Andrew Patner: The View from Here

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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Evgeny Kissin in recital: again among the greats -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Monday April 29, 2013

Evgeny Kissin once again proves he’s an heir to keyboard greats

BY ANDREW PATNER

In some ways, what Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin is doing at 41 is more astonishing than what he was sharing with a jaw-dropping world as a 12-year-old and teenager in the 1980s.

He was a prodigy, without question, whose débuts in concert and recital around the world and live recordings were events. But Kissin has not only continued to play with formidable technique and intelligence as an adult, he has restored the idea of the pianist as a star, and as a star based on actual playing, not on glitz, flash, hype, or hair gel, concepts apparently wholly alien to him.

He plays whatever he wants and wherever he wants, with much of his schedule announced through 2016. And he wants to play the great programs in the tradition of his fellow Russians and Russian émigrés and to play them in concert halls for focused fans. He is an ambassador for something seen as old -- unamplified Western art music played live and with seriousness -- that in his case becomes new for each cycle of listeners. Parents and grandparents with young children in tow were in abundance Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall. There was no sense of duty in the air, whether on the part of the charges or their minders. Just keen focus and joy.

Two things stood out Sunday in a program the pianist is touring all season and will bring Friday to New York’s Carnegie Hall. The first was his traversal in the first half of Beethoven’s last of 32 piano sonatas, the C minor, Op. 111 of 1821-22. This is a work that perhaps more than any other requires the highest physical and intellectual skills in tandem, the province of a select echelon of probing artists such as Brendel, Kempff, Arrau, Richard Goode, and Stephen Kovacevich, and not necessarily those identified more as showpiece virtuosos.

Kissin, at least for these 25 minutes, joined their ranks. He saw not only each of the two unique movements whole but the connections between them, too; gave each of the contrasting variations in the second movement its technical due yet also made their connections seamless. Because you never had a moment’s doubt that this summary work was going to flow fully and unchecked, you could actually take time to watch Kissin’s choices in fingering, hand coordination, and pedaling -- none for show, but all good to have as road maps if one suddenly awoke with superhuman keyboard skills. Thomas Mann devoted a whole chapter of his great novel Doctor Faustus to this sonata. This was a performance that showed you why, structurally and philosophically.

As a complement to this achievement, to close the recital’s second half, Kissin took up what is seen almost solely today as a gymnastic crowd-pleaser, Liszt’s mid-19th century Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in C-sharp minor, and reminded the audience of what we’ve missed as such works have been sidelined or played only with circus style. Along with his second encore (of four!), the same composer’s F minor Transcendental Étude No. 10, this is where Kissin showed how no one since Horowitz can play these sorts of pieces impeccably and so musically. Breathtaking stuff.

The opening 1790 Haydn sonata (in E-flat) mostly served to introduce Kissin’s fascination with how the hands can be used and how throwing their synchronization off just slightly can illuminate melodic and linear development. Four Schubert Impromptus (1827), two each from the D. 935 and D. 899 sets, had great charms and showed insights into achieving certain sounds and colors. Kissin is not at all alone, though, in trying to fit these individual pieces together into some type of a suite. I took them each as they came, one at a time.

In Florida, Kissin, who at times has given a dozen or more encores as an afternoon turns into evening, reportedly played none for some reason. In Boston last week, he gave five. Here, with occasional displays of his small smile, after opening with Sgambatti’s “Mélodie” transcription from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, and the aforementioned Liszt étude, there was Liszt’s embroidery on Schubert’s “The Trout”; and although the audience ovations showed no signs of diminishing, as a closer, Chopin’s D minor 24th Prélude from Op. 28, its final low Ds saying, “I’m done.”

The recital, as all of his performances this season, was dedicated by Kissin to the memory of his father, Igor Kissin, a retired engineer, who died last May in New York at 77.

 

 

Chicago Opera Theater & Piazzolla's "Maria de Buenos Aires": a lot of layers -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Monday April 22, 2013

Photo: Liz Lauren

Chicago Opera Theater singers, musicians carry Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Maria’ in overdue Chicago debut

Last performance: Sunday April 28, 3 p.m. Harris Theater

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Chicago Opera Theater continues its new “more of the different” mission in dramatic form under general director Andreas Mitisek with the much-belated Chicago première of Astor Piazzolla’s 1967-68 “tango operita” Maria de Buenos Aries, which received an enthusiastic ovation at its Saturday night opening at the Harris Theater.

