veteran American Steven Stucky’s 17-minute Piano Quintet (2010) was, as with so much of the Cornell University professor’s work, attractive, hardly path-breaking; described by Stucky in his video intro as “surprising” and “alternating,” it’s pleasant enough but repetitive. CSO assistant principal cello Kenneth Olsen was first among equals.

Clyne offered a world première MusicNOW commission, “As Sudden Shut,” the first of what the British-born émigré hopes will be a cycle of five works based on Emily Dickinson poems. Here, three women from the CSO Chorus intoned Dickinson’s words about a passed door that opens to reveal lively goings-on inside and then, boom: shuts. A light, folklike sound and setting, reminiscent of Benjamin Britten, is set against the low, deep resonant sounds that Clyne often uses as a base or contrast. The 11-minute work spreads and repeats more than Dickinson’s famed economy of words.  Perhaps other settings will be even tighter.

This is a big time for Haas in Chicago -- at last. Thursday night the Austrian composer’s landmark “in vain” (2000) will be performed by the local ensemble dal niente at the Ruth Page Center on the Gold Coast, and May 7, the new music Ensemble 20+ at DePaul University offers more of his time- and sound-bending works.  REMIX, befitting its name, is a 25-minute mash-up of virtuosic snippets from earlier Haas works intended to come together in a “total sonority.” Shwartz seemed to supervise the many sonic car crashes precisely, and if no new ground was broken, a good time appeared to be had by all.

June 3 holds the final Harris concert of the season, with a Bates première and a work by Brazilian composer Marcos Balter of Columbia College Chicago.

 

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My (radio) guest tonight: Esa-Pekka Salonen, on composers

Esa-Pekka Salonen © 2012 Sonja Werner

Tonight on 98.7WFMT Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com from 10:05 p.m. to 11:05 p.m CST (there's an opera broadcast tonight beforehand) my guest is Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, in town for two weeks of concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, through March 2.

In our first recorded conversation (taped February 20 at Orchestra Hall) with the former longtime music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, I ask him about three composers with whom he was or is close and whose music he has conducted on three recently released CDs -- Witold Lutosławski, Henri Dutilleux, and . . . Esa-Pekka Salonen.  Musical examples are provided. And he gives us some bonus time on another composer whose music (from Tristan and Isolde) made up his concerts last week.

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

See you on the radio!

 

 

Chicago Opera Theater: Philip Glass's 'The Fall of the House of Usher': a good and daring choice -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Monday February 25, 2013

Chicago Opera Theater’s ‘Usher’ launches an exciting new era

New chief Andreas Mitisek makes a statement

Lee Gregory (from left), Ryan MacPherson and Suzan Hanson in the Chicago Opera Theater production of Philip Glass's "The Fall of the House of Usher," based on the Edgar Allan Poe story.

‘THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER’

♦ Wednesday February 27 and Friday March 1, 7:30 p.m.

♦ Chicago Opera Theater at the Harris, 205 East Randolph Drive

♦ Tickets, $35-$120

♦(312) 704-8414, chicagooperatheater.com

 

BY ANDREW PATNER 

RECOMMENDED

In 2000, Brian Dickie launched a new era for Chicago Opera Theater with a production of Monteverdi’s 1607 Orfeo, putting a British Mozart specialist in the orchestra pit and a new-to-the-genre downtown New York theater director handling the interpretation.

Saturday night, it was Andreas Mitisek’s turn to share his vision with something unusual, the Chicago première of Philip Glass’s 1987 take on the Edgar Allan Poe tale, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Mitisek, COT’s new general diretor, himself led the 13-member chamber ensemble of local musicians; Ken Cazan, who had also worked with Dickie, set the dark interpretation and strange story on the stage.

The commitment to quality by the two leaders, though, was the same. And while no one will claim that Glass, at least in this relatively modest but lyrical and sometimes even surprising score, is a match for Monteverdi, the idea of serving composer and drama with strong singing, design, and focus was all there.

