By Dennis Polkow

Much has happened to Carlos Kalmar since he was last in town, conducting the Grant Park Orchestra last summer as he has for well over a decade.

To begin with, Kalmar made his Carnegie Hall debut last month with “his other orchestra,” the Oregon Symphony, absolutely wowing even the most hardened New York critics.

“I knew that the program was effective and I knew what my orchestra could do,” says Kalmar, “but you cannot know how New York would respond. Obviously, I am pleased and humbled at the reception that we received.”

Although Kalmar had conducted Mostly Mozart concerts at Avery Fisher Hall “when I was a young conductor,” the Oregon Symphony concerts were his first at Carnegie Hall. “They have already invited us back for 2013. You know, this is a very fine orchestra with a grand tradition. It is 115 years old, the oldest orchestra west of the Mississippi.”

The other good news both for Kalmar and Chicago is last month’s Grant Park Music Festival announcement that Kalmar’s contract as principal conductor of the Grant Park Orchestra has been extended for five years. Along with that announcement came the additional news that Kalmar has also been appointed the Grant Park Music Festival’s artistic director. Read the rest of this entry »

Gustav Mahler

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In 1907, composer Gustav Mahler was diagnosed with an infection of the inner lining of the heart. He died four years later, 100 years ago last month, at the age of fifty. The Mahler death centennial is being commemorated throughout 2011 across the music world, including at this week’s season-finale concerts of the CSO.

Death was a constant companion to Mahler throughout his short life. The tavern owned by his father was adjacent to a funeral parlor and marches and dirges were his childhood aural wallpaper. In addition to the constant funeral processions in and out of the compound which Mahler’s music would often go on to emulate, Mahler lost eight of his fourteen siblings before reaching adulthood.

When Mahler set to work on the song cycle “Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”) set to haunting poems of Friedrich Rückert, his oldest daughter died in what his wife Alma took as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This capped a series of unrelenting tragedies for the composer that included the diagnosis of his fatal heart condition which actually drove Mahler to work harder rather than rest, in order to finish as much work as possible before his untimely demise.

Mahler composed the orchestral song cycle “Das Lied von der Erde” (“The Song of the Earth”) after his mammoth Eighth Symphony (“of a Thousand”) and subtitled the work a symphony. However, given that Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner had all died after writing a Ninth Symphony, he superstitiously refused to place that ominous number—or any number—on the work and felt that he could somehow cheat 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. Read the rest of this entry »

Riccardo Muti (center) clubbing with CSO bass trombonist Charles Vernon (right) and Russian bass trombonist and Vernon protege Andrey Kharlamov/Photo: Dennis Polkow

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After a standing ovation and frantic applause and cheers from the capacity crowd that seemed as if it could have gone on all night, Riccardo Muti officially concluded his inaugural season as CSO music director Saturday night. Motioning for the audience to sit down, Muti addressed both the audience and the orchestra in some heartfelt remarks sprinkled with the wicked wit that has already become a beloved Muti trademark here.

“This is my last concert of my first season, which as you know, was cut short because,” Muti said with a pregnant pause, “I am eccentric.” The crowd howled at Muti poking fun at the snap judgments some made about his medical misfortunes. “Thanks to the Chicago doctors at Northwestern Hospital, I am still alive,” said Muti, to an immense ovation. “You know, it is very tough to kill a Neapolitan. And thank you so much for all of your cards, letters and good wishes, and thank you, my dear orchestra, for your patience. When I fell, they probably thought that instead of a music director, they received a piece of junk,” said Muti, to uproarious laughter from players and audience alike.

The final piece of Muti’s residency was Richard Strauss’ “Aus Italien,” a work Muti performed at his CSO debut in 1973 at Ravinia that had not been here in decades. When some premature applause greeted the rousing finale of the second movement, Muti was amused and turned to the man clapping and said, “There’s a beautiful slow movement yet about the beaches in Sorrento, even though there are no beaches in Sorrento! And we haven’t even got to my part of the country yet, the South!” When the fourth movement about Naples, Muti’s hometown, began with Strauss’ variation on a familiar Neapolitan folksong, Muti beat his heart as if to say, “this is me!”

The program opened with Mason Bates’ “The B Sides,” the most substantial piece yet heard here by the young composer that Muti chose as co-composer-in-residence and who is writing a world-premiere work for Muti and the CSO that will be heard next season. Muti chose Bates for the position based on “his interesting use of color and texture” and as Bates told me about Muti, “He doesn’t just phone it in, he really knew this work.” Read the rest of this entry »

Yo-Yo Ma

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You could see the anxiety on the faces of the young orchestra players from across the United States and Mexico Monday night as they looked out at the vast crowd eavesdropping on their Symphony Center rehearsal, and of course, waiting for the arrival of no less than Riccardo Muti himself to work with them.