Perhaps because it was long linked to dance more than opera -- as recently as last month it was presented in New York at the new music basement nightclub (le) poisson rouge -- this continuous 75-minute work, conceived and developed in Buenos Aires and neighboring Uruguay by Piazzolla with the poet Horacio Ferrer, somehow has eluded Chicago stages despite a long vogue for the composer’s “nuevo tango” style since at least the late 1970s.

Piazzolla himself made his Chicago debut on bandoneón -- the concertina-like instrument at the heart of the tango -- at the Park West in 1989, a year before a debilitating stroke in 1990 that led to his death at 71 in 1992. Classical champions of his works, which musically extend the traditional popular dance and song form, have included the Kronos Quartet and violinist Gidon Kremer. And Piazzolla’s fellow native Argentinian Daniel Barenboim, while music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, had an international hit CD of trios in 1996 including a number of the composer-performer’s “new tangos.”

For Maria’s local launch, Mitisek has brought a reconceived staging that was a success at his Long Beach Opera in January of 2012. Without changing music or Spanish-dialect lyrics, Mitisek took Ferrer’s magical realism story -- with its heavy, often overly symbolic language -- and shifted it from the 1930s and 1940s Buenos Aires demi-monde of prostitutes, pimps and tango clubs to the period of Argentina’s brutal “Dirty War” of 1976-1983, when a military junta turned on its own citizens.

At least 13,000 Argentinians from all walks of life were “disappeared” by the military -- some say as many as 30,000 -- in a campaign of kidnapping, torture, murder, and both child abduction and infant abduction from the wombs of “disappeared” women. The election of Pope Francis, former archbishop of Buenos Aires and a leading Jesuit there during the period, has called coincidental attention to this dark and still not wholly addressed era.

The new setting is delivered dramatically with multimedia visuals and full use of the large stage and proscenium at the Harris. Mitisek, who also conducts and designed the production, enlisted highly capable video (Adam Flemming) and lighting (Dan Weingarten) artists from his Long Beach team, and the visual effects are powerful, from a vanishing “wall” of the individual “disappeared” to cages of real and metaphorical hells. A non-speaking actor, Mark Bringelson, is chilling as an officer who leads a silent squad of government rapists and torturers.

How does this work with an at least overtly apolitical story of a young woman “born on a day when God was drunk” with “three nails in her throat” who embodies, through prostitution and broken hearts, the lowlife existence of the tango world, dies for it, and through rebirth, somehow redeems it? Not at all as far as I could tell. But the performances are so powerful and the music so well-executed (and, frankly, Ferrer’s writing is so often over-the-top and almost at a Mad Libs level of imagery; the original staging even had a chorus of psychoanalysts!) that it’s best just to give yourself over to both sides of the presentation.

The strong cast also carries over from Long Beach (and all are acceptably amplified). Young California contralto Peabody Southwell is Maria in spirit, body and deep, dark voice. Mexican-American baritone Gregorio Gonzalez uses his spectacular voice to offer all shades of Maria’s lover/husband/widower. Lecturer-actor Gregorio Luke of Mexico City is a strong presence in the speaking role of the older, recollecting lover. Eight dancers from Chicago’s Luna Negra Dance Theater, choreographed by their Spanish artistic director Gustavo Ramirez Sansano, move atmospherically behind a scrim.

The bravura nine-member ensemble of strings, flute, piano, and percussion is highlighted as it should be by the bandoneon, here in the hands of Italian-American virtuoso Pietro (Peter) Soave. Mitisek and all of the players keep the tight line of the various tango, milonga. and waltz settings at all times, but it is the growling, tunefulness and even crying of the bandoneon that moves and even tells the story. A shame that Soave was not given a curtain call.

Maria’s 14 varied musical sections never really knit fully into a theatrical work -- like a blues, a brief tango, by its nature, tells a whole story -- and Piazzolla never created another full stage piece, but this is a strong if at times perplexing creation.

