My Tuesday December 15 Chicago Sun-Times piece on Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's new partnership with cellist and educator Yo-Yo Ma.  You can hear my interview with Muti and Ma here at wfmt.com.

Yo-Yo Ma on South Michigan Avenue last year/Chicago Sun-Times

Yo-Yo Ma coming to CSO for three-year education and social connection residency

BY ANDREW PATNER

NEW YORK -- Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director designate Riccardo Muti took a giant step toward realizing his goals of connecting the CSO with wider audiences and young people of all backgrounds by tapping cellist Yo-Yo Ma, one of the world’s best known musicians and most tireless classical music advocates, for a new position in the orchestra’s artistic and educational leadership.

Just hours before being named Musician of the Year by Musical America at a Lincoln Center event here, Muti announced Monday afternoon that Ma would begin a three-year term next month as the CSO’s first Judson and Joyce Green creative consultant, working with the orchestra and its education programs in almost every area, from classrooms to community centers and juvenile detention facilities to Orchestra Hall itself.

“Yo-Yo and I have played together many times for so many years,” Muti said in an interview here Monday.  “We have always found our collaboration a pleasure and an easy dialogue.

“But perhaps even more importantly, we have the same idea that merely giving concerts and making music is not enough.  In a world that is increasingly complex, we need to tear down artificial walls and bring music to a wider array of people and bring those people and communities to music.”

A performer and educator who circles the world commanding top fees and selling out halls wherever he appears, Ma said, “I have a deep affection for Chicago.  The chance to work with Maestro Muti in a city that was the culmination of so much of my 10 years of work on the Silk Road Project and which is in many ways its own multi-ethnic, multi-generationa, and multi-experiential cultural capital is a great honor and very exciting.”

The creative consultant position brings together Muti’s experiences with his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra in Italy and international outreach efforts, Ma’s work connecting the music of Central Asia’s Silk Road with the West and the Far East, and the CSO’s own award-winning programs under the umbrella of its Institute for Learning Access and Training.

In addition to helping to develop and advance existing CSO education programs, Ma will work with multiple new aspects of its institute, including a series for pre-schoolers, intensive workshops for high school and college-age musicians and programs in collaboration with Muti for incarcerated and at-risk youth.  Ma also will lead Symphony Center Presents thematic chamber music residencies in engaging fellow international artists with college and pre-college-age musicians.

Details of how and where Ma spends his time will be worked out as his appointment begins.  “We have to rehearse,” Ma, 54, said.  “As in rehearsing music, you read passages, find new ways, try different gestures.  And we have to learn about different communities -- as we did along the Silk Road -- by meeting people as guests and not as hosts, and truly participating in an exchange with them.”

“Chicago is a great engine, for the country and the world,” said Muti, 68.  “And it is a cultural engine as well.  Together with the management and staff and the orchestra itself, Yo-Yo and I look forward to driving this to new places and in new ways.”

Here is my Saturday December 5, 2009, Chicago Sun-Times news story on the ratification Friday afternoon of a new three-year contract by the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra.

 Shows -- and three seasons -- go on as Lyric Opera musicians ratify new contract

By ANDREW PATNER

In the end it was like a marriage where two partners quarrel and then make up.  And it wasn’t the first occasion that a couple fought over money in tough times, either.

Late Friday afternoon, the 76 members of the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra approved a new three-year contract with the opera company, just a day before their union said they would strike the company over wages.  The vote was “as close to unanimous as you can get,” according to a negotiator.

Lyric management had wanted concessions in salary and season length.  Players had wanted to give some pay back now but make some of it back in future seasons.  Management wanted to go season by season, perhaps up to two years ahead.  Players wanted to lock in an agreement for four years.

In the end, neither side wanted to shut the season down, especially at the scheduled opening of a beloved and light-hearted operetta, Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, which launches its run Saturday night at 7:30 p.m.

“They recognized what we are facing,” said Lyric general director William Mason.  “We acknowledged that and there was compromise.”

