Monday 09 November 2009 -- 10:45 p.m. to 11:45 p.m. CST (note later start time tonight)

Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner

I talk with Erik Nielsen, this year's recipient of a major, $25,000 career support grant for young conductors from the Chicago-based Solti Foundation U.S.  Iowa-born, Kansas-raised, Juilliard-trained in oboe and harp, Curtis-trained in conducting, Erik, 32, is in his second season as Kapellmeister of the Frankfurt Opera in Germany (and has also played harp with the Berlin Philharmonic).  He has worked closely with such conductors as James Levine and Bernard Haitink and received rave reviews from The New York Times when he stepped in for an ailing James Levine at Tanglewood last year to lead both Kurt Weill's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahgonny and a program of two major works by Elliott Carter.  Insightful, articulate, and thoughtful, he seems an excellent choice by the Foundation.

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 7 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday November 5, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with principal conductor Bernard Haitink and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.  Repeated Saturday at 8 p.m. and Tuesday November 10 at 7:30 p.m.

Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet combines wild virtuosity with relaxed grace as Haitink leads CSO in complete Mendelssohn 'Deam'

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The dream times continue at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with a blissful three-man minuet of some of the world's greatest conductors making delicious music week after week.

Last month was music director designate Riccardo Muti's time and January programs will mark the upcoming 85th birthday of conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez.  The first half of November belongs to principal conductor Bernard Haitink and his unique fusion of refinement, passion, and preternatural sensitivity.

Next week's concerts hold more of Haitink's out of this world Bruckner and Haydn.  This week he ventures into other periods with Ravel and Mendelssohn.  Ravel's 1918 orchestration of his 1905 piano piece Alborada del gracioso ("Morning Song of the Buffoon") is an orchestral showpiece of longstanding.  But Haitink has no interest in the show side of pieces instead giving us the delicacy, subtlety, and even heart that defy Stravinsky's famous putdown of the French composer as a "Swiss watchmaker."  Principal bassoon David McGill offered the first of several extraordinary solos over the evening.  Although there are a number of fine players of his instrument, including his section colleagues, there's simply no other bassoonist who has his tone and line.

The soloist for the Ravel Left Hand Piano Concerto of 1929-30 was another unique instrumentalist: Jean-Yves Thibaudet has a way of combining an often wild virtuosity with an almost relaxed grace that sets him apart from many other performers of his generation.  From the first chords of this single movement work (commissioned by the wealthy Paul Wittgenstein after losing his right arm in the First World War), the Lyon-born, Los Angeles-based Thibaudet showed both a total command of the work and tremendous daring, power, and elegance.  Player and conductor were of one accord, with Haitink getting great support from principal trombone Jay Friedman in the jazz-inspired sections.  Permanent substitute contrabassoon Sue Nigro had the earth rumbling in the work's opening passages.  Thibaudet's thrilling performance was one to rank with those Robert Casadesus or Leon Fleisher.  Perhaps there will be an encore in subsequent performances.

The promoted half of the concert was the first CSO performance of Mendelssohn's complete Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, Opp. 21 and 61.  The 1826 Overture, a perfect work written when the composer was all of 17, has been a standard of two centuries and such sections of the rest of the score as the Wedding March took their place in popular culture when they were penned 17 years later.  While there are few conductors besides Haitink who could give this score its proper lightness and precision, I'm just not sure that an hour of this music, intended to accompany Shakespeare's play and with successful ballets set to it by George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, works as a stand-alone concert piece.  My guest compared the experience to eating a whole bowl of exquisite after-dinner mints.

But whatever the quantity, exquisite they were.  Guest flute Kersten McCall, principal of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra, illuminated the overture and scherzo.  The girls of Emily Ellsworth's Anima -- Young Singers of Greater Chicago, were a wonderful chorus of fairies with young American soprano Erin Morley and mezzo Sasha Cooke their spirited leaders.  Sir Thomas Allen, the terrific British baritone, read brief excerpts of text culled from the play by the Juilliard's Ara Guzelimian.  Haitink gave each section its unique character from the moody nocturne to the protomodern funeral march and the braying dance of the clowns.

Here is my Tuesday November 3 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday October 30, 2009, first performance by the second cast in Lyric Opera of Chicago's production of Gounoud's Faust along with a note about the first cast.  There are two more more chances to see Faust: tonight/Tuesday and Saturday night November 7, both at 7:30 p.m.

Second cast of 'Faust' heats up the Civic Opera House

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Lyric Opera of Chicago has had a hit with its revival of audience-favorite Faust since its opening last month with rising Polish tenor Piotr Beczała, superstar bass René Pape, and thrilling soprano Ana María Martínez.

Company schedules often allow for a second cast, or at least several new singers, to step into an ongoing opera run, and young American-based singers Joseph Kaiser (above/left) and Kyle Ketelsen (below/right) are doing so for the last week of Faust as the title character and the devil Méphistophélès respectively.  Although Kaiser seemed to be having some uncharacteristic opening-night jitters in his role debut Friday, and Ketelsen's voice is not as large or as deep as Pape's, the two contributed to a performance that clicked more as a unity than opening night did.  As more than one veteran Lyric patron observed to me, Friday night's was a "hot" performance.