 

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Dresden Staatskapelle, Christian Thielemann, and Lisa Batiashvili at Chicago's Orchestra Hall: welcome returns -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Monday April 15, 2013

Thielemann, Dresden Staatskapelle make a welcome return to Orchestra Hall

Batiashvili's Brahms violin concerto astonishes

BY ANDREW PATNER

Wireless communication meant that the world was too much with many of us, late and soon, on Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall. Just before the much-anticipated Dresden Staatskapelle concert and the long-awaited return to Chicago of its new principal conductor Christian Thielemann, e-mail brought news of the death the night before of trumpet legend Adolph “Bud” Herseth, 91, a Chicago Symphony Orchestra fixture over six decades.

Then, by intermission, Twitter carried word from the London Symphony Orchestra that the widely revered Colin Davis, laureate conductor of the Dresdeners, had just died at 85. That both men were true professionals and that the Staatskapelle is in its 464th(!) year of performing certainly underscored how the show goes on. Orchestras are like that. A name holds and despite the regular turnover and the passage of time, traditions continue and an identity persists.

In the case of Dresden, that identity was preserved in the last century in a complex tradeoff that found the city and its orchestra both behind the Iron Curtain and in a topographical “valley of the blind” without access to West German broadcast television and popular culture. Its rich, deep and warm string sound remains unique, its highly personalized wind -- especially in its pinched just right oboes -- and gentle horns are welcome markers. And its major daily work as an opera orchestra gives it a flexibility that when combined with the relative youth of its current roster and the evident energy of those players make them a conductor’s dream.

Thielemann, who turned 54 this month, has had his battles in previous positions at the former West Berlin Deutsche Oper and the Munich Philharmonic. But he told me in an interview Friday that he knew as early as his first guest conducting with Dresden in 2003 “that this could be a real home for me.” When things ended with Munich, and the Staatskapelle and its previous conductor Fabio Luisi split unhappily, Thielemann and Dresden were ready to start together this season. The position also gives him a smaller and quiet base, away from the daily politics of Bayreuth and the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, whose calendars hold him for many weeks each year. And, through a set of totally unforeseen events, the Thielemann-Dresden team is now the center of the spring Salzburg Easter Festival, abandoned by Berlin after almost 40 years. Their first run, last month, was a box office and critical success.

In the 1990s, it looked as if the United States, and especially Chicago and New York, would be a major part of Thielemann’s professional life. Two subscription weeks with the CSO and a Meistersinger at Lyric were electrifying, as were three different Richard Strauss productions at the Metropolitan Opera. But personal and political issues arose and Thielemann’s career in Germany (he is a native and lifelong Berliner) and Austria took off dramatically. It was fitting that this return to North America and first trip here with Dresden started in Chicago.

An all-Brahms program let all parts of this new team show their chops. Virtuosity matched with warmth; energy was coupled with detail. Watching the trumpets in the Academic Festival Overture sitting in Herseth’s old seats had both an eerie and invigorating quality. The great D Major Violin Concerto brought a third eloquent partner, Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, for as fine a live performance of the work that I can recall. Her playing arose from the orchestra sound and was never imposed upon it. She had a combination of strength and intimacy that brought David Oistrakh to mind. That she plays a 1715 Stradivarius that belonged to Joseph Joachim, the dedicatee and first performer of the concerto, added yet another line of underscoring to the pervasive sense of continuity. There was constant listening and communication between soloist, conductor, and orchestra, and details and Romantic emphases often brushed past emerged clearly. Even the odd little Busoni cadenza, a dialogue with timpanist Thomas Käppler, fit perfectly. A 1990s alumna of Ravinia’s Steans Institute (then using her given name, Elisabeth), Batiashvili made her CSO debut in Highland Park 13 years ago with Christoph Eschenbach. She needs to be a part of our lives here again.

At times the E minor Fourth Symphony seemed to have almost too much energy. But Thielemann and his crew made this driving version cohere and even gave one of the most convincing, well-delineated, Andante moderato movements imaginable. What occasional raggedness there was felt more like celebration and personality. The large audience went fairly wild and an obviously very happy Thielemann -- a tall and big man -- bounded back on to the stage and with a large grin, spun around and called up a spirited encore of the Prelude to Act 3 of Wagner’s Lohengrin. It’s a shame that we did not also get the second program of the Bruckner Eighth Symphony that Carnegie Hall will have later this week. But it was good to see these artists in top form here, so well connected with each other, and reminding us, through that great optimist Brahms, that life rolls on.