Muti, being Muti, sensed this coming onstage, and put them immediately at ease. “They don’t know me,” Muti said, turning to the audience, “and so, like any orchestra working with a conductor for the very first time, they wonder, ‘Is he nice? Does he know the music?’” The kids laugh, and Muti adds,“What they don’t know, is that I am thinking the same thing!”

As the 2011 Chicago Youth In Music Festival Orchestra does a read-through of the “Montagues and Capulets” section of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Muti watches every player very carefully, and later speaks to them about the importance of constant eye contact between a conductor and an orchestra. When one cellist’s face is actually not visible to him, Muti gets up and walks over and introduces himself and rearranges the stage so that the cellist can be seen. “I could only see a blonde head,” he says, “and the eyes communicate everything.” Read the rest of this entry »

Mason Bates

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MusicNow is touted as “the exploratory arm of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,” and has previously held events featuring engaging new music performed by members of the CSO and guests, most notably German electronic artists Mouse on Mars. Tonight, MusicNow takes over the home of Chicago’s favorite makers of spectacle, the Redmoon Theater, for Mercury Soul, a night combining classical musicians, elaborate lighting and set design, and adventurous DJs. Maestro Benjamin Shwartz of the San Francisco Symphony, set designer Anne Patterson, and MusicNow curator/DJ Mason Bates (aka Masonic) have previously teamed up to successfully bring Mercury Soul to San Francisco DJ-destination Mezzanine. Tonight’s installment adds a splash of Chicago DJ flavor with underground favorites and previous MusicNow guests Justin Reed and Striz from illmeasures on the bill. With Reed’s penchant for both angular techno and soulful house, and Striz’s mastery of rhythms from dub, breaky and broken beats to thumpin’ 4/4, their additions to an evening of fully actualized guest immersion (sound and sight, performance and environment, with no programs or seats and plenty to drink) makes attendance to Mercury Soul mandatory for the adventurous weekender. Bonus points: sound for the evening will be reinforced by a Void Audio system. (Duke Shin)

May 13 at Redmoon Theater, 1463 West Hubbard, (312)850-8440. 9pm. $20.

Photo: Todd Rosenberg

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An important step in the recovery of CSO music director Riccardo Muti was to actually perform in public the music that he was rehearsing when he collapsed on February 3. It was during the slow movement of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, after having triumphantly performed that music here before taking it to Carnegie Hall last month, that Muti mischievously admitted backstage to toying with using the same spot in the music to take a step back as if the whole thing were happening all over again. CSO president Deborah Rutter looked wide-eyed and white at the prospect, even as a joke, but Muti was elated with laughter at the notion. “No one but the orchestra would have known my little joke,” he reassured her. And yes, Muti teasing like this about his health with what he admits is a “dangerous” sense of humor is a sure sign that things are back to normal.

In fact, the Muti that conducted the Shostakovich and stellar concert performances of “Otello” last month is a Muti that the area has not seen in decades, moving around like a conductor half his age—like the young, matinee-idol Muti of old. This is no frail James Levine situation where the music director remains ill; this guy is moving around like a changed individual. The music making itself is not radically transformed in the sense that Muti’s interpretations with the CSO since returning here in 2008 have all been exquisite, but now, in addition to that, there is an electricity, an energy, that is extraordinary. The players feel it, and are themselves charged by it. Muti admits that he feels it too, and is understandably elated about it. And so, after those extraordinary concerts here and in New York and a return home for the Easter holiday to rest and recharge with his family, Muti is back here ready to tackle his second spring residency of two weeks of concerts, his last scheduled concerts of the 2010-11 season, and leave his fall and winter illnesses and cancellations behind. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicole Cabell

By Dennis Polkow

The tradition of reciting the four gospel accounts of Christ’s passion and death during Holy Week goes back to the fourth century. By the thirteenth century, this was done in Gregorian chant and, over the centuries, settings gradually became elaborate, reflective of the musical styles of the day, culminating in the magnificent eighteenth-century passion settings of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach is attributed with writing five Passions to correspond to his five annual sets of church cantatas. Of these, two have been entirely lost—there have been attempts to reconstruct a “St. Mark Passion” torso from other surviving borrowed Bach pieces used in the work—and the “St. Luke Passion” bearing Bach’s name is the work of a Bach student or minor contemporary.

This leaves the “St. John Passion” and the “St. Matthew Passion,” two of the supreme glories of Western music, and thanks to Soli Deo Gloria, pieces Chicago is now going to hear in regular annual rotation with Bach’s “Mass in b minor” during Holy Week in an annual performance called the Chicago Bach Project.

