Andrew Patner: The View from Here

CSO with Jaap van Zweden and David Fray: gravitas returns to Orchestra Hall

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday May 31, 2013 4:30PM CDT

Jaap van Zweden returns gravitas to the CSO podium

Fray makes concerto début, Bartók shines, Bates shares a first draft

Conductor Jaap van Zweden and composer Mason Bates with the CSO Thursday night.  Todd Rosenberg Photography/CSO

 

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

♦ 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday June 4

♦ Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue

♦ Tickets, $10-$212

♦ (312) 294-3000, cso.org

 

BY ANDREW PATNER 

RECOMMENDED

After a month of concerts with novices and lesser names as conductors, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had a serious figure on the podium Thursday night: Jaap van Zweden, music director of the Dallas Symphony and Hong Kong Philharmonic orchestras.

Making a breathtaking last-minute sub debut 4½ years ago, van Zweden has gone from dependable pinch-hitter to principal guest conductor in all but name with a full festival of politically related music here next spring. Although I had some concerns with some of his recent performances, Thursday night was all about nuance, lyricism, support, and depth. The Dutch-born conductor and former Amsterdam Concertgebouw concertmaster is a great asset to the larger CSO family.

He first demonstrated this Thursday by providing wholly sympathetic accompaniment to David Fray’s CSO début as soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20, K. 466. The young Frenchman, who turned 32 last week, has a serious, even brooding, side to his playing that some might have found too dark and structural for this work, especially in the usually more lyrical slow movement. Beethoven himself, though, held this 1785 concerto uniquely dear and did so for a reason. This was a strong Beethovenian interpretation combined with both the lucidity and tone of the French style.

Sitting in a straight back chair and crossing his arms when not playing, Fray underscored his often muscular conception by using perhaps the two most fiery cadenzas written for the soloist, an amalgam based on Austrian Paul Badura-Skoda’s in the opening Allegro and the dramatic intervention of Swiss giant Edwin Fischer (Daniel Barenboim’s teacher) in the closing Rondo. Where his compatriot Jean-Yves Thibaudet, last week’s brilliant CSO soloist, prefers colorful works, elegantly played, Fray offers more analytical investigations of challenging repertoire. His is a career to keep watching.

The CSO has owned Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra since the late 1940s, when a succession of great Budapest refugee conductors who knew the composer -- George Szell, Fritz Reiner, and Georg Solti -- started giving important performances of this core 1943 masterwork.  Pierre Boulez offered his own decidedly non-Hungarian take in concerts and a recording here in the 1990s. Van Zweden showed his real chops in the Bartók by starting with a clean, notes-on-the-page, slate, reminding us what a beautiful piece this is, as well as a powerful one. He added several minutes to its normal length without ever weighing anything down and opened up the infamous satirical attack on Shostakovich in the “interrupted intermezzo” in a whole new comic, and warm, way.

Wind principals, the harp duo, the especially muted trumpet pair, and hard-stick timpani were especially responsive collaborators. Jonathan Gunn, acting principal clarinet in Cincinnati and husband of superb CSO piccolo Jennifer Gunn, was sitting in the chair that will be empty for at least a year, when, for family reasons, principal Stephen Williamson will give the New York Philharmonic a try. Gunn would appear to be an excellent candidate for major works next season.

The concert opened with Liquid Interface, a 2006-2007 piece by Mead co-composer-in-residence Mason Bates, who assumed his customary place at the back of the orchestra with his electronica set-up. Perhaps when it was written for the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, it was something more than a first draft of his much more effective Alternative Energy, successfully premiered and toured by Riccardo Muti and the CSO in 2012.  It’s not much more than that now.

Ostensibly following water through four obvious movements and sets of recorded sounds, the piece is not at the top of the Bates catalog and left little impression. Van Zweden kept the acoustic instruments going with care and click-track efficiency. One is more hopeful about a brand-new Bates work, Difficult Bamboo, for chamber ensemble and percussion, that will have its world première Monday night in a MusicNow concert at the Harris Theater.

Chicago Opera Theater announces 2014 season: Ellington, Orff, Ullmann, and Bloch -- My Sun-Times preview

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday May 17, 2013

Nmon Ford sings the title role of Ernest Bloch's Macbeth, which Chicago Opera Theater will stage as part of its 2014 season. | Photo: Long Beach Opera

Chicago Opera Theater to launch 2014 season with an Ellington rarity

Orff, Ullmann, and a rare 'Macbeth' (by Bloch)

BY ANDREW PATNER

Eclectic.  Theatrical.  Unusual.  20th century.

In announcing its 2014 season, Chicago Opera Theater continues to move in different directions from its recent past while building on its strong bond with its general director’s Southern California company.

At the company’s annual gala Thursday night, Andreas Mitisek, who also heads the Long Beach (Calif.) Opera, announced the second COT season under his watch and the first planned fully by him.

As he did this year with a Piazzolla tango work, Mitisek stretches the definition of opera with the Chicago première of Duke Ellington’s Queenie Pie, which will launch the season February 15 to 23.  For 12 years until his death in 1974, Ellington worked on, but never completed, this musical setting of the life of the first Black self-made millionaire, the hair-products pioneer Madam C. J. Walker.