 

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CSO and Riccardo Muti: Bach B minor Mass: high aims, not quite realized -- My Sun-Times review

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Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday April 12, 2013

Muti, CSO aim for heavenly heights in Bach’s Mass in B Minor, but don't quite hit them

Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. and Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Few works are more esteemed as grand contributions to Western civilization than Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor.

Neither Protestant nor Catholic, the work is universal, though the Latin language and some structure comes from the latter tradition. (Bach, however, was a devoted Lutheran.) Written in parts over 35 years with no plan that it would be performed in Bach’s lifetime, it was directed to a posterity of unknown distance. (It sat in drawers for more than a century after Bach’s 1750 death before receiving its first full performance.) It sums up and weaves together the styles, scoring and experiments of Bach’s full career with lessons from his keyboard, chamber, orchestral, choral and vocal music integrating harmony, counterpoint and invention.

But is grand enough when reviving this work? For Riccardo Muti, returning to concerts as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since September, grandeur seemed to be the chief goal Thursday at Symphony Center, but solemnity and anonymity reigned for much of the time. And a long time it was, too, two hours and five minutes, plus a full intermission. (It was last heard here in 1990, under Sir Georg Solti.)

Muti has spoken, insightfully and humorously, about the need to navigate between doctrinaire ideas of “historic performance” of earlier music and grandiose cathedral performances with hundreds of choristers and players. But the issue here was not the types of strings or bowing or the size or restriction of the sound of each instrument — areas where Muti’s call for a middle ground, embodied here by 85 singers and an orchestra of 55, makes great sense. But the so sober, museum-like presentation too often lacked the very liveliness and personal connection that the long-experienced conductor contends “period performances” miss.

Bach front loads the five-part work with a lengthy Kyrie, compact in text, but thick with choral and orchestral writing. Here, this set a weighty tone that dominated the first half, including the second-part Gloria. After the break, Muti’s ideas and practice came together much more fully on the nine sections of the Credo. The CSO Chorus, prepared by its director Duain Wolfe, had often been uncharacteristically muddy up to that point. It now came fully alive, and Muti delivered the central “Et incarnatus est,” “Crucifixus” and “Et resurrexit” — the core of the Christian creed — in all three dimensions with incarnation, the nail hammers of crucifixion and the glory and splendor of resurrection essentially enacted. That same spirit and execution was present in the well-known concluding “Dona nobis pacem.” One wished that this feeling could be projected back through the full two hours-plus. Perhaps it will be during the work’s remaining performances.

Orchestral clarity and articulation were there at all times. And solo parts were enviable and more both on their own and while interweaving with the four vocal soloists. Principal flute Mathieu Dufour is always worth the price of admission alone, and oboe d’amore players Eugene Izotov and Scott Hostetler and bassoonists David McGill and Dennis Michel matched him in insight and tenderness. Horn Daniel Gingrich and concertmaster Robert Chen offered elegance and a certain stateliness. The continuo accompaniment of cellist John Sharp, bass Alexander Hanna, organist David Schrader and harpsichordist Mark Shuldiner also embodied Muti’s ideas with supportive style.

Vocal soloists reflected Muti’s preference for lesser-known young European singers, in this case, mezzo Anna Malavasi and soprano Eleonora Buratto (both Italians), and Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu and Czech bass-baritine Adam Plachetk. One can understand why “stars” as used by Carlo Maria Giulini, say, in his well-known recording, do not appeal to Muti for a devotional and ensemble work such as this. But the general lack of distinction and the failure of the two women singers to demonstrate any personal connection with the essential poetry they were singing (Pirgu and Plachetk fared better) also kept this major performance achievement from reaching heavenly heights.

