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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 »

By Dennis Polkow

Danny Partridge’s mom could have been Carol Brady?  Shirley, you can’t be serious.

“It’s true,” admits Shirley Jones, “I was offered that role, but turned it down.”  Jones had made some thirty films by then, many of them cutting-edge roles opposite “every leading man in Hollywood” and was already an Academy Award-winning actress. “I somehow couldn’t see myself after all of that delivering lines like, ‘Honey, I think the roast is ready.’ ”

Yet a year later when a television series about a singing family was offered to Jones, she jumped at it, despite her agent’s warning that she would be typecast forever after as Mrs. Partridge. “I was a widowed mom who sang with her kids and was the first working mom on television,” says Jones. “That show had a lot more to say, and I loved doing it.”  And yes, unlike the rest of the cast, which were dubbed, Jones and her stepson David Cassidy did their own singing.

Still, don’t expect Jones to offer up any renditions of Partridge Family hits during an ultra-rare area appearance this week at the Paramount Theatre in west suburban Aurora.  “I leave that to David is my standard response.  He’s the one who really made those work.” 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 »

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Stravinsky’s “Oedipus rex” is not only the greatest masterpiece of Stravinsky’s neo-classical period, but is the greatest adaptation of the celebrated Sophocles play into any art form.  Stravinsky labeled it an “opera-oratorio after Sophocles” and although the work has been staged as an opera, the music is so compelling and the action so static that it is most effective done in concert form, as will be the case here.

British actor Sir Patrick Stewart, best known in the States for his starring role on the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” television series, will be the narrator while mezzo soprano Michelle DeYoung will sing the role of Jocasta and tenor William Burden will star as the king.

The handful of times that the Chicago Symphony has performed this unique work have been quite memorable, not only because of the virtuoso orchestral score, but also because of the participation of the men of the CSO Chorus taking on the role of the traditional Greek chorus.

Michael Tilson Thomas, a master Stravinsky interpreter, will conduct a program that will also include Stravinsky’s ballet “Apollo,” also on a Greek theme, and his short orchestral work, “Ode.” (Dennis Polkow)

February 18-21 at Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, (312)294-3000.

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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As odd a paradox as it may be, Pierre Boulez, that musical maverick and innovative anarchist forever associated with everything that is young, brash and new, will turn 85 on March 26.  That event is being celebrated worldwide all year long but nowhere as intensely in Chicago, where Boulez remains Conductor Emeritus of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and where he served as Principal Guest Conductor for more than a decade.

Music of Bartók was spotlighted at Boulez’ first-ever appearances with the CSO, back in 1969, the occasion of another historic debut, Daniel Barenboim as piano soloist for two Bartók piano concertos. Bartók once again takes center stage as the centerpiece of the first in a month of special CSO concerts in Chicago and Carnegie Hall called “Boulez@85” where the Hungarian composer’s only opera, “Bluebeard’s Castle,” will be presented in concert form.

Boulez considers the one-act opera one of the most important ever written, but even he has been unable to perform in it a staged version, despite his best efforts. “There is perhaps no staging to compete with the music,” he concedes. “Anything that you do to ‘show’ the content behind each of the seven doors of the castle somehow seems trivial or distracting compared with the music itself.” 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 »

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Soprano Kathleen Battle has had a long connection to Chicago, going back to when she first began singing here as a virtual unknown at Ravinia in the early 1970s.  Some of her earliest recordings were made here with James Levine and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and her last opera performance in the area was a Ravinia concert performance of Donizetti’s “L’elisir d’amore” with Luciano Pavarotti.  Her Lyric Opera appearances have been few and far between, as Battle’s voice has never been a large one, but always a beautiful one.  And while her diva displays of temperament are legendary—even leading to a firing and notorious ban from the Metropolitan Opera where even her old friend Levine could do little to help her—audiences never see that side of her. What will Battle sound like at this stage of her career?  That is anyone’s guess, but she is returning to familiar territory in this ultra-rare area appearance with the Chicago Children’s Choir: holiday fare and spirituals.  Traversing such crowd-pleasing repertoire that poses so little challenge to her technique and surrounded by multicultural singing children during the holiday season, here’s betting that Battle will not only look and sound like a dream, but will be on her very best behavior.  (Dennis Polkow)

December 18, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph,  (312)334-7777. 7:30pm. $45-$75.

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 »