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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 »

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 »

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.

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.

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 »

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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 »

It’s doubtful if Natacha Atlas felt the winds of change blowing in the Middle East at the time she was recording her latest offering, but listening to the songs (sung in English, French and Arabic) you feel that she was concerned about the religious contradictions and the state of distress  in her ancestral lands.

In between the songs, there are spoken snippets from President Barack Obama and Zeitgeist movement founder Peter Joseph which point at the need to “pay attention” to the Middle East and its problems. There are interesting sonic textures between songs, and Atlas offers a variety of sounds that include traditional Arabic sounds, a full orchestra and even jazz-tinged piano courtesy of pianist Zoe Rahman, including a very personal take on Nick Drake’s “River Man.” Various reviewers scoffed at her musical eclecticism on the album, but this to me smacks of purism—some critics just cannot accept that Atlas can go across musical genres with such ease, but for the open-minded listener, this album is truly a gem.

Incidentally, the disc’s title translates as “State of Reversal.” Whatever she was thinking about at the time (Corruption in the government? Religious backward thought?), it is now a timely disc when we marvel at the current events in that troubled region. Regardless of the aftermath, Mounqualiba is definitely a memorable addition to Atlas’ noble canon. (Ernest Barteldes)

Natacha Atlas
“Mounqualiba”
(Six Degrees)