Dickie had to wait three years to move his brand of excitement and rediscovery from a quaint former Catholic school auditorium in Lake View to the then-new Harris Theater in Millennium Park. Mitisek starts with the technical and acoustic advantages of the downtown venue and brings additional cost savings, too: He also heads Long Beach Opera in Southern California, and productions and casts can be shared between the two comparable and flexible companies.

Until Mitisek is more established in Chicago, that sharing is from west to east; the operatic jack of all trades -- manager, conductor, director, designer, marketer, and sometimes all five -- was able to bring COT the Long Beach production of Usher, which had its debut in San Pedro, California, less than a month ago.

It was a good and daring choice. The Glass name and the looping, minimal, and intentionally repetitive sounds it conjures up have both built-in attraction for some and are a hard sell for others. But this 80-minute chamber piece is a tightly focused explication of the Poe story of a young man who finds himself compelled to answer a cry for help by a wealthy, brilliant, and disturbed childhood friend who is the last of his line.

Poe’s story never makes clear why the man does so, coming close to sacrificing his life, and librettist Arthur Yorinks leaves the question open. Cazan answers it, in your face but reasonably: The visitor William and the heir Roderick Usher have a sexual and emotional attraction. The possibly imaginary Madeline Usher, whether Roderick’s twin or hallucination, expresses the drug-addled artist’s very mixed and complex longings.

The three lead singers, all new to Chicago, are well cast vocally and physically. Baritone Lee Gregory conveys William’s own combination of innocence and desire with a compelling voice and stage presence. Ryan MacPherson grabs Roderick’s multifaceted personality and has a tenor both strong and seductive enough to ride the score’s high passage work. Soprano Suzan Hanson, who created the role of Madeline a quarter century ago, makes the sounds and movements of her wordless part both frightening and convincing.

Tenor Jonathan Mack as a dour Dr. Feelgood and bass-baritone Nick Shelton as the Usher family servant round out the cast. The eight silent goth young men who both move Alan E. Muraoka’s imaginatively designed modular set pieces around and menace William seem hokey at first and too literally connected to the “gothic” story, but they grow on you. David Martin Jacques’s lighting and Jacqueline Saint Anne’s costumes move easily across time and from fantasy to reality and back.

Greeting the audience Mitisek, in crutches and a plastic splint (due to a recent slip on the ice by the California arrival) added a twist to the “break a leg” wish for theatre success. He brought out the subtleties in Glass’s music, including his use of guitar (Steve Roberts), Poe’s choice for Roderick’s own instrument. He’s off to a personal, provocative start.

CSO 'Tristan' Prelude and Act II with Esa-Pekka Salonen -- and a mixed bag of soloists -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday February 22, 2013 11:58AM CST

Guest vocalists stumble in CSO’s ‘Tristan’ program

Conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen 

 

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

◆ 8 p.m. Saturday; “Beyond the Score,” 3 p.m. Sunday

◆ Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue

◆ Tickets, $10-$243

◆ (312) 294-3000, cso.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

 
"This sweet little word ‘and’ . . .” the eternally smitten Isolde sings in the seemingly eternal Act II love scene of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. It’s what binds the title characters together and makes them more than just two names.

It’s also the key to a successful presentation of the great mid-19th century work that changed music history forever. Especially in a concert version, because Wagner requires great orchestral playing and direction and great singers to realize his massive yet highly communicative works.

Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, guest conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who has been presenting a highly acclaimed Tristan worldwide since 2004, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra came close to offering the first half of the equation in a concert performance of the famous Prelude to Act I and the entire 75-minute Act II, played together without a break.

But the second half, the “and” -- great singing -- was not present, with a particularly unmusical Tristan making it hard in long stretches of the sung-through work to concentrate on Wagner’s overall creation and concept or the playing going on behind the tenor, the German Stefan Vinke in his CSO debut.

