Gerhard Oppitz

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This is the third and final week of the fall residency of Riccardo Muti’s second season as music director, which has thankfully thus far gone off without a hitch. The music-making has been glorious and Muti’s community outreach has stretched beyond CSO president Deborah Rutter’s wildest expectations.

Muti has professed his dislike for composer anniversaries and has chosen a unique method of dealing with them; namely, resurrecting offbeat programs from the past. Last week for the Liszt bicentennial, Muti recreated the same CSO concert that had been presented a century ago to celebrate then the Liszt centennial by then-music director Frederick Stock. This week, Muti is saluting the Mahler death centennial by recreating the final concert conducted by Mahler a century ago with the New York Philharmonic. 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 »

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It has been seventy-five years since the Chicago Symphony Orchestra began its annual residency at the Ravinia Festival, an anniversary which is being celebrated throughout what is, ironically, one of the CSO’s most truncated at Ravinia. This week marks one of the first CSO Ravinia concerts of the summer, which sees the return of former Ravinia music director and new National Symphony Orchestra music director Christoph Eschenbach for a series of concerts.

2011 marks the bicentennial of Franz Liszt, which Ravinia is marking all season long but especially in this opening week, where both piano concertos are being presented: No. 1 on the CSO season opening itself (July 7) with soloist Lang Lang, and tonight’s performance of the Second Piano Concerto with soloist Andre Watts. The contrast could not be more extreme: whereas Lang Lang epitomizes the kind of empty virtuosity that many stereotype Liszt as also representing, Watts has always taken a more cerebral approach and has approached Liszt as the true innovator and revolutionary that he was and in the right hands such as those of Watts, can still be. In another cost-cutting move, segments of both concerts will consist of non-orchestral solo piano pieces featuring the soloists as well, sort of built-in and pre-programmed encores: Lang will be performing Chopin, Watts will be performing Liszt.

Berlioz’ Roman Carnival Overture will open tonight’s performance and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” will close it out. (Dennis Polkow)

July 8, 8pm at Ravinia Festival, Lake-Cook & Green Bay Roads, Highland Park, (847)266-5100. $10-$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 »

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 »

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 »

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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 »

Muti conducts Nabucco

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Another week of high drama for CSO music director Riccardo Muti, despite the fact that he is no longer in Chicago and is not expected to return until next month’s CSO concert performances of Verdi’s “Otello.” Against the explicit orders of his Northwestern doctors who felt he should have at least two more weeks of rest here, Muti flew to Rome and conducted his scheduled opening March 12 performance of Verdi’s “Nabucco” at Opera di Roma. Muti, who missed much of his inaugural fall residency due to what Italian doctors diagnosed as exhaustion, and all of his winter residency after collapsing here during a rehearsal on February 3 and having subsequent facial surgery and a pacemaker installed, has yet to address why he would so directly defy doctors’ orders. Even the press office of the Opera di Roma noted publicly that Muti was appearing against doctors’ orders, the company clearly wanting to absolve itself of any responsibility for what could happen.

CSO president Deborah Rutter attended the performance in Rome and said that Muti was “in great shape,” but noted that he “was lifting his left arm a little lower than usual.” Rutter also said that Muti had allowed an assistant conductor to prepare the work before he arrived, “something that he rarely does” so that he could come in and take over at the last possible moment. Read the rest of this entry »