As Marguerite, Martínez continues to hold the stage as singer and actress, and her duets and trios were always well-blended and convincing.  Kaiser had some difficulty with his top on Friday but took to the role more securely in the last acts.  Ketelsen, who will sing Mozart's Figaro in March at Lyric, moves beautifully and makes a devil of equal parts charm and dastardliness.  It's a pleasure to watch these artists evolve over time. 

Much of the success here is due to the superb work of music director Sir Andrew Davis and the Lyric Orchestra in the pit.  The orchestra drives and defines this production with cues and atmospheres of humor, wistfulness, betrayal, damnation, and salvation -- each in perfect measure and in a tightly woven whole.

Mezzo soprano Jane Bunnell's comic Marthe seemed better integrated into the show this time around, and baritone Lucas Meachem's morally rigid Valentin is still stirring.  But it's the whole here that is especially appealing, and not just several parts.

Note: I heard from several readers about my comments on Beczała's opening-night performance.  Half agreed with me that he was just not quite where his performances elsewhere have shown he can go, and the other half disagreed, finding him close to perfection.  Critics come to a performance with pairs of ears and eyes not substantially different from many others in the house.  We do our best to describe honestly and fairly what we hear and see, and are aware that perspectives and performances vary, and that our words can sometimes sting.  Having been wowed by Beczała in Dvořák's Rusalka in Salzburg last year, I wanted to hear him a second time in this production, but my schedule did not allow it. I very much look forward to his next appearances at Lyric.

Monday 02 November 2009 -- 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CST

Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner

I talk with Michael Morgan, marking 20 seasons as music director of the Oakland East Bay Symphony.  The former longtime assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Sir Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim is in town to conduct the Chicago Sinfonietta tonight.  Michael is a candidate to succeed the Sinfonietta's founding music director Paul Freeman who is retiring at the end of this season.

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 Thursday October 29, 2009 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Tuesday October 27 2009's opening night of Verdi's Ernani at Lyric Opera of Chicago.  While cuts in the opera remain, those in the printed version of my review have been restored here.  Ernani runs at the Civic Opera House through November 23.

Sondra Radvanovsky as Elvira in Verdi's "Ernani" at Lyric Opera of Chicago. 

Lyric misses chance to set 'Ernani' straight

OPERA REVIEW | Obscure Verdi work gets efficient, by-the-old-book reading

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

When it comes to putting a season schedule together, an opera company can be damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.  Not enough chestnuts and many patrons get heated.  Too many, and the critics yawn.  A more obscure work often elicits cries of "why?"  Programming only better-known ones draws those of  “But why not x or y?”

So it is even with the king of 19th century Italian opera, Giuseppe Verdi, with no fewer than a dozen of his works in the standard repertoire.  Along with the favorites, shouldn't we have the chance to know the fruit of what Verdi himself called his "galley years"?

Tuesday night, Lyric Opera of Chicago opened its first revival of Ernani (1844) in a new production, no less, a work that had its Lyric debut only in 1984, ostensibly to commemorate the new critical edition of the opera by the University of Chicago's Philip Gossett and his colleagues.  But Lyric's 1984 cast refused to pay the corrected and historically verified score any mind, and there was a bit of a scandal in the opera world.

With whole new generations of Verdi singers coming up, it's a shame that Lyric couldn't have followed the pathbreaking scholarship 25 years later.  This version is sticking to an old edition and  with many cabalettas (the closing, more ornamented sections of Italian arias) cut, so new insights will have to wait for another day.

Still, the availability of new Verdi singers also give Lyric audiences a chance to see a work that they might otherwise know only as a template for the convoluted plots and spirited choruses of the operetta parodies of Gilbert and Sullivan.  Alas, the opera house is not immune to seasonal cold bugs, and a couple of the singers sounded under the weather.

Chicago area native Sondra Radvanovsky was the standout as Elvira, pursued by all three of the male leads in this potboiler of love, honor, vengeance, and ambition in 16th century Spain.  Though her diction was not as clear as she is capable of, the soprano projected a Callas-like vulnerability and a fine intensity.  

In the title role of the bandit-impersonating aristocrat, Italian tenor Salvatore Licitra actually came much more to life after an announcement following the first intermission of his indisposition.  Israeli baritone Boaz Daniel, too, built up his presence as the king, Don Carlo,'s own throughout the evening, and Italian bass Giacomo Prestia, in his Lyric debut, grew into the honor-mad Silva as the plot followed its winding path.

Lyric's own production design director Scott Marr created the clean, intelligent, simple, and appropriate sets and costumes, lit by veteran Duane Schuler.  The young Argentinean-born director Jose Maria Condemi, in his first new production at Lyric, somehow understands the motivations of these melodramatic characters and is able to take them seriously while having some fun with them.

But the evening’s hero is Italian conductor Renato Palumbo who pays attention to Verdian style and purpose and doesn’t give us the too frequent fast-plus-loud-equals-early-Verdi treatment.  With such an idiomatic conductor, only two hours of music (plus two intermissions) and superb work from Donald Nally’s chorus, it would have been nice to have heard a few more minutes of what Verdi intended .