 

 

 

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Lyric Opera of Chicago: "A Streetcar Named Desire": Fleming and colleagues work theatrical magic on non-operatic opera -- My Sun-Times review

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

Renée Fleming keeps Lyric’s ‘Streetcar’ on course

Strong performances, direction, lift unoriginal score towards play's heights

Renée Fleming as Blanche DuBois and Anthony Dean Griffey as Mitch, March 23, 2013 | Todd Rosenberg Photography for Sun-Times Media

‘A Streetcar Named Desire’

♦ Three performances through April 6 (matinée)

♦ Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 North Wacker Drive

♦ Limited ticket availability; also a second-cast performance April 5 at 7:30 p.m.

♦ (312) 332-2244; lyricopera.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Soprano Renée Fleming is as level-headed and focused as the fictional character Blanche DuBois is flighty and unhinged.

But they do both believe in loyalty. Fleming, now also creative consultant and a company vice president at Lyric Opera of Chicago, has been loyal for 16 years now to the self-imagined Southern belle Blanche and to the opera written for the singer to portray her.

Having worked with composer André Previn to create an operatic adaptation of the classic 1947 Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire and its at least equally legendary 1951 film version, Fleming starred in the work’s première at San Francisco Opera in 1998 and has taken it elsewhere since. Unable to persuade the Metropolitan Opera to present the work, she secured its New York début in a semi-staged version at Carnegie Hall just this month.

Now Chicago has its turn, with a limited run that opened Tuesday at Lyric of this appealing version. For a piece that really is not much of an opera but mostly a play with music, this more ethereal, though fully costumed and acted production may be the most compelling way to present this three-act American tragedy.

The Lyric Opera Orchestra is onstage, as the Orchestra of St. Luke’s was at Carnegie, but positioned near an acoustic shell toward the back wall and sunken down a few feet.  In director Brad Dalton’s highly physical and usually smooth-moving conception, a silent “chorus” of six hulking young men provide bayou atmosphere and emotional cues.

Providing atmosphere and emotional cues also is probably the best way to describe Previn’s score and achievement -- or lack thereof.  Had this work been written at the time of the play or film, it might have seemed a bit original.  Coming half a century later, its jazzy, postwar Hollywood style is entirely derivative, usually pleasant, and much more a sort of retread soundtrack than a work of its own substance.  The music almost never moves, directs, or tells the story. To the extent that there are songs or arias, they are mostly dropped-in set pieces.  In the case of the two numbers written for Blanche/Fleming, they not only add little to the character, they also step out of the flow of the drama and actually diminish the work.

That said, Fleming’s intense commitment, Dalton’s direction, a largely strong cast, Duane Schuler’s lighting wizardry, Johann Stegmeir’s effective period costuming, and a good connection between American conductor Evan Rogister and the score and orchestra, make this a surprisingly moving evening, but one much more at the theatre than the opera.

Philip Litell’s libretto sticks closely to Williams’s achingly poetic language, and most of it fits well with Previn’s recitative setting and the always difficult task of making sung English clear in an opera house. (Supertitles do assure that nothing is lost.) Soprano Susanna Phillips, a Lyric Ryan Center alumna with an international career, is a total fit with Blanche’s younger sister, Stella, trapped in a violent marriage with the feral Stanley Kowalski.  Her first act number is one of the work’s two genuine show-stoppers and also gives us the warm and breezy side of her character.  It’s a really fine performance as a singer and actress.

Ardent tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, part of the original SFO cast, reprises his role as Mitch, Blanche’s arranged local suitor. He owns the part of this heartbroken and heartbreaking figure and also has the work’s other real number; his pairing with Fleming and their extended scene together in Act II are highlights.  That Griffey and Phillips both come from the South could very well inform their under-the-skin characterizations.  The audience rewarded them appropriately.

Making his Lyric début, baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes is from New Zealand, and, alas, it shows.  He gets the brutality of Stanley and some of his physical charm and ability at playing mind games with women.  But his strong accent never makes Stanley believable as American, let alone an ethnic factory worker in New Orleans. An imposing physique, shaved head, and large Kiwi shoulder and arm tattoo don’t make up for a barking delivery.  (Previn has acknowledged that the role is musically underdeveloped and regrets he didn’t give a song or aria to Stanley.)

And Fleming?  She gives everything, and we never think that she is anyone other than Blanche, even in “I Want Magic,” which she has made a popular concert and recital piece, and in the distracting reverie in the last scenes. At 54, she commands much vocal magic and plenty of power in this role; she brings out both the tragic and the horrid side of her troubled and troubling character.  Brava.