COT will perform a 2009 version created for the University of Texas at Austin by the composer’s longtime collaborator, Betty McGettigan (who also wrote the work’s libretto).  Ellington called this light piece, intended for public television, an opéra comique, and others have compared it to ’20s-era orchestral jazz. COT will collaborate with Jeff Lindberg’s Chicago Jazz Orchestra on the production, which will later travel to Long Beach.

Spring brings a contrasting double bill of one-act German works from 1943: Carl Orff’s Die Kluge (“The Clever One”) and Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis (“The Emperor of Atlantis”). The Bavarian Orff (1895-1982), best known for his 1937 profane cantata Carmina Burana, prospered during and after the Nazi period; his innocently satirical fairy tale opera, adapted from the Brothers Grimm, received productions in 21 theaters under the Nazis.

Ullmann, an assimilated Czech Jew, wrote his biting send-up of the Nazis in the Theresienstadt “model” concentration camp. In 1944, he was mudered at Auschwitz and never saw his opera produced. In 1998, COT presented the Chicago première of the Ullmann work for the company’s 25th anniversary season. This spring bill will be staged May 31 to June 8, 2014, at the Merle Reskin Theatre of DePaul University, 60 East Balbo Drive, instead of the COT’s usual base at the Harris Theater.

Fall brings another work with a complicated history, Swiss-American refugee Ernest Bloch’s 1904-06 Macbeth in its Chicago première, September 13 to 21, 2014, at the Harris.  Bloch (1880-1959) remains largely known for such Jewish-influenced works as the 1915 Schelomo, written for 'cello and orchestra.  His only completed opera ran up against hard political times in Europe after its première in 1910, and the English-language libretto the composer preferred was not presented on the Continent until 2003 in Vienna. COT promises “a new production based on” the version that will go up at Long Beach next month.

COT’s current season continues with Verdi’s rarely performed Joan of Arc, September 21 to 29 at the Harris.

Mitisek will conduct Macbeth and the spring double-bill. Casts and production teams will be announced later.  Full 2014 season subscriptions starting at $95 go on sale July 1, with individual tickets on January 6, 2014. 

www.chicagooperatheater.org 312-704-8414

CSO with Mei-Ann Chen, Florence Price, 'Beyond the Score': but no whole? -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday May 10, 2013

Mei-Ann Chen conducts the CSO, Thursday night May 9 © Todd Rosenberg Photography

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Mei-Ann Chen makes subscription concerts début on CSO podium

1934 Florence Price work is given CSO première

'Beyond the Score' takes up Rimsky's 'Sheherazade'

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

♦ 8 p.m. Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, and “Beyond the Score,” 3 p.m. Sunday

♦ Pre-concert presentation by lecturer Barbara Wright-Pryor and tenor Henry Pleas Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.

♦ Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue

♦ Tickets, $10-$215; “BTS,” $10-$142

♦ (312) 294-3000; cso.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

In the weeks between music director Riccardo Muti’s April and June residencies, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has engaged four lower-tier conductors and one tested regular guest, Jaap van Zweden.

To say that a conductor is of a lower tier than a CSO music director is not an insult, it’s a description. There are only a small number of great orchestra leaders at any given time. Conductors of various levels and abilities play crucial roles in heading orchestras of various abilities, sizes, and needs. Building young artists, bringing enthusiasm to communities, experimenting with programs are all necessary and important tasks in the larger musical ecosystem. But genuine accomplishment in these areas does not automatically make one an authority with the CSO or the Berlin Philharmonic.

Taiwan-born conductor Mei-Ann Chen has been a terrific match as music director for the Chicago Sinfonietta and the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. She has upped the ante for both ensembles, connected strongly with audiences, and scoured the world for new and neglected scores. Several efforts have come together for the centerpiece of her CSO subscription-concert début Thursday at Orchestra Hall, The Mississippi River by Florence Price, which also kicks off a set of “Rivers”-themed concerts this spring.

The Arkansas-born Price (above), a graduate of Boston’s New England Conservatory and the first Black woman to be widely recognized as a symphonic composer, made Chicago her home from 1927 until her death at 66 in 1953. Frederick Stock premiered her first symphony with the CSO at the Auditorium in 1933 as a part of the Century of Progress World’s Fair. Her suite, a kind of tone poem about life and music along the great river, unusually running from Minnesota downward to the cradle of spirituals and blues in the South, was written the next year but has received professional performances and a recording only recently. This week marks its première CSO performances.

If Price could have had more performances and feedback in her lifetime, surely the piece could have been sharpened and perhaps tightened from its 30-minute length. An opening brass chorale, Native American sounds and rhythms as the journey moves past Iowa, and an unusual tiering of spirituals and popular river songs toward the end of the suite are quite attractive and individual. But many of the spirituals excerpts are repeated too often, and transitions are not as convincing as they might be. (Robert G. Hasty will lead Price’s First Symphony with the Northwestern University Chamber Orchestra at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall in Evanston on June 6.) Strong pre-concert performances by local tenor Henry Pleas and pianist Charles Hayes of Price song settings also point to the need to hear more of her large catalog more regularly.

