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When he died suddenly of a heart attack while on vacation in early September, 1997, Sir Georg Solti had a score to Bach’s “St. John Passion” at his bedside. The 84-year-old music director emeritus of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was scheduled to conduct the piece for the first time ever in Europe and had spoken openly of his hope to subsequently do it with “his orchestra” here in Chicago. While the CSO had performed the “St. Matthew Passion” under Solti on three occasions during his long music directorship—including making a Grammy Award-winning recording of the work—neither Solti nor the CSO ever got around to the “St. John Passion.”  Until now. This week marks the first-ever CSO performances of the “St. John Passion,” at long last.

Johann Sebastian Bach is attributed with writing five Passions to correspond to his five annual sets of church cantatas.  Of these, two have been entirely lost, and the “St. Luke Passion” bearing Bach’s name is the work of a Bach student or minor contemporary. This leaves only the “St. John Passion” and the “St. Matthew Passion,” two of the supreme glories of Western music. Read the rest of this entry »

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The inauguration of the Year of the Tiger, the lunar or “Chinese” New Year 4708, began with the new moon that occurred on Valentine’s Day, and climaxes this weekend with the first full moon of the New Year.  It would be difficult to imagine a better way to celebrate than with the North American debut of the Hong Kong-based Windpipe Chinese Ensemble.

Thanks to the auspices of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office of New York, which is sponsoring the tour, and Chicago’s Fulcrum Point New Music Project, the Windpipe Chinese Ensemble will present a free, one-night-only area performance that will spotlight this remarkable group that seeks to preserve traditional Chinese music on indigenous instruments as well as create a new body of contemporary Chinese music for ensemble that feature both traditional and modern instruments.         Read the rest of this entry »

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Political dissension in Iran is nothing new. At a time when the freethinking people of the country keep making news for political protest while the repressive government greets dissension with crackdowns on the free flow of information and boastful nuclear claims to the West, it is sobering to remember that the geographical region called Iran in modern times (after Aryan, the Noble One) has a rich culture that is millennia old.

Most Iranians, especially expatriates, prefer the term Persian to Iranian, reflecting the ancient culture that so flourished there before the nation became a police state under a series of Shahs, only to be replaced by a series of ruling Shi’ite clerics that took careful notes upon—and have even expanded upon—the brutal tactics of the previously secular government.     Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

Boulez.  The radical and outspoken enfant terrible who once advocated that concert halls and opera houses should be burnt to the ground as dead monuments to an irrelevant past, but who ended up being known as one of the all-time great conductors and interpreters of that past.

Boulez.  The name of the leading twelve-tone composer of his generation, the man who once advocated that serialism would become “the only musical direction of the future,” and yet who later completely abandoned it as a compositional method.

Boulez.  The frustrated artist who vowed that he would never come back to an artistic position in his native France, and yet who returned to Paris to found and lead the world’s premier experimental music research center at the Centre Pompidou for a decade and a half.

Boulez.  The defiant and arrogant lion in Nietzsche’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” who once attacked all established systems, but who is today as diplomatic and subdued as a pussycat and who has come to epitomize the very musical establishment he once so sharply opposed.

On the surface, at least, it would seem that Pierre Boulez is a man of considerable contradiction.  Rather, Boulez is a man of genuine paradox: a living parable and a walking twentieth-century monument.

Our greatest living figure in music, Boulez is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most significant and innovative composers.  But there is also Boulez the conductor, the champion of new music, of technology to expand music materials, the teacher, guru to rock stars, author and lecturer of international renown; in short, a man who helped reshape the course of music after World War II on a myriad of levels. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

Pierre Boulez is widely represented on recordings and videos both as a composer and as a conductor. Sony Classical has re-released virtually all of his earliest recordings in a special “Pierre Boulez Edition” released for his eighty-fifth birthday, but many of these recordings have long been supplanted. Deutsche Grammaphon is re-releasing many of its Boulez recordings in multi-disc sets this year and the CSO is even releasing an all-new “Boulez Conducts Stravinsky” disc later this month on its own CSO Resound label. The following very select list is a basic introduction to the remarkable art of Pierre Boulez:

Bartók: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 3. Daniel Barenboim, soloist, Pierre Boulez and the BBC Symphony. Angel/EMI Classics. Many people thought the Bartók Piano concertos were just noise until this legendary 1970 recording forever made these works part of the standard repertory.

Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra, Four Orchestral Pieces, Op. 12. Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez. Deutsche Grammaphon. This stellar recording swept the Grammy Awards and is the best of several Boulez/CSO recordings of the Hungarian master’s music. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you were going to catch only one concert of the month-long Boulez@85 celebration that would tell you the most about the man who is being celebrated, this is the one to catch. We know Boulez is a great conductor, but hearing his own music in Chicago is still somewhat of a rarity compared to how much music we hear Boulez conduct of others. This is the only concert primarily devoted to works composed by Boulez himself.

Opening the program will be French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard performing “Notations,” an early adventurous piano work consisting of several movements which Boulez is in the process of re-imaging for orchestra. Aimard will be joined by his protégé Tamara Stefanovich for “Structures I” for two pianos, the first major piece that Boulez wrote that applied the serial principles of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern to all aspects of its composition: form, rhythm, register, dynamics, et al.     Read the rest of this entry »

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The only Boulez work that Boulez himself will conduct with the Chicago Symphony for his month-long eighty-fifth birthday celebration is his short “Livre pour cordes,” his 1969 orchestration of a string quartet (“Livre pour quatuor”) from 1948-1949, which will open this last Boulez CSO program before the celebration transfers to the University of Michigan and to Carnegie Hall in New York next week (Boulez was there last week as well, leading the Vienna Philharmonic with former CSO music director Daniel Barenboim at the piano).

But the real curiosity of this program is Boulez’ first-ever performances of the Bartók Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, an orchestrated version of the Hungarian composer’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion that Bartók made at the suggestion of his music publisher for orchestras to perform and to have the composer and his wife appear as the soloists during Bartók’s last, lean years in exile in the United States. Boulez had never done the piece before, but being such an admirer of the music of Bartók, the piece made his birthday “wish list.” French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and his protégé Tamara Stefanovich will be the soloists and the CSO percussion section will also take the spotlight. Read the rest of this entry »

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There are many moving musical settings of the medieval sequence “Stabat Mater” (“Sorrowful Mother”) that contemplates the suffering of Christ as experienced by the Virgin Mary standing next to the cross during his crucifixion, but none more celebrated nor exquisite than that of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, whose 300th birthday anniversary is January 4, 2010 and is being celebrated all year long. Baroque Band, Chicago’s period-instrument orchestra, gets a head start on the festivities during the very week of the birthday itself with a series of performances of Pergolesi’s most famous work.

Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater” is shrouded in legend since its frail composer wrote it very young and then died soon after at the age of 26. It was commissioned to take the place of another celebrated “Stabet Mater,” that of Scarlatti, and because of its beauty and its composer’s mysterious death soon after the work’s completion, the piece is a staple of major Italian churches during Lent, and is often presented in an elaborate, operatic manner that obscures much of the work’s original intentions. (Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director designate and fellow Neapolitan Riccardo Muti is a particular fan of the work presented in this grandiose style.) The Baroque Band approach will be to strip away these excesses and restore a sense of the original performance style of the piece. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

The “ought” or “aught” decade, as many are now calling it, has seen gargantuan changes to the landscape of classical music in Chicago.  A decade ago, Chicago still had two classical music radio stations, but the air space for WNIB became too valuable a commodity for the family that owned it to resist selling out; WFMT wasted no time in changing its motto from “Chicago’s fine arts station” to “Chicago’s classical station.”

Compact discs were still the media of choice a decade ago, and despite the fact that few downloading options exist that preserve the dynamic range necessary to faithfully reproduce the subtleties of the genre, more and more classical listeners are now embracing non-software listening options.

Chicago, which used to set the industry standard for classical recordings and Grammy Awards, saw a huge reduction in recording activity overall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra having lost its recording contract under Daniel Barenboim. Pierre Boulez continued to make recordings here with the orchestra now and then for Deutsche Grammaphon, but the CSO became so fed up with the situation that it began releasing its own recordings on its own CSO Resound label, despite the fact that, by then, it had no music director. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

Thomas S. Wikman & the Music of the Baroque Ensemble, Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” March 2000

Daniel Barenboim & the East-West Divan Orchestra, Northwestern University, August 2001

Daniel Barenboim & the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in concert, October 2001

Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle, Lyric Opera, April 2005

Cecilia Bartoli in recital, Symphony Center, Oct. 2005

John Adams’ “Nixon in China,” Chicago Opera Theater, May 2006

Daniel Barenboim Chicago Symphony Farewell concerts, June 2006

Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Christ,” Vermeer Quartet Farewell Performance, March 2007

Tashi Reunion at Ravinia, Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” August 2008

Riccardo Muti & the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Verdi’s “Requiem,” January 2009