Enrico Caruso, Luisa Tetrazzini, Giuseppe Di Stefano, and lecturer Henry Fogel 

WFMT Immersion Day: "Great Opera Singers of the 20th Century" with Henry Fogel

Riccardo Muti and the CSO with vocal soloists -- Verdi's Otello, April 2011.  © Todd Rosenberg Photography.

Tonight from 10 to 11 p.m. CST on Critical Thinking on 98.7WFMT Chicago -- and via free streaming anywhere at wfmt.com -- I talk with Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti about music of Carl Orff, César Franck, CSO Meas composers-in-residence Mason Bates and Anna Clyne, Schubert, and even Dmitri Smirnov, all of which is coming up on his three weeks of CSO subscription concerts from January 26 through February 11 and then on a four-city, five-concert Muti/CSO tour to California February 14 through 19.  Stick it out to the end and you'll hear some recollections of Muti's closest musical friends, the late Carlos Kleiber and the late Sviatoslov Richter, too, as well as how everything comes from Naples.

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

See you on the radio!

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Sunday January 22, 2012 8:43PM CST

‘Aida’ star’s stamina enviable but intimacy lacking

Lyric Orchestra a stand-out again

Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, a Chicago area native, in the title role of a princess taken into slavery in the Lyric Opera presentation of Verdi’s Aida. | John H. White~Sun-Times

‘AIDA’

◆ Through February 8 (new cast March 6-25)

◆ Civic Opera House, 20 North Wacker Drive, Chicago

◆ $54-$254

◆ (312) 332-2244; lyricopera.org

BY ANDREW PATNER 

RECOMMENDED

Verdi’s Aida is many operas in one. Even for scholars, critics, and performers, it’s the opera remembered from childhood.  (Did we really see it with elephants?)

It’s grand opera with the “Triumphal March,” dancers, Egyptian soldiers and Ethiopian captives.  It’s dramatic opera with loyalties of love vs. country.  And it is, despite all of the trappings, intimate chamber opera -- heartrending solos and duets with spare instrumentation as two lovers wrestle with the pull of a father and a princess against the commands of their hearts.

All of these account for its enduring popularity (the work turned 140 on Christmas Eve) and allow for a good fit with traditional presentations. (Lyric Opera of Chicago now is presenting its fifth outing for the Nicolas Joel/Pet Halmen production created for Luciano Pavarotti in 1983.) Even when it’s done only adequately, audiences take away a certain satisfaction from the doom-laden tale of the captive slave loved by a prince who does not know she is the daughter of his enemy.  And its 3½-hour length including two half-hour intermissions allows for the audience meeting, greeting, and exchange of reactions that represent a night at the opera for many.

Saturday night’s opening of the run of the first of two Aida casts (a second set of the five principals takes over for March) offered vocal and dramatic results above adequate if not pyramid-shaking. Italian conductor Renato Palumbo is of the younger generations that have benefited from Riccardo Muti’s sweeping away of performance exaggerations and accretions to Verdi’s exquisitely created scores.  He and the excellent Lyric Orchestra played the score eloquently and with much inner drama. Stage director Matthew Lata, remounting the Joel/Halmen conception for the third time here, gets the balance between pomp and the crowds and the personal dilemmas of the protagonists.

Recalling casts even solely from Lyric’s own history with the piece is not fair to today’s Verdi singers and to the admirable job Lyric has done in recruiting two casts committed to this repertoire and its vocal demands.  For many, Chicago area native soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, taking up the title role at Lyric for the first time, is the great hope for Verdi today.  I have found her at her best in lesser-known works such as the Metropolitan Opera’s recent revival of the mid-period Stiffelio or Lyric’s 2009 offering of the early Ernani.  Her technique and stamina are enviable, but in works we know better, a certain one-size-fits-all sound does not allow for the personal and intimate characterization necessary for a Verdi heroine. Nor did her acting or singing ever say “AIDA.” The opening-night audience rewarded her richly at evening’s end.