The lack of chemistry between Vinke and debutante American dramatic soprano Linda Watson made for another sorely missed “and.” (Watson at some point in the last few months replaced the previously announced Evelyn Herlitzius, who will be Salonen’s Elektra in a highly anticipated new production in Aix-en-Provence, France, this summer.)

Were it not for the rolling sound and dramatic and psychological insight of American bass-baritone John Relyea as the betrayed King Marke, and several fine moments by CSO favorite mezzo Michelle DeYoung as Isolde’s companion Brangäne (including some sung, with an hypnotic nonchalance, from the hall’s lower balcony seats), the performance would have been a total vocal washout. (Tenor Sean Panikkar was a fine and creepy Melot, but this is a tiny Act II part.) Remarkably, Relyea, who has appeared successfully at Ravinia with the CSO, is making his downtown subscription debut as well.

Castings are hard, particularly in Wagner's bicentennial year when his operas are being presented globally non-stop. And no one anywhere today can match the CSO’s first Tristan, Lauritz Melchior, who sang the part here with Frederick Stock in 1935. But it’s not easy to take the measure of the singing of the orchestra itself with this sort of thing going on downstage.

That said, after what impressed as a particularly stretched Prelude, Salonen led the act itself with the clarity, flexibility, and attention to sound quality that are his hallmarks at his best. Surely the connection will be even greater by the repeat performance Saturday night. Although only bass clarinet J. Lawrie Bloom was given a much deserved solo bow -- his part is another “and,” almost an additional character in the opera -- oboe Eugene Izotov and bassoon William Buchman also deserve kudos.

It may be no one’s fault, but for the main Wagner salute in two seasons by one of the world’s great Wagner orchestras, one wished for -- and audiences and musicians were entitled to -- much more “and” here.

 

 

Haymarket Opera Company an instant success in Chicago, Purcell's 'Dido' up this coming weekend -- My Sun-Times Sunday 'Show' feature

My Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com Sunday Show feature, February 10, 2013

Haymarket Opera Company an instant success in Chicago

Growth in only 18 months 'like a big dream'

Marc Molomot was Orpheus in Haymarket Opera Company's, second production La descente d’Orphée aux enfers in 2012. | Wendy Benner Photography

‘DIDO AND AENEAS’

◆ 7:30 p.m. Friday February 15 and 7 p.m. February 16

◆ Haymarket Opera at Mayne Stage, 1328 West Morse Avenue (6944 North)

◆ Tickets, $38, $53

◆ haymarketopera.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

So let’s get this straight.

Classical music is supposed to be dying. There’s a recession going on. There’s no audience for little-known 17th and 18th century operas from before the time of what’s usually presented by grand opera companies.

So how is it that just 18 months after launching its first production out of nowhere that Haymarket Opera Company has been selling out its performances, getting universal critical praise (even from The New York Times), making everything from scratch and coming in on budget, and is about to open production No. 4, its largest yet, and looking toward the future with a committed board?

“It’s all been like a big dream,” said Haymarket founder and general (and music) director Craig Trompeter. “But a dream that has been a combination of hard work and pleasant surprise and constant education.”

Between rehearsals for Henry Purcell’s 1688 Dido and Aeneas, set to run Friday and Saturday, February 15 and 16 at the Mayne Stage in the Rogers Park neighborhood, Trompeter reflected on having a good idea at the right time and with the right people with whom to achieve it.

“This was just something I had wanted to do for a long while,” said Trompeter, 42, a popular player of the 'cello and its earlier incarnation, the viola da gamba, since coming to Chicago 15 years ago after studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music. “Through groups that I’ve played with here,” including Baroque Band, Music of the Baroque and the Newberry Consort, among others, “I knew that there was a real hunger -- on the part of performers as well as audiences -- for early opera and for something intimate."

