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The Old Town School of Folk Music has been the stage for countless performances for its half-century existence, hosting concerts that run the gamut from Americana to folk-rock and world music and in the meantime giving lesser-known artists a chance to showcase their talents to appreciative audiences that might not be reached otherwise.

To celebrate this, the school is releasing a four-disc box set of recordings made during these shows—some made on the sound board and others captured during radio broadcasts. The full package includes as many as 127 songs that had to be individually cleared with each artist or their estates. Read the rest of this entry »

Gerhard Oppitz

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This is the third and final week of the fall residency of Riccardo Muti’s second season as music director, which has thankfully thus far gone off without a hitch. The music-making has been glorious and Muti’s community outreach has stretched beyond CSO president Deborah Rutter’s wildest expectations.

Muti has professed his dislike for composer anniversaries and has chosen a unique method of dealing with them; namely, resurrecting offbeat programs from the past. Last week for the Liszt bicentennial, Muti recreated the same CSO concert that had been presented a century ago to celebrate then the Liszt centennial by then-music director Frederick Stock. This week, Muti is saluting the Mahler death centennial by recreating the final concert conducted by Mahler a century ago with the New York Philharmonic. Read the rest of this entry »

At the Illinois Youth Center/Photo: Todd Rosenberg

By Dennis Polkow

The Gospel of Matthew states, “I was in prison, and you visited me.” It’s an adage Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti takes very seriously. He has visited prison a number of times in his native Italy, and during the first days of his inaugural season last year as music director it was a top priority for him.

“The experience was wonderful, fantastic,” Muti said of his first visit to the Illinois Youth Center in west suburban Warrenville, an incarceration facility for female juveniles, where he gave a concert and first visited with the inmates in September of 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Todd Rosenberg

By Dennis Polkow

Entering Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti’s dressing room on a quiet evening before the next day’s first rehearsal of the 2011-12 season, there is a new shelf on the wall with two new possessions courtesy of his new partnership with the CSO: two Grammy Awards.

“They look nice there, don’t you think?” Muti says, looking quite relaxed in a dapper three-piece gray suit and open collar, hospitably offering up chocolate given to him as one of a myriad of presents for his seventieth birthday, which was July 28. Although Muti was conducting Verdi’s “Macbeth” in Salzburg over his birthday, he did announce that after forty years of conducting summer operas there, he would no longer be doing so. “I said if you want to hear me do opera, come to Rome where I will do them on the stage, or to Chicago, where I will do them in concert.” Read the rest of this entry »

Franz Schmidt

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It is odd how history has dealt with Hitler’s attraction to certain composers: performing Wagner in a high-profile manner is still considered taboo in Israel, although no one in Israel or anywhere else worries about programming Hitler’s favorite work by his favorite composer, “Carmina burana” by Carl Orff.

The music of Austrian composer Franz Schmidt did, however, suffer because of its association with Hitler and as popular as Schmidt’s music was through 1945, it fell into virtual disuse after the war because his music had been canonized by the Nazis.

Schmidt’s 1937 cantata “The Book with Seven Seals” brought Wagnerian-style music drama to the setting of the apocalyptic biblical Book of Revelation in a manner that satiated the Nazis, who had invaded Austria just three months before the world premiere.    Read the rest of this entry »

Bryn Terfel

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It has been seven years since Bryn Terfel last sang in Chicago. The Welsh bass-baritone superstar has severely curtailed his American appearances and the Met has been his first priority when he does come to the States. This week Terfel makes his long-awaited return to Chicago at Ravinia, where he had several early career triumphs.

Terfel will sing the role of Scarpia in a concert version of Puccini’s “Tosca” with soprano Patricia Racette in the title role and Italian tenor Salvatore Licitra as Cavaradossi, with Ravinia music director James Conlon conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (not the CSO chorus, however, in another Ravinia cost-cutting move).

The title and most popular aria (“Vissi d’arte”) may belong to Tosca, but in many ways, this is Scarpia’s opera, and Terfel is known for his blood-curdling portrayal and for the way that he toys with Tosca and creates sadistic sexual tension with her. Read the rest of this entry »

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Soprano Deborah Voigt has been singing a lot of Puccini recently at Lyric Opera, a rather dull “Tosca” two seasons ago and a shoot-’em-up Minnie in “La fanciulla del West” earlier this year. But it is Voigt’s Wagner and Richard Strauss that remain her bread-and-butter roles and, among today’s singers, in a class by themselves. Happily, this rare orchestral concert appearance will offer a compact evening of some of Voigt’s most memorable portrayals with the additional benefit of giving the CSO a chance to offer an evening of its bread-and-butter repertoire as well, under former Ravinia music director and new National Symphony Orchestra music director Christoph Eschenbach.

Fresh on Voigt’s triumph at the Met with her first-ever Brünnhilde, she reprises Sieglinde’s “Du bist der Lenz” from Act I of “Die Walküre” and offers Elizabeth’s Act II aria “Dich teure Halle” from “Tannhäuser.” Orchestral Wagner on the program includes the Overture to “Tannhäuser” and “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” from “Götterdämmerung.”