Sicilian tenor Marcello Giordani holds his own throughout the impossibly demanding part of Radames, and whether they always connect in the first three acts, he and Radvanovsky offer the proper, shared delicacy in the Tomb Scene finale. American Jill Grove seems to have become Lyric’s house mezzo and this has been a very good thing, even if her nuanced, jealous princess Amneris does not quite match her successes or depth in the Austro-German repertoire. American baritone Gordon Hawkins, an impressive Porgy at Lyric, holds the stage as Aida’s captive father Amonasro. American bass Raymond Aceto is a solid Ramfis, the high priest.  Ryan Center second-year bass Evan Boyer has a lovely voice not quite powerful enough for the King of Egypt in the cavernous Civic Opera House.  First-year Ryan mezzo Cecelia Hall was a lyrical offstage priestess.  Michael Black’s chorus, Kenneth von Heidecke’s principal dancers, Eric Weimer’s onstage trumpets, and Jason Brown’s lighting all animate the space and time.  Alas, there are no elephants.

In fact, the first season at Lyric Opera of Chicago that will be fully planned by the company’s new general director Anthony Freud is that of 2015-16, three and a half year’s away.

But the 2012-13 season, Lyric's 58th, announced Tuesday afternoon at the Civic Opera House bears more of Freud’s fingerprints than might immediately be obvious and, in its seriousness, commitment to American artists, and well-balanced variety is one the manager told a press conference he happily takes “full responsibility” for.

Previous commitments by now retired general director William Mason and Lyric board chairman Richard P. Kiphart also give Freud an extra boost for next season: a ninth opera added to the eight operas that have been the norm for the last 14 years.

As previously announced, Lyric creative consultant and diva soprano Renée Fleming, who joined the press event from New York via Skype, will star in spring 2013 stagings of André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, written for her.  In a canny move, tickets for the Chicago première of Streetcar will at least initially be available only to subscribers.

A similar “Subscribe Now!” hook is being used with the often-awaited Lyric début of the other superstar on the schedule, Russian soprano Anna Netrebko slated as Mimi in the March dates of Puccini’s La bohème.

The six-month season (with 68 total performances down from 72 this year) is heavy on serious works with only one out and out comedy, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (in a Dallas/Covent Garden production), which itself has some major international singers in German soprano Marlis Petersen and Italian bass-baritone Ildebrando D’Arcangelo in the title role. And high tenor René Barbera is one of a number of Ryan Center alums (he'll be done with his third year in the program after the current season) cast in important roles next season.  November 25 to December 15.

Other works on the schedule are:

• Richard Strauss’s scorching Elektra opening the season in a new David McVicar production with American soprano Christine Goerke making her Chicago début and American mezzo Jill Grove as Clytemnestra.  October 6-30.

• The first of two Verdi works, Simon Boccanegra, this with Thomas Hampson, Italian bass Ferrucio Furlanetto, whose belated Lyric début, in the title role of Boris Godunov, was a hit of the current season, and Bulgarian soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, Desdemona in Riccardo Muti’s critically-acclaimed 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert performances of Verdi's Otello, makes her house début.  October 15 to November 9.

• A new Francisco Negrin production of Massenet’s Werther, not seen here since 1978, with area native and local favorite Matthew Polenzani making his role début opposite Lyric débutante French mezzo Sophie Koch who has won acclaim as Charlotte.  November 11-26.

• The winter holiday offering, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, first and last seen here in 2001-02, revives the dark but highly effective Richard Jones production.  Freud is particularly excited about this revival both because he commissioned it when he was chief at Welsh National Opera (before taking the top job at Houston Grand Opera) and “it was the first opera I ever saw, as a boy at Sadler’s Wells” in his native London.  December 7 to January 19, 2013. 

• Popular soprano Ana María Martínez will sing the initial Bohème dates in a production from San Francisco new to Chicago.  Greek-American tenor Dimitri Pittas (début) and Maltese sensation Joseph Calleja share Rodolfo’s role and Ryan Center alum Elizabeth Futral takes on her first Musetta.  January 21 to March 28, 2013.

• Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, not seen here since 1999, gets a new McVicar production (via Glyndebourne and San Francisco, though no McVicar himself for this one) with James Morris, Johan Botha, rapidly rising Ryan alumna Amanda Majeski, and Bo Skovhus leading the cast.  February 8 to March 3, 2013.

• The other Verdi, Rigoletto, brings three awaited Lyric débuts from European singers: Polish baritone Andrzej Dobber and Serb Željko Lučić sharing the title role and Russian soprano (and Houston Studio alum) Albina Shagimuratova as Gilda, in a revival of the 2005-06 "traditional" Lyric production.  February 25 to March 30, 2013.

• Fleming’s Blanche DuBois is joined in the aforementioned Streetcar -- which will receive a theatrical but black-box treatment with the Lyric Orchestra on stage as well -- by Ryan alum Susanna Phillips as Stella, New Zealand baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes débuting here as Stanley Kowalski, and tenor Anthony Dean Griffey returning to the part of Mitch which he created in the opera’s 1998 world première.  March 26 to April 6, 2013.

Lyric music director Andrew Davis conducts the three first works (Elektra, Boccanegra, and Werther) and then returns for Meistersinger.  Stephen Lord of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis returns for Pasquale and two young American conductors début: Ward Stare for Hansel and Gretel and Freud protégé Evan Rogister for both Rigoletto and Streetcar.  Popular French conductor -- and regular Netrebko collaborator -- Emmanuel Villaume has the Bohème.

A complex array of raised, lowered, and frozen ticket prices results in an overall price increase of only 2.5 percent but with substantial savings available to all subscribers and lowered prices for some main floor and balcony seats. Family tickets will be offered for the first time, for Hansel and Gretel and for a special family matinée of Don Pasquale, and a first-time college and university performance of Streetcar will have a $20 ticket price for the understudy cast.

Season brochures will be mailed to subscribers February 2. 

America’s most diverse orchestra, founded by an African-American conductor-scholar 25 years ago, now led by a Taiwanese woman, performing at a very high level music from three centuries with influences from at least as many continents before a large, predominantly Black audience?  An annual birthday tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. that is substantive, moving, and joyous?

It’s hard to imagine anything that compares.  And this year’s King concert Monday night, following a sold-out matinée Sunday at Wentz Concert Hall of North Central College in Naperville, managed to raise the bar on this already enviable tradition.

As unlikely as it might sound, music director Mei-Ann Chen, 38, has shown she was born to lead this group and these historically-conscious concerts. As passionate and in control as she appears on the podium, so is the sense of connection that she has felt with the United States, with Black American history, and with King in particular since coming to this country as a teenage music student. She plays and speaks from the heart, the body, and the head, and the audience and the players have embraced her.

Her own wide embrace extends to sharing she stage as often as possible with what she calls “new sisters and brothers.”  In the course of the program, the Sinfonietta may have broken its own records with three women conductors and three African-Americans on the podium in one evening.

The program embodied Paul Freeman and Chen’s visions of universal music: the first half held Hungarian Zoltán Kodály’s 1933 ethnographic-inspired Dances of Galánta, Beethoven’s lesser-heard 1814 “Fidelio” overture, and Charles Ives’s remarkable 1906 two-ensemble Central Park in the Dark. Philadelphia-based conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson, a University of Chicago graduate music alum, led a well-thought-out Beethoven, and took the brass and wind “interruptions” of the Ives nightscape, that, with Chen’s string evocation of the underlying summer night, made for one of the best Central Park's I’ve heard.

The second half featured Harambee: Road to Victory, a brief but buoyant world première by longtime Chicago new music mainstay Nicole Mitchell, recently relocated to the University of California-Irvine.  Unable to perform the solo flute part herself here due to a family emergency, Mitchell had an able replacement in young Chicago native Kedgrick Pullums (left,  photo by Rieny G. Cualoping, from Sunday's Naperville concert, courtesy of ENERI). Johnson (above) also led this piece, which brought the Apostolic Church of God Sanctuary Choir to the stage.  Mitchell lately has been blending her own improvisations with scored jazz and classical ensembles, and this work continued that exploration.