The deal calls for a freeze on pay and a 26-week season for 2009-10.  It then allows for a 4 percent increase in each of the following two years but offsets the increases with a cut to 24 work weeks each of those seasons.  Health insurance agreements and other monetary benefits remain unchanged.

“We don’t exist in a vacuum,” said Chicago Federation of Musicians president Gary Matts.  “We always hope to better our lot -- our members have earned that.  But we also know that without the people who raise and donate money in Chicago there would not be a Lyric Opera or a Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  We’re appreciative of each other.”

The Bucksbaum Family Lyric Opera Radio Broadcasts over Chicago’s WFMT-FM and the WFMT Radio Network, along with their broadcast income for players, are also guaranteed for the length of the new contract.  And Mason said that additional administrative savings would be achieved in Lyric’s next fiscal year, beginning May 1, 2010.

In keeping with the Viennese party atmosphere of The Merry Widow, negotiators even broke out champagne and toasted each other after reaching agreement Thursday just before midnight.

Here is my Saturday December 5 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday December 3, 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Markus Stenz and soloists Viviane Hagner, violin, and Nicole Cabell, soprano.

Markus Stenz with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at this week's "Beyond the Score" concerts  (John J. Kim/Sun-Times)

Rare missteps at Orchestra Hall

Guest conductor, violin soloist falter

BY ANDREW PATNER

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.

The Mahler Fourth is the subject of the CSO’s “Beyond the Score” program on Sunday at 3 p.m.

There are downsides to having things go as well as they have in recent seasons at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and when a concert doesn't fully come together, it shows.  Thursday night it showed right away when Korean-German guest soloist Viviane Hagner, making her downtown debut, began the Mendelssohn E minor Violin Concerto both out of tune and with a small and hardly seductive tone.

She picked up technically as the half-hour piece went on, and offered a number of interesting, analytical takes on the 1844 work that usually belongs to the much more emotional Russian school of performance.  But if she had much interest in what the orchestra was doing around her, she didn't show it.  A disappointment from a still young player who has had good reports.

German conductor Markus Stenz made a favorable impression when he last led the CSO nine years ago, and he is doing fine work at Lyric Opera leading the outstanding Katya Kabanova through December 12.  And he clearly has ideas about this week's main orchestral work, Mahler's Symphony No. 4 in G Major.  But having ideas, communicating them, and achieving one's desired results are not the same things.  

As this week's CSO "Beyond the Score" programs on the 1899-1901 composition argue, this is not only music about "beauty" and "heavenliness," as commonly understood.  Mahler was an experimenter, a proto-Modernist, and he wanted to shake his audiences as much or more than soothe them.  But however interesting what Mahler himself left behind on piano rolls might be, it is not necessarily the model for interpreting this nearly hourlong work, and certainly such a reading would require someone with a conducting and baton technique much more focused and clear than Stenz showed here.  His fussiness with tempos in the normally transfixing final movement with the song "Heavenly Life" seemed to throw off soprano soloist Nicole Cabell, making it difficult to evaluate her performance or fully appreciate this landmark work.  Among the soloists, principal oboe Eugene Izotov and guest principal flute Thomas Robertello were especially superb. 

Chicago Sun-Times, Friday, December 4, 2009

A scene from the Lyric Opera of Chicago production of "The Merry Widow," a show that will go on after Friday morning's contract deal with musicians.

Lyric Opera photo

Lyric Opera, musicians' union avert strike in deadline deal

By ANDREW PATNER

"The Merry Widow" will dance her opening night waltz as scheduled at the Civic Opera House Saturday evening.

Despite an escalating war of words between Lyric Opera of Chicago and the players committee of the company's 76-member orchestra, a possible strike by the instrumentalists has been averted less than 48 hours before members of the Chicago Federation of Musicians were set to walk out.

After an all-evening negotiation session Lyric made the following announcement just before midnight on Thursday: "Lyric management and the musicians have reached a tentative agreement. There will be no strike. No further details will be released until late Friday after ratification by the orchestra.