From his work with contemporary composer and former Chicagoan John Eaton, on the other end of the chronological spectrum, Trompeter also knew that he wanted to create something theatrical. Eaton’s “pocket operas” actually have the musicians playing and singing and moving actively about the performance space. With singer and stage director Ellen Hargis, a longtime colleague through Newberry and other projects, and with violinist Jeri-Lou Zike, in many ways a counterpart to Trompeter on her instrument, and his partner, David Rice, Trompeter moved quickly to get the company going.

Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, Haymarket’s début production, is a rarity, but the 1708 Handel dramatic cantata was compact enough that it would allow Haymarket to do what it wanted instrumentally, vocally, and in terms of costuming and set design. The intimacy of the Mayne Stage’s near 300-capacity theater added to the attraction and made for reasonable ticket-selling goals. (Although technically state of the art, the Mayne Stage has the shape and space of the private and court theatres where these works were originally given.) When the show went up after Labor Day 2011, he said, “We were almost unprepared for the wave of interest before we had sung or played a single note.”

The houses were sold out, an extra performance was added, and the rave reviews rolled in. In the meantime, too, Brian Dickie was retiring after 13 years at the helm of Chicago Opera Theater, and his designated successor, Andreas Mitisek, had different ideas for the city’s second opera company, ones that would no longer make Baroque work a central part of COT’s agenda. “We have definitely been very attractive to people who had been following that side of COT,” Trompeter said.

Haymarket’s second production, Charpentier’s 1686 La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, even drew New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe, in town for other projects. “Finely played, carefully sung, lovingly detailed period performance,” Woolfe wrote in the paper afterward. The French work saw Haymarket trying more things with Baroque-era dance, a field of interest that has been growing lately among both scholars and performers, and attracted Paris-based, Chicago-born harpsichordist Jory Vinokur, who also had a major gig with Lyric Opera here, to join the orchestra.

Haymarket’s third show last fall, a Handel “pastoral,” complete with shepherds and a shepherdess, Clori, Tirsi e Fileno, marked the Chicago première of the 1707 work, and Haymarket was able to recruit another European-based artist, archlute specialist Michael Leopold.

Now, for the English-language Dido, Haymarket has its largest onstage cast yet with 11 singers. The company also has recruited Sarah Edgar, a recent Chicago transplant and Baroque dance maven, to work with the full cast on dance and movement (so that the action is not just separate performers presenting interludes). Local favorites soprano Kimberly McCord and bass-baritone Peter van de Graaff take the title roles of the mythical lovers caught between a fallen Troy and a still to be founded Italy. Trompeter leads a dozen instrumental colleagues in the main floor level “pit.”

But Trompeter is already looking beyond the weekend. “We’ve just added two board members,” he said. “Set our budget at about $75,000 a year and are looking down the road at more.” The company’s next work? Its first piece by the German composer Telemann, the 1725 comic Die ungleiche Heirat zwischen Vespetta und Pimpinone, oder Die herrschsüchtige Cammer-Mädgen (The Unequal Match between Vespetta and Pimpinone, or The Domineering Chambermaid), known simply as . . . Pimpinone.

If anyone can pull that off, it’s Trompeter.

 

Lyric Opera of Chicago 2013-2014 season preview: tried, true, and Italian, but a new 'Rusalka' beckons -- My Sun-Times preview

My Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com preview story on Lyric Opera of Chicago's 2013-2014 season.

Posted Thursday February 7, 2013 at 3 p.m. CST.  Published Friday February 8, 2013.

Tenor Johan Botha in the title role of Verdi's Otello. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Lyric Opera offers tried and true for its 2013-14 season

'Rusalka' is only work new to the rep, but new and new-to Chicago prodiuctions abound

BY ANDREW PATNER

As Lyric Opera of Chicago approaches its 60th anniversary next year, the company on Thursday announced a 2013-14 season of eight operas largely consisting of the tried, the true, and the Italian.

Continuing the conservative programming put into place by retired general director William Mason -- opera seasons are planned and artists contracted years in advance -- Lyric will present only one opera new to its repertoire: an eagerly awaited Rusalka by Antonin Dvořák.