Monday 26 October 2009 -- 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT

Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner

As a preview to the international conference Darwin/Chicago 2009 to be held October 29-31 at The University of Chicago, I talk with Robert J. Richards, Morris Fishbein Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at The University of Chicago.  In addition to discussing the life and work of Charles Darwin, the 200th anniversary of his birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his The Origin of Species, Robert Richards also discusses the evolution of Darwin's ideas and current trends and controversies in the areas of natural selection and the theory of evolution. 

We'll also hear some excerpts of a delightful musical revue, Time Will Tell, written for and presented at the first international Darwin conference held at The University in 1959

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

and subsequently available at 

http://wfmt.com/criticalthinking

for free podcast/streaming.

Tonight's program is dedicated to the memory of Robert Lovett Ashenhurst, professor emeritus in the Graduate School of Business at the U of C, who died on Wednesday at his Hyde Park home at the age of 80.  A longtime friend of this program, of WFMT, and of good words and music of all kinds in Chicago, Bob Ashenhurst was the co-creator of Time Will Tellwith the late Robert Pollak.

See you on the radio!

Marginal Waters 7, 1985; 2009 -- by Doug Ischar

I greatly regret that during its run I have not had time to write a full piece on Doug Ischar's extraordinary show of photographs made in the summer of 1985 at the now all-but-erased Belmont Rocks on the North Side lakefront in Chicago.  Under the title Marginal Waters, these large, color-drenched new prints of what are, in some ways, found objects from another time and place, are shown beautifully at GOLDEN, 816 West Newport (3430 North, just west of Halsted Street), in the heart of Chicago's Lakeview/Boystown neighborhood.  You have but one more chance to see them together -- today, Sunday October 25 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at a catalogue release and closing party at the gallery.

Along with a new video, sound, and installation work, Forget Him, made from a set of truly found home movies from the 1960s -- work more in the vein of what Ischar, a professor of photography at the School of Art and Design of the University of Illinois at Chicago, has made his name with over the past two decades -- the photographs tell a story of looking, being, remembering, and reconstructing, of a gay world, of gay worlds, that are gone now, and yet that occasionally return, unexpectedly and, as in this show, in moving and extremely humane ways.

More to come -- and see you there!

Here is my Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday October 22 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus concert with Riccardo Muti and vocalists Elin Rombo and Russell Braun.

Muti's Brahms 'Requiem' sticks to text yet digs deep

Conductor leads CSO in glorious, meditative reading

Repeats: Saturday October 24 at 8 p.m. and Tuesday October 27 at 7:30 p.m. 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

BY ANDREW PATNER

For his two weeks this season as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s music director designate, Riccardo Muti is offering programs of works that were already on his plate before he agreed to take up full leadership of the CSO beginning in September 2010.

In some ways this has made these concerts more fascinating for they give an idea of what Muti has been wanting to play in recent years, the first and only time in his professional life where he was fully a free lance, not in charge of a major orchestra and its programming.

Last week’s elegant and lyrical performances of Bruckner’s Second Symphony showed that Muti could play a too-neglected work of this Austrian master without seeming just to bring coals to the CSO’s Bruckner-rich Newcastle.

Thursday night was another example of the unexpected with the much-loved Brahms A German Requiem, Op. 45 (1865-1868), a work that the Italian conductor had added to his repertoire only last year, at the age of 67, for concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival.

Muti not only loves music, he loves studying it and it was remarkable to hear what a conductor with more than 40 years of experience with both symphonic and operatic works brought to a concert-hall staple.  Here was the same level of razor-sharp analysis of every measure and phrase, the attention to balance and interplay of sections, and the support for and implicit understanding of choral singing that marked his offerings last season of his countryman Verdi’s own Requiem, a work Muti could probably conduct in his sleep.

Under the late Sir Georg Solti, the Brahms could be a set of sonic explosions, for James Levine at Ravinia a display of polished beauty, and for Daniel Barenboim a roller coaster of psychic peaks and valleys.  Muti for his part starts and stays with the score.  The young Brahms chose the scriptural passages he did, those from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament dealing with consolation and peace for the most part, to make a very humane response to death, not one that followed any traditional religious ritual or tradition.  Every musical passage, in Muti’s view, is tied into and relates and responds to these texts.

So brasses were muted but not silenced.  Strings were foremost, always meditative.  And wind lines ran through each section like threads of gold.  Urgency was applied where the score demanded it and the timpani rolls of assistant principal Vadim Karpinos and the choruses that do deal with fear or dread appeared in proper measure making the whole work cohere as a philosophical statement.

The Chicago Symphony Chorus, prepared by Duain Wolfe and Muti himself, sounded as it hasn’t since last year’s Verdi, gentle and commanding in equal measure and in appropriate turn.  Canadian baritone Russell Braun and Swedish soprano Elin Rombo seemed still to be settling in on Thursday but their contributions remained of a piece with a performance that was all about not only the audience listening to Brahms but every member of the orchestra and chorus listening to each other.  As the baritone soloist sings, “Behold, I tell you a mystery.”  

And a wholly beautiful and moving one at that.