"All performances will proceed as planned."

Management and the players had reached an impasse over the length of a new contract and the combination of cuts, freezes and potential future raises that would satisfy both the company's demand to reduce spending in the present economy and the musicians' insistence that they share in an anticipated recovery.

Here is my Thursday December 3 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com story on the possibility of a strike by the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra beginning this Saturday evening.

 Lyric Opera musicians might strike Saturday

CONTRACT TALKS | 'Merry Widow' headed for divorce court?

BY ANDREW PATNER

Franz Lehár's 1905 operetta The Merry Widow concerns the efforts of diplomats in a fictional Central European grand duchy to keep an heiress and her fortune in their cash-strapped land.

Management and musicians of Lyric Opera of Chicago are probably hoping that their current labor negotiations will end as happily as the Lehár work does, or the curtain won’t rise Saturday on the first performance of Lyric’s new production of The Merry Widow.

The Chicago Federation of Musicians and the members committee of the Lyric Orchestra announced late Tuesday night that they would call a strike if a contract agreement is not reached by 7:30 p.m. on Saturday.

A statement from the union noted that the 76-member orchestra has been working without a contract since the season started in September.

“Contract negotiations are stalled despite recent negotiating sessions and the assistance of a federal mediator,” said William Cernota, orchestra cellist and committee chair.  “We’ve offered meaningful concessions for the first years of a multi-year contract, but want Lyric to agree to compensate us for those concessions in the latter contract years.  Lyric adamantly refuses to do so.”

“In addition,” the statement continued, “Lyric is attempting to dismantle long accepted working conditions, and we will not agree to those changes.”  Cernota said that Lyric management was “using the current economic downturn as an excuse for gutting our contract.”

It was unclear if the strike threat was a negotiating tool by the union or a sign of a deterioration in negotiations that had recently been described by both sides as “proceeding in good faith."  CFM president Gary Matts said Wednesday, “We are all -- management and players -- certainly aware that we are in this together.  But sometimes we don’t know where that together is.”

Talks are still scheduled for today following the dress rehearsal for The Merry Widow and Matts said the union “is prepared to work through the night if necessary.”

“It’s an interesting situation, to say the least,” Lyric general director William Mason said Wednesday.  “We have been through difficult, even tortuous negotiations.  But we cannot agree to a contract that we cannot afford.  It would not be fair to our donors, our board members, and our many other employees.

“We have to be concerned with the long-term health of the company.  That the union does not seem to share this concern is shocking, irresponsible, and, frankly, incomprehensible.”

In October, Lyric reached agreements with its stagehands, box-office employees, and wig and makeup artists that included union contract concessions.

Mason pointed to a number of smaller companies around the country that have closed or suspended operations in the current economic environment.  Others, including Washington National Opera and the San Francisco and Los Angeles companies, have announced cutbacks and performance reductions.

“In a world where hundreds of thousands of Americans are out of work, where retirees, who make up a significant portion of our ticket buyers and donors, have seen their retirement funds take drastic hits, we cannot make commitments that are out of line with our budgeting,” Mason said.

Speaking after a Wednesday rehearsal, Cernota countered management’s arguments by saying “we absolutely are making concessions, significant ones, freezes and cuts, but we are also saying that some recovery has to be built into a multi-year contract.  Some, not of everything.  We recognize that.  But this is the model that other orchestras have agreed to.”

Work rules, which the union sees as allowing for rotation of players and standby players and Mason sees as “still about wages,” are also at issue.  “We have told them that we will be reducing our schedule from 26 weeks to 24 next season,” Mason said.  “But we will still be presenting eight different operas.  We had only added additional performances when we were in a position to sell tickets to them.  Now even many of our regular subscribers are saying that they cannot renew because of limits on their spending.”

Said Cernota, “A reduction of performances does not lead to a reduction in rehearsals.  That’s counter-intuitive.  Why would they want to lower the quality level?”