There was little for Chen to do with Mendelssohn’s rarely played 1833 The Fair Melusina overture, itself practically a repetitive 10-minute loop. Her athletic and at times over-eager, ahead-of-the-beat direction of Rimsky-Korsakov’s much-loved 1888 symphonic suite Sheherazade did not do much for this 50-minute work of “Oriental” perfumes, tales, and mysteries.

Nor did it hinder it, though, as this is a work the CSO plays like no other ensemble. From full-throated themes to the many characteristic solos, these players own this piece. Concertmaster Robert Chen and his violin were the instrumental incarnation of the eponymous narrator, and the four principals of the wind section were four princes of bassoon, clarinet, oboe, and flute with principal cello and harp also beautifully floating melodies and invented scales.

Friday afternoon saw the Rimsky taken apart and reassembled over an hour in a very successful installment of Gerard McBurney’s Beyond the Score series. Actor Roger Mueller portrayed the composer, Sandra Delgado was Sheherazade herself (in the full five-syllable pronunciation) before beautiful animated scenes by Hillary Leben with galantry shadow cutouts by English sculptor Tim Millar.

As Chen and the full orchestra gave excerpts not only from Rimsky’s work but by those who influenced him such as Balakirev, Borodin, and Mussorgsky, Mueller shared the composer’s youth as a naval cadet with a voyage in the mid-19th century that took him as far away from Russia as Manhattan and Brazil, opening his eyes to the exotic.

 

 

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CSO with Pablo Heras-Casado: 'Spanish Passion'? Not really -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and sun-times.com, Friday May 3, 2013

Pablo Heras-Casado

CSO’s ‘Spanish Passion’ program lacks genuine fire

Flamenco work doesn't quite click

Repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.

BY ANDREW PATNER

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

Following Riccardo Muti’s spring residency, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra turns to lesser-known podium names for a month, including three Latin and/or Iberian guests, one rising and two middling.

The rising conductor is Pablo Heras-Casado, 35, a native of Granada, who started out largely self-made. The son of a police officer, Heras-Casado showed musical talent early, and his parents supported him in being a chorister from boyhood on. Singing Renaissance music made him want to explore it more, especially conducting it. Hearing contemporary music had the same effect, so he founded groups dedicated to each. After Pierre Boulez chose him as a protégé at his Lucerne Festival Academy for new music, he was soon tapped for a world-wide array of guest appearances and is now the principal conductor of New York’s chamber-sized Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

All these elements were apparent in his CSO subscription concert debut Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, in a program billed as “Spanish Passion,” but not all at the same time nor in the best combinations. Heras-Casado appears genuinely engaged in the music and is not any kind of showoff. He seems to be a real listener, and on Thursday, was good at achieving balances, especially in the delicate music of Ravel and a Debussy rarity. But he put no stamp on any of the works played, slowed Ravel’s Pavanne for a Dead Princess to an almost embalmed tempo and could hold no candle to the passion that Daniel Barenboim brings to Andalusian music, such as Falla’s El amor brujo (“Love, the Magician”), which closed the concert. Like Boulez, he uses no baton. This may be a mistake at this point in his still-developing career when authority is so important. A full-time position with a full-time orchestra or opera house also would allow him to build on his genuine strengths.

All three French works were orchestrations of piano pieces, two famously expanded by their composer, Maurice Ravel: Le tombeau de Couperin (1919) and the Pavanne (1910). The opening Tombeau was the program’s most successful work, with the dances differentiated but still needing some oomph. This also brought the first display of remarkable oboe solos throughout the concert by Eugene Izotov. In between came André Caplet’s 1919 orchestration of a 1913 children’s ballet, Le boîte a jouxjoux (“The Toy Box”) that Debussy left in piano score form before his death in 1918. Surely the composer would have done much more with this piece, filled with whimsy, quotations of other works and a fairy-tale poignance and summation. However, it was intriguing to hear this version and imagine the life and loves of the toy characters. Scott Hostetler’s atmospheric English horn solos were highlights of the 35-minute piece.

The Falla held promise, given the CSO debut of Marina Heredia, a leading flamenco singer from a prominent family in the field and like Heras-Casado, Granada born. With this set of invented “popular” pieces, a conductor can either work with a large-voiced opera singer affecting flamenco style (Leontyne Price with Fritz Reiner on the CSO’s 1963 recording, Barenboim with Jennifer Larmore in 1997) or with an authentic folkloric singer who then has to try to fill a large concert hall rather than a customary intimate cave or club. A microphone and speakers were placed onstage for the sultry, appropriately raspy-voiced Heredia but either they did not work or she did not use them properly; the contrasts of volume, expectations, and results were problematic. Orchestrally, the “Ritual Fire Dance” section had Heras-Casado turning up the heat a bit. But it’s still a chilly spring in Chicago. More, please.

 

 

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