Veteran North Carolina mezzo Victoria Livengood, a last-minute substitute, turned the neighbor lady Eunice into a Broadway-rich character.  Tenor Andrew Bidlack was touching and attractive in the silent role of Blanche’s dead young husband and as the newspaper delivery collector briefly ensnared by Blanche’s seductions. Dominic Armstrong, Joe Lauck, and Mary Robin Roth round out the spoken cast. The six “Stanley types,” as Dalton calls them, include Wesley Daniel, the actor-acrobat injured in a freak accident at the dress rehearsal for Lyric’s Meistersinger.  Welcome back.

 

CSO has another début: young conductor Tugan Sokhiev and flute wizard Mathieu Dufour in a . . . Russian-ish program -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday March 22, 2013

Mathieu Dufour steals the show in CSO’s Russian-themed program

Débuting conductor serves up a mixed platter

Mathieu Dufour, flute, and conductor Tugan Sokhiev -- CSO/Todd Rosenberg Photography

 

 

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

◆ 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday

◆ Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue

◆ Tickets, $89-$220

◆ (312) 294-3000; cso.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED (for Dufour)

This week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts are unusual all the way around.

Start with a local conducting début, a rare occurrence in the Muti era (there are none at all scheduled for next season). Then the repertoire: two atmospheric “Oriental” works from Russia and the former Soviet Union, followed by guest conductor Tugan Sokhiev’s heavily manipulated take on Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.  Then, on the very positive side, the chance to hear the CSO’s superb principal flute as a soloist, although here in a work transcribed and adapted from a violin concerto.

In many ways, Mathieu Dufour is the centerpiece of this program, heard Thursday at Orchestra Hall. Sokhiev, 35, from Ossetia in the southern-Russian Caucasus (like his mentor Valery Gergiev), is music director of the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Dufour’s first orchestra, and the two young men have collaborated there in recent years.

Dufour, 39, also is one of the world’s great orchestral musicians, and over his 14-year tenure here, one of the top players in the CSO’s history. His breath control, tone and timbre, depth, and total musicality make him a wonder in any repertoire; his ability to move from sectional to principal to solo work always in the proper voice is astounding.

Awaiting a concerto from the Soviet-Armenian Aram Khachaturian in the 1960s, an earlier French flute legend, Jean-Pierre Rampal, grew impatient and came up with a solution approved by the broad-styled composer: He adapted Khachaturian’s popular 1940 violin showpiece for the flute, retailoring the long violin lines and wider range of the stringed instrument to suit the requirements and possibilities of the flute.

You’d think that Dufour could have gone ahead and just played the original, so assured and winning was he in this rather hokey work. (This was essentially a CSO prenière: At 15, Chicago native Demarre McGill, another superb musician, played the first movement only in a 1991 young composers competitition.) With a middle Andante movement that recalls Hollywood in the ’40s, there’s a lot of chintz in the 35-minute piece, but Dufour gave his part total magnetism and seriousness.  (Khachaturian was a major composer for Soviet films and excerpts of his works were popular with Western directors as well.)  To the audience’s good fortune, he also followed it with a masterful solo encore of Debussy’s hypnotic “Syrinx,” which was worth the whole evening’s ticket.

Sokhiev was an excellent partner and support to Dufour. But he had already showed signs in the relatively frivolous opening piece, Borodin’s 1880 “In the Steppes of Central Asia,” with its invented “Asiatic” melodies, of an attempt at personalizing and overly dramatizing a work. This isn’t consequential with Borodin (not played on a subscription concert since 1953), but it was often disturbing and disappointing in the Tchaikovsky, which has its own famous drama and logic built into it by its composer.

Stretching orchestral and solo lines like soft taffy, then breaking a piece made of arching lines and tightly woven self-references into little discrete sections for effect, Sokhiev showed that he can get what he wants from an orchestra but made no case for what he wanted. Former principal conductor Bernard Haitink, with decades on this guest, lets such a work reveal itself and disappears into the score and performance. Sokhiev has talent, but he could learn from Haitink that what ideas he might have about a masterwork should come out after many years subordinating himself to a score.