Lyric has long been proud of its fiscal discipline and has operated in the black for 21 of the past 22 seasons.

In addition to the Merry Widow dress rehearsal this afternoon, Friday night’s scheduled performance of Janáček's Katya Kabanova is not affected by the current labor dispute.

Lyric management says that the average orchestra wage is $91,624 for 27 20-hour work weeks, plus any overtime.  The union prefers to cite the base wage of $59,150.  Union leaders also point out that their compensation reflects a lifetime of training and practice and that a top artistic product requires competitive wages in a difficult field.

Here is my Tuesday November 24 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Sunday November 22, 2009, opening matinée performance of Leoš Janáček's Katya Kabanova by Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Karita Mattila (Katya, left) and Liora Grodnikaite (Varvara) perform in the Lyric Opera of Chicago's Katya Kabanova at the Civic Opera House.  (John J. Kim/Sun-Times)

Sense of torch passing at Lyric's 'Katya Kabanova'

Late soprano Söderström advocated Janacek works

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Through December 12.

The death Friday in Stockholm of the great Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström at age 82 cast a shadow and a sense of torch-passing toward Lyric Opera of Chicago's opening performance Sunday afternoon of Leoš Janáček's Katya Kabanova.

Along with Australian conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, no one did more to introduce and cement the reputation of Janáček's dark, spiky, mature, and brilliant operas to the listening world than the enterprising and authoritative Söderström.

But it was a part of Söderström's makeup and appeal that she advocated these works with the hope that others would enter the Moravian composer's universe of folk melodies given a Modernist spin, with complex but captivating speech song of the Czech language, and doomed heroines and hard truths of love and societal norms.

The Metropolitan Opera has drawn great attention with its new production of Janáček's last opera, The House of the Dead, an adaptation from Dostoevsky.  Lyric has given many of his other works and turns to another of his Russian-inspired stories, Katya Kabanova, for the first time in 23 seasons.  Written in 1921, when Janáček was 67, the opera's marriage of music, plot, and characterization in just under 100 minutes makes it a can't-miss presentation, almost regardless of how it is being handled in the opera house.

Fortunately, Lyric's production, first seen at the Met in 1991, is strong despite some ineffective directorial choices.  The singing is often spectacular, and German conductor Markus Stenz makes an excellent debut with the Janáček-friendly Lyric Orchestra.  Finnish soprano Karita Mattila is one of today's best singing actresses and while director Paula Williams (working with Jonathan Miller's production) does not always seem to know what to do with her in the title role, Mattila is incapable of giving less than 110 percent.  She never allows us to lose sympathy for the put-upon, emotionally starved provincial heroine of Alexander Ostrovsky’s Russian play The Storm.  In her second- and third-act monologues, you might be tempted to join Katya in the tragic arc of her life.

Mattila is at least matched by the American tenor Brandon Jovanovich in his house debut.  Too often the character of Boris, the Moscow wooer of the married Katya, is seen as a Pinkerton-like cad. Jovanovich sees and sings him instead as a man squeezed in his own vice who truly loves Katya.  Everything about his performance is a success.  Let's hear and see more of him.

English baritone Andrew Shore as Boris's uncle, the sadomasochistic merchant Dikoj, is almost frighteningly good.  While Canadian mezzo Judith Forst is a bit one-dimensional as Katya's awful mother-in-law Kabanicha, she has that one dimension of total callousness down cold.  American tenor Jason Collins, also debuting here, seems a bit misdirected as Katya's mother-crushed husband Tichon but has a nice voice.  Another debutant, Hoosier tenor Garrett Sorenson, is absolutely winning as Kudrjáš, the lighthearted friend who courts Katya's foster sister, Varvara, Lithuanian mezzo Liora Grodnikaite, in a pleasant if perhaps too-girlish debut.

Robert Israel's minimal sets and buttoned-up costumes are a perfect foil to Janáček's score and Stenz's careful handling of it, even if Williams does not always use the settings well or with much dramatic effect.  Somehow other issues fade away, though, and we are left after two hours (including one intermission) with only the power of this awfully sad story and this haunting, deathless music.