But there are no operas composed after 1904 nor any from earlier than the late 18th century -- nor any American or English-language works. Parsifal will be the Wagner offering and Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus the operetta. Otherwise, two Verdis for his anniversary year, Otello and La traviata; one Puccini, Madama Butterfly; one Rossini, The Barber of Seville, and late Mozart, his last operatic creation, in Italian, La clemenza di Tito, not seen here since 1989.

Lyric also announced that its nascent post-season American Mus­ical Theater Initiative will continue for at least four additional years in coöperation with the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization as a purely R&H enterprise. The series launches in May with Oklahoma!  The Sound of Music, Carousel, The King and I and South Pacific will follow through 2017.

There will be a focus on new productions, though. with four débuting and three from elsewhere to be seen here for the first time. Only Peter Hall’s Otello will be a revival, perhaps a first for this cost-conscious company.

General director Anthony Freud pointed out at a press conference Thursday that the company “works on a 10-year plan” and that repertoire is looked at within that frame and context.  (The 2015-2016 season will be the first wholly planned by Freud.)  Added Lyric music director Andrew Davis, “This is certainly not our most way-out season.”

Freud said as well that “the next few years” would see more rarities and some of the increasingly popular bel canto repertoire of the early 19th century.  In the earky 1970s, Lyric and the American mezzo Marilyn Horne played a role in reviving these works.

Lyric creative consultant Renée Fleming again will not appear in any operas but she and German tenor Jonas Kaufmann -- also absent from the opera roster -- will present the annual subscriber concert, with the Lyric Orchestra, in March 2014. Fleming, who also participated in the press conference, will appear in Strauss’s Capriccio the following season, as previously announced.

There are several house débuts and unusual casting choices: mezzo Isabel Leonard debuts as Rosina, Latvian Marina Rebeka as Violetta, Juliane Banse as Rosalinde, South African Amanda Echalaz as Cio-Cio San, and Daveda Karanas as Kundry.

Returning artists Ana María Martínez will sing her first Desdemona, Jill Grove and Eric Owens make role débuts in Rusalka, Matthew Polenzani will take on Tito, and most unexpectedly, tenor Paul Groves moves from a lighter, largely French repertoire to the title role in Parsifal.

Welcome returns also are made by Joyce DiDonato as Sesto in La clemenza; Patricia Racette, also as Cio-Cio San; Thomas Hampson as Amfortas; Joseph Calleja as Alfredo; Nathan Gunn as Figaro; Brandon Jovanovich as the Prince in Rusalka; and two rising Ryan Center alumni, Amanda Majeski in La clemenza and Quinn Kelsey stepping up to the elder Germont in La traviata after  break-out appearances at Lyric this season.

Davis leads three works: Parsifal, Rusalka, and La clemenza. Notable conducting débuts include Frenchman Bertrand de Billy for the season-opening Otello and Michele Mariotti, now leading Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera.

As with the Met, stage directors with high profile theater and musical experience will shape new productions. John Caird of the Royal Shakespeare Company, London’s Royal National Theatre, and one of Freud’s former homes, Welsh National Opera, will stage Parsifal.  Arin Arbus of the alternative Theatre for a New Audience in New York City will be a rare woman directing La traviata. Tony Award-winning choreographer and Broadway director Rob Ashford takes up Barber.

The popular director-designer team of David McVicar and John Macfarlane will be responsible for the brand-new Rusalka.  And the Clemenza that McVicar directed and designed at the 2011 Aix-en-Provence Festival will be restaged.

Freud expressed pride in this season’s Lyric Unlimited projects, including the sold-out The Second City Guide to the Opera and Popcorn and Pasquale for families, as well as the upcoming mariachi opera Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (“To Cross the Face of the Moon”), and said additional such programs will be announced for next season “in due course.”