The roof then was nearly blown off when Chen, the choir, and orchestra collaborated on the first of four contemporary gospel numbers, “Total Praise” by Richard Smallwood, orchestrated by Willetta Greene-Johnson, who, along with the Apostolic’s minister of music H. Chip Johnson, Jr., also conducted a selection. Chen returned for the finale, and despite her claim to “knowing nothing about conducting gospel music,” more than held her own with the disciplined and highly effective singers.  Excellent soloists, varied in style, included Rev. Ivory Nuckolls, James Hudson, and Travis A. Newsome.

The Freeman tradition of an audience sing-and-sway-along to “We Shall Overcome” closed the concert. It displayed the same humor and warmth that Freeman, whose life and career were greatly influenced by a chance airport meeting with King, brought to the tradition. Despite the ravages of the world outside, the hall became a place of real fellowship. “Surely Dr. King is smiling down on this,” a beaming Chen said toward the concert’s end. I’d say not just King, but the people’s music champion Kodály, the American excavator Ives, and the great musical humanist Beethoven himself.  Glory be.

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday January 13, 2012 2:32PM CST

Elder’s CSO salute to the Bard goes off the rails

Actor Greg Vinkler captures Falstaff, but musical direction misses

Repeats at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday

Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue

Tickets: (312) 294-3000 and cso.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

In boxing, you could call it a split decision.

This week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts offer unusual programming: a neglected masterwork, an all-time audience favorite and two rarities, Russian and English musical takes on the Bard, with gifted actors from Chicago Shakespeare Theater animating the textual sources.

But much was undercut Thursday night by slipshod execution by guest conductor Mark Elder, who organized this week’s program as well as last week’s more successful all-Berlioz with Shakespeare venture.

The work that came off best, a Thomas Beecham extraction from Frederick Delius’ English opera A Village Rome and Juliet (1906), was also the slightest. The eight-minute excerpt, “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” (the destination the name of an inn) is the sort of “light music” still enjoyed by some in Britain and once the province of several now-defunct local commercial classical radio stations.

What followed, however, was not limited to paradise. As beloved as some works by Edward Elgar are, his later Falstaff, Symphonic Study, Op. 68 remains a rarity in concert. Daniel Barenboim, then just 29, was stunned that the CSO had never played this deeply insightful 1912-13 portrait of Shakespeare’s merry (and fat) knight until he led it here in 1972. Barenboim was responsible for its most recent Chicago performances in the mid-1990s as well.

Barenboim’s performances emphasized the 35-minute work’s harmonic development -- albeit still well within Elgar’s tonal world -- and complexity, and he showed a love for every skipping eighth note and every sighing or smiling cadence. Elder instead took a bulldozer approach, stating in stage comments beforehand that this is “a brisk” work and chiefly a clever bit of program music.

If there had been any measure-by-measure or harmonic analysis, Elder did not communicate his discoveries to the players. The decision to project written signposts of the work’s “plot” similarly distracted from the musical depth and originality, parallel in accomplishment to the tone poems of Strauss. The music should tell the stories. That’s the composer’s achievement here.

For his part, Chicago actor and Door County, Wisc., Peninsula Players Theatre artistic director Greg Vinkler knows the part of Sir John Falstaff as one of the great humane works of art. His boasts, his postures, and his ultimate deflation by his onetime charge when the boy becomes the man and king, Henry V, were in turn hilarious and devastating. As Prince Hal/Henry, Jürgen Hooper was a perfect foil. (This week, unlike last, the amplification for the spoken-word scenes was just right.)

Four selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Musical Pictures from The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (1903-04) opened the second half, presumably as a lead-in for Tchaikovsky’s late 19^th-century Romeo and Juliet, with three of the four “Kitezh” selections having CSO premières Thursday night. The wholly unidiomatic direction seemed to connect these Russian fantasies more with Delius than with the two unidentified but colorfully costumed balalaika players at the stage’s front.