Monday 23 November 2009 -- 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CST 

Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner

I talk with French-born and -trained, Los Angeles-based pianist  Jean-Yves Thibaudet.  Thibaudet was in town this month for performances of a signature work for him, the 1929-30 Ravel Concerto for the Left Hand, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its principal conductor Bernard Haitink.  You can read my Chicago Sun-Times review of that high-octane performance here. Although Thibaudet has been coming to Chicago throughout his professional career and although I have long been a fan, this was actually my first in-person interview with him.

On 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and streamed (free) on wfmt.com

and subsequently available at 

http://wfmt.com/criticalthinking

for free podcast/streaming.

See you on the radio!

Here is my Saturday November 21 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday November 19, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Paul Lewis, piano, and Christoph von Dohnányi, guest conductor.  The program repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m.

Pianist Lewis shines in debut with CSO

From prodigy to mature artist

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

With no hype and even very little standard promotion, Liverpool-born Paul Lewis has emerged in recent years as one of the world's finest pianists.  At 37, he no longer should be judged as a "younger pianist" but simply as the great artist he is increasingly showing himself to be.

Two years ago, the shaggy-haired Lewis made his superb Chicago debut with Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto.  A year ago, he made his Orchestra Hall recital debut in a rich, challenging solo program.  And Thursday night, he at last played as soloist for the first time with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

For those who have been following this thoughtful musician, whether live or on his many harmonia mundi label recordings, all expectations were confirmed by his playing of Mozart's A minor Concerto No. 12, K. 414. Lewis somehow marries intellectual insight with total technical command and a true soulfulness. For those new to this soft-spoken player who manages to be both a non-nonsense performer and one capable of transmitting joy and subtle humor in his interpretations, he must have been a revelation.

The K. 414 is a work filled with booby traps that only the most careful pianists can avoid.  There is an unusual back and forth between soloist and orchestra, a mixing of delicate and stirring passages, and a lightness that is deceptive in sounding easy to achieve.  Lewis navigated all of these -- and even managed to integrate his own blend of the two sets of cadenzas Mozart wrote for this 1782 work along with some of his own figurations -- as if the work were written just for him.  Audience and CSO musicians demanded several curtain calls.

Veteran German guest conductor Christoph von Dohnányi was backing Lewis every step of the way, breathing with him and shaping the reduced orchestra to match the pianist's take.  On his own, Dohnányi led a sobering -- though never dull -- performance of Bartók's 1939 Divertimento for String Orchestra, often seen, as its name indicates, as a light and joyful work.  Dohnányi, who was turning 10 when this work was written on the eve of World War II, and 15 when his own father was executed in 1945 for his role in the failed plot to kill Hitler, knows better.  It was good, too, to hear the CSO strings showing their best after the Berlin Philharmonic's famed sections played here on Monday night.

Dohnányi closed with the Schumann C Major Second Symphony, Op. 61, giving the 1845-46 Romantic work more structure than it probably has and as a result making it much more interesting and fulfilling to hear than it often is.

Here is my Wednesday November 18 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Monday November 16, 2009, Orchestra Hall concert by the Berlin Philharmonic, Sir Simon Rattle, principal conductor, in music of Wagner, Schoenberg, and Brahms.

Berlin Philharmonic in Chicago: Once is never enough

BY ANDREW PATNER

The Berlin Philharmonic has been one of the world’s greatest orchestras almost from its founding in 1882.  And since the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago it has resumed its place as a national institution in a reunified city that is once again the sole German capital.

Unlike their Austrian counterparts at the Vienna Philharmonic, also a self-governing ensemble, the Berliners have based their membership on merit alone and not gender, color, or national origin.  And with an Italian, Claudio Abbado, and now a Brit, Sir Simon Rattle, as principal conductors over the past two decades, with healthy representation of women, and with the average age of players down to around 40, Berlin is truly a 21st -century international treasure.