Soli Deo Gloria, which is Latin for “To God Alone be the Glory,” was a phrase appropriated by Protestant Reformers indicating the belief that every human endeavor should be directed towards God and God alone, and not for self-gratification or personal pride. Abbreviated as SDG, Bach, a pious Lutheran, wrote it on virtually every manuscript of sacred music that he composed—including all three of these works—usually cited as cornerstone pieces of Western music but which have not received regular performances here since the heyday of Music of the Baroque. Read the rest of this entry »

Riccardo Muti shot March 30, 2011 in his dressing room at Orchestra Hall. Photo credit: Jim Newberry.

By Dennis Polkow

Even from across the hall, Riccardo Muti is beaming. He has just completed his first Chicago Symphony Orchestra rehearsal since what Muti himself has come to call “the accident,” and players and music director alike are virtually euphoric.

CSO president Deborah Rutter looks the happiest I have seen her since Muti arrived here last fall. One longtime player passing by whispers to me, “We are on cloud nine.” If things kept going the way they were before Muti, he adds, “this orchestra would have been in ruins.” Concertmaster Robert Chen walks by flashing an ear-to-ear smile.

Muti is childlike and playful enough that he even warmly greets me, a reporter, by placing his hands on my cheeks and patting them much as Neapolitans do to young children. Even returning to the rigors of doing interviews is an apparent joy to a man who has been through as much convalescing as Muti has since his February 3 collapse during a rehearsal, and the facial injuries and surgery and pacemaker implementation that resulted.

As we walk back together to Muti’s dressing room in the basement of Symphony Center, CSO artists assistant Pietro Fiumara—who as a native Italian speaker and confidant so carefully stayed by Muti’s side during his hospitalization—is cheerfully offering us cappuccinos. Read the rest of this entry »

Giuseppe Verdi

Our conversation about the need for a last-minute recasting of the central role of Iago led music director Riccardo Muti to muse about Verdi’s opera “Otello,” which he will conduct the CSO in performing this weekend. “All personalities in Shakespeare psychologically require a lot of work from an interpreter on the stage, in the orchestra, etc., but Iago is the most complicated,” Muti says.

“Generally, Iago is sung with such a nasty attitude from the beginning of the opera, that I make a comparison to some paintings of the Last Supper where you see Jesus Christ with all of the apostles and you say, ‘Who is Judah [Judas]?’ And everybody says, ‘He,’ and points, because they always paint Judah with a horrible expression [puts his hands forward like claws, bulges his eyes and grits his teeth, which the photographer captures]. That’s not good. For a photographer it’s good, but can you imagine the reaction [if that runs]?

“This is completely wrong because all indications from Verdi are that Iago should be beautiful, that he should walk like a leopard with a very slow and very long walk, like a tiger. Everybody that looks at him should be taken by the beauty of his face and by the honesty of his expression.”

And as Muti has done every time he has performed “Otello,” he will be using the finale of the “Paris” version for Act III. “The finale of Act III in the first version—which is the common version that is always done—brings the opera back to the past. The entire opera is very modern and declamatory, but this finale sounds like the finale of an opera from twenty years before, a big finale with the chorus singing, etc.

“In the second version, Verdi made the finale much shorter and there is a middle part that is changed completely, and it is much more interesting: the orchestration, the use of the chorus, the harmony, the counterpoint, and the part of Iago. I was the first one to do it, and I did it in La Scala both times I did ‘Otello,’ in Salzburg, and in Rome. So, every time I have always used the second finale of the third act.” As far as Muti knows, the only other conductor to have performed this version was Claudio Abbado “one time” and “after me.” (Dennis Polkow)

Riccardo Muti conducts Verdi’s “Otello” April 7, 9 and 12 at 7pm at Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center, 220 South Michigan, (312)294-3000.

Click here for an in-depth interview with Riccardo Muti

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What was a devout eighteenth-century Lutheran doing writing a Latin setting of the Roman Catholic Mass? We’ll never know for sure, but Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Mass in b minor” stands as the greatest Mass setting ever put to music and represents the last statement on sacred music from the composer who still reigns as the supreme musical genius of all time and who spent most of his life composing sacred music.

Chicago Chorale artistic director Bruce Tammen has expressed his own wish in the group’s press release that “we all come to understand, through experiencing [Bach’s “Mass in b minor”] that the work represents “not only the best that we humans can come up with,” but that it represents a transcendent goodness that shows that “there is more to us, more to hope for and plan for and celebrate, than the brutality, the violence, the hatred, which we daily confront in one another.” For Tammen, just knowing that “a human being, one of us,” composed “this monumental and life-transforming work… should make us better people.”

What is particularly odd is that such a sublime work was the product of a disgruntled composer who was miserable in his job as cantor at Leipzig where he was underpaid and overworked. Despite composing works unparalleled in quality and quantity during these years, Bach was not much appreciated by his employers, a squabbling town council, who thought his work teaching and looking after the schoolboys at Saint Thomas’ was as important as his composing for and supervising performances at the two town churches. Read the rest of this entry »