Even, or especially, with these additional demands, bassoon William Buchman, clarinet Stephen Williamson, piccolo Jennifer Gunn all distinguished themselves throughout, and flute Richard Graef and oboe Michael Henoch were stalwarts as well. Daniel Gingrich led the horns through many fine soundings of the “fate” motif in the Tchaikovsky.

 

CSO stunning début: Michael Barenboim in Schoenberg violin concerto, Mahler and Wagner with Asher Fisch make for top-flight concert -- My Sun-Times review

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday March 15, 2013

Michael Barenboim makes a memorable début in Schoenberg with the CSO

Fisch is insightful leader of Boulez-programmed concert, including Mahler, Wagner 

Michael Barenboim

Chicago Symphony Orhestra

Repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Pierre Boulez may be recuperating in Europe this month, but the very positive presence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s legendary conductor emeritus has been felt at Orchestra Hall these past two weeks during concerts he was schedued to lead.

Except for the swap of one piece last week, Boulez’s carefully and provocatively planned programs have remained unchanged. Replacement conductors were engaged who share his interests and respect his taste. Soloists stayed in place, and perhaps best of all, two young artists -- including last week's conductor, Cristian Macelaru -- made extremely memorable débuts and boosted listeners’ confidence in the future of classical music concerts, even those of the most difficult repertoire. 

 This week’s CSO subscription concerts saw as exciting a first appearance by an instrumental soloist as I can recall in years: Michael Barenboim, 27, was the soloist in the fiendishly challenging and lushly romantic 1936 Schoenberg Violin Concerto on Thursday at Orchestra Hall. The son of former CSO music director Daniel Barenboim and the pianist Elena Bashkirova, he has been familiar to Chicagoans since his high school years as concertmaster and chamber musician with his father’s West-Eastern Divan Arab-Israeli orchestra.

Having chosen to follow his maternal grandmother’s route to the violin, the younger Barenboim has done so in a way that carries on his parents’ and his own intellectualism and their intense musicality. As does this week’s conductor, the Munich-based, Israeli-born Asher Fisch (left), another Barenboim associate, the violinist sees the Schoenberg, even with its 12-tone compositional technique, growing out of Brahms’s attempts to carry on the classical and Romantic traditions.

The Schoenberg was largely ignored by the generations after its original champions until Christian Tetzlaff toured with it in the late 1990s. Since then, Nikolaj Znaider (soloist in the last CSO performances, nine years ago) and Hilary Hahn have shown what the current generation can do with a piece whose own composer said required the soloist to have a sixth finger on the left hand.  Barenboim has worked on the piece with Boulez and another eminence, Michael Gielen, and demonstrates his attachment to its lines and sounds as well as his full analysis of the three-movement, half-hour often wave-like work. He wholly carried the sharp rhythms, tough harmonics, and tantalizing blend of logic and unpredictability of the part. Fisch and the full ensemble reminded us of just how beautiful Schoenberg’s orchestration can be. Barenboim was called back for a rare fourth curtain call. He deserved it, as well as the hearty applause of the orchestra, and let’s hope he will be back often in what could be a major career.

The rest of the concert contained Boulez favorites that are also close to Fisch’s heart. Wagner’s opening Siegfried Idyll received a transparent and beautifully lulling chamber presentation and the closing Prelude from the composer’s Parsifal was an opera-sized, full-throated performance that also respected Wagner’s pianissimos and silences.  Fisch, who is playing Wagner literally around the world in this bicentennial year, had just led the last two performances of the full work earlier this month at the Metropolitan Opera, and the connection was intensely felt. He also gave the 1910 Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony, a heartbreaking piece not heard here since Gielen in 2001, a wholly sympathetic treatment -- no easy feat to do so with all three of these deeply related but unique composers.

Trumpet Christopher Martin was an essential actor in the Mahler and the Parsifal prelude, as was the full brass cohort.  Seven principal players sat out the Schoenberg, a shame for them more than for the audience, as it turned out.

Saturday postscript: Friday night Michael Barenboim added an encore: the 3rd movement Melodia from the Bartók Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117, BB124 (the Menuhin Sonata of March 1944).