Voigt’s Richard Strauss will be represented by “Ich kann nicht sitzen” from “Elektra” (“Chrysothemsis’ scene”) and by the Finale of “Salome,” one of Voigt’s signature roles and some of the most rapturous music ever composed. Orchestral Richard Strauss includes the “Dance of the Seven Veils.”

Also on the program is the Overture to Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and Leonore’s Act I “Abscheulicher!” (Dennis Polkow)

July 9, 7:30pm at Ravinia Festival, Lake-Cook & Green Bay Roads, Highland Park, (847)266-5100. $15-$70.

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It has been seventy-five years since the Chicago Symphony Orchestra began its annual residency at the Ravinia Festival, an anniversary which is being celebrated throughout what is, ironically, one of the CSO’s most truncated at Ravinia. This week marks one of the first CSO Ravinia concerts of the summer, which sees the return of former Ravinia music director and new National Symphony Orchestra music director Christoph Eschenbach for a series of concerts.

2011 marks the bicentennial of Franz Liszt, which Ravinia is marking all season long but especially in this opening week, where both piano concertos are being presented: No. 1 on the CSO season opening itself (July 7) with soloist Lang Lang, and tonight’s performance of the Second Piano Concerto with soloist Andre Watts. The contrast could not be more extreme: whereas Lang Lang epitomizes the kind of empty virtuosity that many stereotype Liszt as also representing, Watts has always taken a more cerebral approach and has approached Liszt as the true innovator and revolutionary that he was and in the right hands such as those of Watts, can still be. In another cost-cutting move, segments of both concerts will consist of non-orchestral solo piano pieces featuring the soloists as well, sort of built-in and pre-programmed encores: Lang will be performing Chopin, Watts will be performing Liszt.

Berlioz’ Roman Carnival Overture will open tonight’s performance and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” will close it out. (Dennis Polkow)

July 8, 8pm at Ravinia Festival, Lake-Cook & Green Bay Roads, Highland Park, (847)266-5100. $10-$70.

Alexandra Petersamer

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Mahler composed “Das Lied von der Erde” after his mammoth Eighth Symphony and subtitled it “Eine Symphonie,” but given that Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner had all died after writing a Ninth Symphony, he superstitiously refused to place that ominous number on the work and felt that he had somehow cheated fate as a result. Ironically, Mahler would go on to write a Ninth and even an un-orchestrated Tenth Symphony, which he would not live to complete.

To these ears, “Das Lied” has always been more of an orchestral song cycle than a symphony, consisting as it does of six songs based on medieval Chinese poetry loosely translated into German from French and liberally paraphrased and sometimes expanded upon by Mahler himself.

As such, its maximum impact is largely dependent upon the artistry of the two vocal soloists—tenor and alto are specified, although baritone is given as an alternative for alto—not only in terms of singing ability and sheer power to cut through a full orchestra when needed, but each must have a wide arsenal of vocal timbres and dynamics that appropriately approximate the range of moods expressed in the songs themselves; like all great lieder artists, each needs to be a master storyteller. Read the rest of this entry »

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With all of the attention focused on conductor Carlos Kalmar’s recent Carnegie Hall triumph and his newly expanded role in the Grant Park Music Festival, it may be easy to overlook the significant contribution that Christopher Bell has made to the festival during what is now a decade of directing the Grant Park Chorus.

Bell has transformed what was already a fine chorus into an instrument of remarkable transparency and flexibility which is spectacularly showcased on the just-released Cedille Records release “The Pulitzer Project” where the chorus is heard performing the Pulitzer Prize-winning works William Schuman’s “A Free Song” and Leo Sowerby’s “The Canticle of the Sun” along with Kalmar and the Grant Park Orchestra. The chorus itself, by itself, will be the centerpiece of a special indoor Harris Theater a cappella concert of contemporary American choral music this week while Taste of Chicago is in full noisy swing outdoors.

The eclectic program includes Wisconsin-born Minnesota composer Abbie Betinis’ 2005 “Toward Sunshine, Toward Freedom: Songs of Smaller Creatures” based on animal poetry of Hans Christian Andersen, Walter de la Mare and Charles Swinburne; Milwaukee-born Glen Ellyn composer Lee Kesselman’s 1976 “Buzzings: Three pieces for Mixed Chorus” inspired by poems of Emily Dickinson; Eric Whitacre’s popular biblical lamentation “When David Heard;” Chicago composer Stacy Garrop’s 2004 “Sonnets of Desire, Longing, and Whimsy” based on poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay; Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1998 “Regina Caeli;” David Del Tredici’s “Acrostic Song” from his 1976 opera and Solti/CSO favorite “Final Alice;” Ned Rorem’s 1986 “Seven Motets for the Church Year,” British-born Paul Crabtree’s 1999 “Five Romantic Miniatures (from The Simpsons): Abe, Lisa, Homer, Marge & Homer” and Whitacre’s 2010 YouTube virtual choir piece, “Sleep.” (Dennis Polkow)

6:30pm-8pm, June 28 & 30, Millennium Park’s Harris Theater, 205 East Randolph, (312)742-7638. Free.