“Innovative schemes and ways of funding them” for local large-screen video transmission are under review, Freud said.  Referring to the Met’s “Live in HD” series, he added, “But the type of HD transmission to movie houses around the country and around the world and all that entails does not interest us in that way.”

In an effort to balance costs, income, and audience development, Lyric will now offer subscription savings of up to 40 percent on all series.  An overall ticket price increase of 2 percent will be offset by lower or frozen prices in sections of the main floor, balcony, and upper balcony.

The 24-week, 68-performance season opens October 5 with Verdi’s Otello starring Johan Botha, Martínez, and Falk Struckmann and runs through March 23.

Chicago's 98.7WFMT and wfmt.com will broadcast all opening performances live and then will syndicate the full season internationally in May and June 2014.

Subscriptons are on sale online at lyricopera.org, by phone at (312) 332-2244 ext. 5600, fax (312) 332-8120, or by mail or in person at Lyric, 20 North Wacker Drive, Suite 840, 60606.

 

Chicago Symphony Orchestra 'Symphony Center Presents' 2013-2014 season preview: chamber, piano, visiting orchestras, special concerts -- My Sun-Times preview

My Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com preview story on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association's Symphony Center Presents 2013-2014 season.

Posted Wednesday February 6, 2013 at 4 p.m. CST.  Published Thursday February 7, 2013.

Leif Ove Andsnes plays Beethoven; Omara Portuondo sings of love

Symphony Center Presents series take a Latin and Russian accent

Chamber, piano, visiting orchestras, and special concerts announced

BY ANDREW PATNER 

Along with its full Chicago Symphony Orchestra offerings, the CSO Association announced its various Symphony Center Presents series and subscriptions Wednesday.  (The jazz series will be be announced at a later date.)

The CSOA is increasingly targeting ethnic communities. Both the CSO and SCP calendars include strong representation of Latin and Russian programs and performers. Visiting orchestras next season include the Mariinsky (Kirov) with its artistic chief Valery Gergiev in the three early Stravinsky ballets, The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring on October 2.

The St. Petersburg Philharmonic follows with its principal conductor Yuri Temirkanov in an all-Russian program February 22 with young Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang. Zubin Mehta returns March 17 with his Israel Philharmonic in the Bruckner Eighth Symphony.

Special concerts include the Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club, with original members Omara Portuondo and Barbarito Torres, on September 29 and Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán on October 20. Flamenco singer Estrella Morente makes her SCP debut on March 4.

In addition to such regular SCP engagements as Hallowed Haunts, the Vienna Boys Choir, Chanticleer, and the Chieftans, the CSO Brass will return to the series December 19 after a one-year absence.

The Chamber Music Series goes from five to six dates. German violinist Christian Tetzlaff (who also appears in the Dvořák concerto with the CSO and Esa-Pekka Salonen in April) kicks off the series with his countryman Lars Vogt in a mixed program November 17. Anne Sofie von Otter and Emanuel Ax present a song program January 26.

Violinist Joshua Bell plays February 12, and Yo-Yo Ma and Ax perform Brahms together February 21. Richard Tognetti leads his vibrant Australian Chamber Orchestra with pianist Olli Mustonen on March 23 and pianist Yefim Bronfman and violist-violinist Pinchas Zukerman play Brahms and Schubert on April 2.

The 10-program Piano Series leads off with intrepid performer and writer Jeremy Denk in Bach’s Goldberg Variations on October 13, other highlights include András Schiff continuing his own heavy Bach explorations with the six Partitas on October 27, rising young Russian Daniil Trifonov in a demanding mixed program February 9, Evgeny Kissin in Schubert and Scriabin on March 2, Mitsuko Uchida in Beethoven’s great Diabelli Variations on March 9, Leif Ove Andsnes in an all-Beethoven program on March 16, and Ax in another of his Brahms plus contemporary combinations May 18.