It was brave to conduct Tchaikovsky’s “Fantasy-Overture after Shakespeare” just over a year after CSO music director used it as a triumphant calling card for his new post at his free concert in Millennium Park.  In the event it was foolhardy, too. This was the biggest train wreck at a CSO concert in almost 15 years. An increasing lack of coordination from the podium left sections and solo players wrongly exposed; by the final sections of the tightly knit 20-minute piece, the leadership and playing were wholly out of phase. There’s a big difference between having great ideas and making them work in reality.

BY ANDREW PATNER

Gala concerts at opera houses can be many things.

As Lyric Opera of Chicago continues its season of transition from the generations of managers and musicians who created and built the 58-year-old company to leaders from elsewhere -- some not even born at the time of Lyric’s founding -- Saturday night’s "Subscriber Appreciation Concert" was mostly a look back at both storied and recent pasts with few clues about the organization’s future.

Honoring recently retired general director William (Bill) Mason’s literal lifetime of service to Lyric were two superstar singers closely associated with his years in the top two posts at the Opera House: soprano Renée Fleming and baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, neither of whom has taken a stage role at Lyric in several seasons. And while Fleming has begun managerial, advisory, and board positions at Lyric in the last two seasons, her future participation as a performer in full-run, fully staged productions in Chicago remains unclear.

Lyric artistic director emeritus Bruno Bartoletti, board of directors co-chairman emeritus Allan B. Muchin, William Mason, and music director Sir Andrew Davis. | Dan Rest~Lyric Opera

Modest and always grateful throughout his career, Mason displayed the best parts of his character in accepting the honors of having the main Lyric rehearsal space, "Room 200," named for him and the Carol Fox award, the company’s highest honor.  “It occurred to me,” Mason told the sold-out house, “that I will likely be the last recipient of this award who actually knew Carol Fox,” Lyric’s chief founder as a 28-year-old Chicagoan in 1954 and its undisputed leader until her ouster in 1980, a year before her death.

The gracious Mason then delivered an overdue tribute to Fox, her vision, determination, gumption, and taste -- with no prior experience or major connections she landed the U.S. début of Maria Callas and signed a roster of Italian legends who made Lyric rightly known in the 1950s as La Scala West -- as well as her mercurial temperament and the lavish and unchecked spending that led to the end of her tenure, even recounting his own two banishments by the imperious Fox in the 1970s.

“But she was also a nurturing mother,” Mason said. “And Lyric would have been and would be a very different company if it had not been founded by a woman and led by women [Fox and her assistant-turned-successor Ardis Krainik] for its first” 45 years, referring to the “family feel” that has so long characterized the theatre on Wacker Drive.  To drive this communal sense home, emeritus artistic director Bruno Bartoletti, 85, came in from Italy to salute Mason, and New York’s contemporary impresario Joseph Volpe, former head of the Metropolitan Opera, was in the second row and penned a full-page, candid tribute to Mason in the program book.

Fleming, turning 53 next month, and Hvorostovsky, 49, lit few musical fireworks but offered mostly quality work for singers now in middle age. Despite excess attention by both artists to their outfits, staggeringly high heels, cleavage displays, and coiffures, they were at their best vocally and dramatically in their most serious and subtle offerings. For Fleming this included the Act 3 scene from Massenet’s Thaïs and a wonderful “Give me some music” from Samuel Barber’s ill-fated Antony and Cleopatra, reminders of her strengths in French and American repertoire. Hvorostovsky gave a well-measured “Ode to the Evening Star” from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, albeit with a Russian sensibility, and the two were a near-perfect match in the Act 3 confrontation scene between Tatiana and Onegin in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, all in the evening’s second half.

First-half tries at Verdi by both singers and conductor and Lyric music director Andrew Davis were wider of the mark and often unidiomatic. The Lyric Orchestra however was responsive, eloquent, and supportive in all repertoire.

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday January 6, 2012 4:52PM CST

Conductor Mark Elder and the CSO are at one with the Bard and Berlioz