What a shame then that Chicago has not had a chance to see and hear this sterling group in six years and that although they are touring with three programs that include all four Brahms symphonies, Monday night’s Symphony Center Presents Great Performance Series concert was their only local appearance.

That said, we might have had the best of the three programs.  Not only did it include the 1877 D Major Brahms Second but also a neglected masterwork with strong connections to the Brahmsian legacy -- Arnold Schoenberg’s revised version (1935) of his 1922 orchestration of the hypnotic 1906 First Chamber Symphony.  

For while Rattle is not always an inspiring conductor for either musicians or audiences, he has a special ability with 20th century and contemporary music and with connecting this repertoire to an elite European classical and romantic orchestra and its audience.  To hear the swirling 22-minute Schoenberg work, written less than 10 years after Brahms’s death, played with such conviction and with the rich and gleaming sound of the Berlin strings and its famously balanced wind and brass sections was a true joy and no sort of obligatory program filler.

The Brahms, too, was given a surprisingly clear and intelligent interpretation, particularly in its first three movements.  Rattle seemed to find an ability to create quiet moments and passages that reports said had eluded him in his Carnegie Hall dates in New York last week.  Only in the buoyant eruptions of the finale did he come close to indulging his tendency towards vulgar effects and contrasts.

Berlin has one of the deepest benches of any major orchestra with two or more acclaimed principals in many sections.  Still, the single performance meant that contemporary stars Emmanuel Pahud, flute, Albrecht Mayer, oboe, and Radek Baborák, horn, had the whole night off.   Co-principal horn Stefan Dohr was a special standout of those who did play.  The concert opener, Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, seemed a Rattle miscalculation, starting sloppily before coming together -- this despite a full hour of rehearsal earlier in the day.

Here is my Saturday November 14 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday night November 12, 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with principal conductor Bernard Haitink and CSO principals as soloists.

Haydn, Bruckner magic on view as program develops

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeats Saturday November 14 at 8 p.m.

Even the Chicago Symphony Orchestra catches its breath occasionally.  This fall has been a heavy roll of European touring, Mutimania, and four large-scale works these last two weeks under the painstaking care of principal conductor Bernard Haitink.  One had a sense that the CSO concert Thursday night at Symphony Center was more a preview of great performances to come than a fully realized achievement.

When Haitink has paired Haydn and Bruckner in the past, the two composers' visions played and even fed off of each other.  This week, the contrasts are greater, and each half of the program stands wholly alone.

Haydn's 1792 B-Flat Major Sinfonia concertante for four instrumental soloists has been a staple of orchestras eager to let their principal players shine.  The lineup of concertmaster Robert Chen, cellist John Sharp, oboe Eugene Izotov, and bassoon David McGill could hardly have been more promising: These are gifted players who love chamber-music style.  But Sharp was having an unusual off-night, and Chen, so often a master of the courtly style,  was too straightforward for Haydn's mischievousness.  Izotov and McGill spun magical threads from their double reeds, and Haitink and the orchestra were in true Haydnesque form.

Bruckner began his Ninth Symphony, in D minor in 1891 and it remained unfinished at his death at 72 five years later. Even without a final movement, it has been recognized since the 1930s as a summing up of his work and life.

The CSO's major conductors of recent decades -- Solti, Barenboim, and Boulez -- have all wrestled with this musical and spiritual testament; it's a tribute to conductors and composer that there's no single way to play this 70-minute score.  Still, whatever style is at work, there's a motor that has to hum in this piece from the earliest measures if a performance is to cohere fully.

Somehow, despite tremendous playing by this made-for-Bruckner orchestra  -- special nod to the glow of the four Wagner tubas played by members of the horn section -- and Haitink's ability to treat the most dramatic climaxes with an uncanny delicacy, that motor did not start whirring until the second-movement Scherzo. But I'll bet it will be purring full time tonight, Haitink's last CSO appearance until his much-awaited, three-week, 11-concert Beethoven Festival in June.