Subscriptions are now on sale online, at cso.org; by phone, (312) 294-3000 and (800) 223-7114, by fax (312-294-3015; credit card payments only), by mail, or in person at the Orchestra Hall box office, 220 South Michigan Avenue, 60604.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra 2013-2014 season: Verdi, Britten, Schubert, and company -- My Sun-Times preview

My Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com preview story on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's 2013-2014 season.

Posted Wednesday February 6, 2013 at 3 p.m. CST.  Published Thursday February 7, 2013.

 

 Guess who?  Man on left: Sun-Times photo by Tom Cruze

 Verdi, Britten tributes head up Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 2013-14 season

Muti, Boulez, Hatink, Dutoit, Salonen, and van Zweden lead the roster

BY ANDREW PATNER 

Following a year mark­ed by cancellations and illness of its music director Riccardo Muti and marquee veteran conductors Pierre Boulez and Bernard Haitink, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced on Wednesday its 2013-2014 subscription season with 13 weeks of concerts to be led by these much admired leaders now in their 70s and 80s.

While the Richard Wag­ner bicentenary being mark­ed worldwide this year was basically snubbed this season at Orchestra Hall and will be wholly ignored in the next, Giuseppe Verdi’s 200th birthday anniversary will be celebrated with five different programs, including a free season-launching community concert at a place to be named later (September 18), the annual gala Symphony Ball (September 21), four concert performances of the full opera Macbeth (September 28 through October 6), and a reprise of the Requiem on October 10, the exact anniversary of the composer’s birth in Italy in 1813. Macbeth will feature young singers who took the lead roles in Muti’s successful Rome Opera production a little over a year ago, Uruguayan baritone, Dario Solari, and Russian soprano Tatiana Serjan.

Though Benjamin Britten’s music often has been disregarded here in recent years, the CSO will salute the English composer’s centennial with five programs, including his giant War Requiem, led by regular visitor Charles Dutoit in the fall, and in a series of four programs of Britten, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich over three weeks in the spring, organized by Dallas Symphony Orchestra music director Jaap van Zweden (who has now emerged as the CSO’s principal guest conductor in all but name.)

Now recovering from a nasty flu that led to two canceled weeks of concerts here last month and a hernia surgery that caused him to miss the CSO tour of Asia wrapping up this week, Muti also will present an in-depth series of concerts featuring all eight of Schubert’s symphonies and his rarely heard Mass in A-Flat Major.

The Schubert survey also will include a welcome return of a series of three vocal recitals: the belated local recital début of acclaimed German baritone Christian Gerhaher (left, © Jim Rakete) in Winterreise, Matthias Goerne in Die schöne Müllerin, and Susanna Phillips and Eric Owens in a lieder program that includes The Shepherd on the Rock and Auf dem Strom.

Muti also will lead a commissioned world première double cello concerto by Giovanni Sollima, who will solo along with CSO Green creative consultant Yo-Yo Ma in January, and a work by renowned film composer Ennio Morricone written to commemorate the events of Sept. 11.  Both Italians are close associates of Muti, and Sollima is a member of Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. Other highlights of Muti’s four residencies featuring 10 weeks of programs include concertos with principal CSO players Robert Chen, John Sharp, and David McGill and pianist Mitsuko Uchida, and to conclude the season in June, Mahler’s First Symphony.

Former principal conductor Haitink, who missed one of two weeks this season, is scheduled for one week this fall with Emanuel Ax, in Mozart’s last Piano Concerto, No. 27, and the Bruckner Fourth Symphony. Conductor emeritus Boulez, who had to cancel his podium engagements here last season due to eye problems, is slated for two full weeks in February with intriguing programs of Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky, along with chamber rarities by the latter two.

In addition to the November dates of War Requiem, which will honor Britten’s intent with vocal soloists from England, Germany, and Russia, in March Dutoit also will conduct the season’s other world première commission, a flute concerto written by French composer Guillaume Connesson for principal flute Mathieu Dufour.

