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If it seems bizarre that an organization called Music of the Baroque would label its season-finale program “Gloriously Baroque,” it is an indication of just how far the repertoire of the organization has strayed from its original mission. No matter, enjoy a basically Bach program with a couple of Telemann works while you can.

The theme here is St. Michael slaying the dragon and no less than three Bach cantatas celebrating that feast day will be included: BWV 50, 130 and 19 along with Bach’s First Brandenburg Concerto which conductor Nicholas Kraemer thinks has been played too prettily and properly in the past; Kraemer feels that the horns were intended as hunting horns being introduced as a raucous diversion and plans on including them as such. No word as to whether these will be the natural horns that Bach would have used, which would really add to that effect.

The rarely heard Telemann cantata “Nun ist das Heil und die Kraft” also takes up the Michael vs. the dragon theme, which will be heard along with a Telemann Suite in d minor for three oboes, bassoon and strings.  (Dennis Polkow)

May 7 at 7:30pm, Millennium Park’s Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph; May 9 at 7:30pm at First United Methodist Church, 516 Church, Evanston, (312)551-1414. $30-$78.

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Years ago when I asked a former Chicago Symphony Orchestra manager why we didn’t hear more early music conductors leading the CSO, I was told that most had poor baton technique. Of course, given that the stand-up conductor with a baton was a late innovation during the eras that constitute early music, many early music conductors conducted—as was often true then—within the ensemble itself.

For Trevor Pinnock, the founder of the celebrated and pioneering British early music ensemble the English Concert, that often meant doing so from the harpsichord. There will be no harpsichord at this week’s CSO concerts, where Pinnock will make his long overdue CSO debut, though he has been to Chicago before with the English Concert and the experience was indeed a memorable one.

This Haydn-heavy program includes the Overture to his opera “The Desert Island” and the Cello Concerto, with Russian cellist Pavel Gomziakov also making his CSO debut, along with Fauré’s orchestral suite “Masques et bergamasques” and the monumental penultimate Mozart Symphony No. 40 in g minor, K. 550.  (Dennis Polkow)

April 29, 30, May 1 at 8pm; May 4, 7:30pm, Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, (312) 294-3000.

Patrice Michaels with the Bach Week Orchestra Chorus

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There is a lot of early music going on this week, with the City of Chicago’s first-ever Early Music Festival, which also includes ticketed performances by “partner” venues as well as free performances by the Department of Cultural Affairs across city venues. Along with all of those events, the weekend of the end of that new festival brings with it the beginning of another early music event that already has a long history, the 37th annual Bach Week.

This year’s festival includes three concerts that will be exclusively devoted to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, with the exception of the Chicago premiere of the “Baroque Suite” for Brass, Timpani and Orchestra, composed by Richard Webster  (the festival’s music director since 1975), and which is Webster’s own homage to the music of Bach. Read the rest of this entry »

Piers Adams

By Dennis Polkow

The City of Chicago is already well known for well-established annual music celebrations such as the Blues Festival, the Jazz Festival, the World Music Festival, et al, but if Department of Cultural Affairs program coordinator Helen Vasey has her way, we will soon be adding the Chicago Early Music Festival to that list of annual city events.

“We wanted this to be an Early Music Festival,” explains Vasey, “and not just a Baroque music festival, a period of time that already is represented in what happens around the city.” For Vasey, a British native who specialized in vocal performance back home before coming to Chicago five years ago, the dividing line is 1750, the year of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. “It is always an arbitrary dividing line,” admits Vasey, “but I think about seventy-five percent of the Early Music community would agree with me about that date.”

This means that medieval and Renaissance music—periods of music history that are seldom represented on local concert programs—will also be well represented, accounting for forty percent of the programming of the inaugural six-day festival. Read the rest of this entry »

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In case you weren’t paying attention, 2010 marks the 400th anniversary of one of the most innovative and glorious works of the Renaissance era, Monteverdi’s “Vespers of the Blessed Virgin,” more commonly known as “Vespers of 1610.”  To celebrate the occasion, the a cappella choral ensemble Bella Voce is joining forces with violinists Rachel Barton Pine and Martin Davids, along with Davids’ period-instrument-ensemble The Callipygian Players, for a rare area performance of the masterpiece that, along with its companion piece, the opera “L’Orfeo,” helped change the course of Western music.

In a press release, Bella Voce music director Andrew Lewis—who will conduct these performances—describes Monteverdi as “a composer of astonishing creativity, [who] forever changed the way we think about music. Renaissance polyphony, based on the Church Modes, made way for functional harmony—an innovation to which even rock ‘n’ roll owes its existence.  Monteverdi’s masterpiece is super-charged with rhythmic and spiritual intensity.” Read the rest of this entry »

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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 »