The CSO’s Mead composers in residence will have the first CSO performances of respective works: Anne Akiko Meyers will make her CSO début playing Mason Bates’s Violin Concerto in April, and composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, the only other guest invited to lead two weeks of concerts, will offer Anna Clyne’s rescheduled <<rewind<< as well as one of his own works, Nyx.

Pianist and curator Ax will share three programs of his four-city Brahms Project, in which he pairs Brahms piano and chamber works with new commissions by Nico Muhly, Anders Hillborg, Brett Dean, and Missy Mazzoli. Ma joines Ax in one program and soprano Anne Sofie von Otter in another.

No new guest conductors have been invited for next season. Thirteen returning guests, both young and veteran, are on the schedule for one week each, in addition to those mentioned above: Semyon Bychkov; Stéphane Denève, Christoph von Dohnányi; Mark Elder; an unexpected return by former Ravinia music director Christoph Eschenbach, now chief of the National Symphony in Washington, D.C.; Miguel Harth-Bedoya; Vladimir Jurowski; Bernard Labadie; Susanna Mälkki (left), only one of two women on the guest conducting roster, and music director of the Boulez-founded Ensemble intercontemporain in Paris; Baroque specialist Nicholas McGegan; Detroit Symphony Orchestra music director Leonard Slatkin; San Francisco’s Michael Tilson Thomas, and pianist-conductor Mitsuko Uchida.

The highly popular “Beyond the Score” series, directed by Gerard McBurney, returns with programs examining the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique (with Denève) on December 6 and 8; Haydn’s London Symphony No. 100, the “Military” (McGegan) on February 14 and 16, and the pioneering American Charles Ives’s Second Symphony (Elder) on April 25 and 27. The multimedia programs shift their Friday slots from afternoons to evenings at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays remain 3 p.m. matinées.

Muti, Dutoit, Mälkki, and Jurowski each also lead one early evening, intermissionless “Afterwork Masterworks” program and participate in post-concert discussions during the season.

If over-all programming is not heavily adventurous, one quarter of the works of next season’s concerts (by number) are having their first-ever CSO performances. In addition to works already mentioned, these range from pieces by contemporary composers Thomas Adès and Chicagoan Bernard Rands to lesser-heard Baroque works to Stravinsky’s Elegy for J.F.K. (to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination) to the Schubert Mass in A and his Overture in the Italian Style on Muti’s concerts to the Carlos Chávez Piano Concerto with Chicago area soloist Jorge Federico Osorio and William Schuman’s 1948 Sixth Symphony with American music champion Slatkin.

Additional notable CSO concert solo débuts include the members of the Macbeth international cast, English tenor John Mark Ainsley in the War Requiem, Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma in the Britten concerto, past CSO League Youth Auditions winner cellist Gabriel Cabezas, and Alaska-born mezzo Vivica Geneaux on McGegan’s Baroque program.

Other returning soloists of note include violinists Leila Josefowicz and James Ehnes, and pianists Kirill Gerstein, Richard Goode, Paul Lewis, and Marc-André Hamelin. Principal oboe Eugene Izotov also has a concerto: the Strauss, with Jurowski.

Plans for domestic and international tours by the orchestra in 2013-14 will be announced this spring.

Under a new name, “CSO at the Movies” returns with John Williams conducting selections from his film music -- including from Lincoln, which featured the composer conducting the CSO on its soundtrack -- and his Violin Concerto with soloist Gil Shaham on November 10 (with additional performances on November 8 and 9). Regular film program conductor Richard Kaufman leads CSO members in Chaplin’s City Lights on March 21.  Details of a January 24 program are to be announced.

The MusicNOW series, curated by Bates and Clyne and with Cliff Colnot as principal conductor, will take place at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance on October 21, December 16, February 3 and May 5, with programs to be announced.

Subscriptions are now on sale online, at cso.org; by phone, (312) 294-3000 and (800) 223-7114, by fax (312-294-3015; credit card payments only), by mail, or in person at the Orchestra Hall box office, 220 South Michigan Avenue, 60604.