RECOMMENDED

Yes, I was there for Thursday night’s pugilistic outburst at the CSO, but I didn’t start it: honest.  In case you haven’t heard, the fight started as an argument over a box seat,  and when the seated sixty-seven-year-old man didn’t relinquish his seat, a post-intermission man in his thirties began slinging at him while the music was well underway. This, despite the fact that box seat patrons are asked to exchange seats after intermission in any case. Amazingly, it didn’t happen during “The Rite of Spring,” which inspired fistfights in the aisles at its world premiere a century ago, or even John Cage, who so enraged CSO concertgoers in the mid-1970s that some indeed, stepped outside. The fight took place during, of all things, the Brahms Second—the tranquil end of the second movement. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

On the heels of their fifth full album, the Brooklyn shoegaze outfit bring their dreamy take on pop hooks over sonic jetwash to the Empty Bottle. “Flourescence,” released earlier this month, has the band moving towards bare-boned electronic post-punk territory, gravitating more towards Curve and My Bloody Valentine than Cocteau Twins on tracks like “Trails” and “Trance Out.” Yuki Chikudate’s soaring vocals still manage to surface above that expected cacophony of drone-noise, feedback and distortion, whether taking a distinctively retro sixties approach on “My Baby” or echoing as sonic texture on the epic “Leave the Drummer Out There.” Also wearing their influences on their cover sleeve, “Flourescence” showcases the distinctive style of classic 4AD Records to boot, with artist Vaughan Oliver supplying the look. And there, somewhere between the future and the past, eyes sometimes closed, keeping time with a finger on the keys and another shaking a maraca, Chikudate and Asobi Seksu don’t reinvent the wheel, but spin it well enough to trample over naysayers and trite, dead-genre revivalists. Hidden melodies, and surfacing beauty, textures upon sonic texture… if you like it, love it, you’re already there, and if you don’t, you already know. It’s why you never could get into the Jesus and Mary Chain or thought the first Raveonettes record sounded weird. But for the rest of us, we’ll see you there! (Duke Shin)

February 28 at The Empty Bottle, 1035 North Western, (773)276-3600, 9:30pm. $12.

Photo: Luke Ratray

By Dennis Polkow

When Igor Stravinsky wrote his 1936 “An Autobiography,” he made what has become an infamous statement that, “I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.”

Coming from the composer of some of the most radically expressive music of the twentieth century, the paradoxical passage took many by surprise, to say the least.

Others viewed it merely as a contemporary reiteration of the nineteenth-century French aesthetic of L’art pour l’art, rendered in Latin as Ars gratia artis, or “Art for art’s sake.”

The idea that art neither had—nor needed—any ulterior purpose whatsoever other than to be art had become so commonplace in popular culture that it even became the motto of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, shown encircling a roaring lion before every MGM movie.

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe in his 1976 “Morning Yet on Creation Day” offered one of the most biting criticisms of what he considered an arrogant, abstract and Eurocentric view of culture, declaring that “art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorised dog @#!*%” (sic)

“That debate fascinated us,” says Lisa Kaplan, pianist for the Grammy Award-winning contemporary music ensemble eighth blackbird, “and became the catalyst to curate pieces specifically intended to convey passion versus ‘absolute’ or abstract music for its own sake.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ken Carl

By Dennis Polkow

“The news here is that no music director has been appointed yet,” says Chicago Sinfonietta founder and music director Paul Freeman, anticipating curiosity about whether or not there is an end in sight to an ongoing and speculative process. “In other words,” he laughs, “I’m still here.”

Freeman, 74, announced his retirement in March of 2009, in part so that he could remain actively involved with the orchestra that he founded and has so carefully nurtured and tendered for more than two decades during the process of locating his successor.

“I realize that there is a time to be born—and I don’t want to say the other—but after nearly twenty-five years, everybody needs a new breath. I won’t say a breath of fresh air, but a new breath,” says Freeman. “This is one of the elements that helped this orchestra develop as an artistic institution, that we’ve kept everything fresh and new. I am not saying that I feel that the relationship between the orchestra and myself has ended, I don’t feel that way: I still like the involvement. But there comes a time when you have to think of securing the future.”   Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It would be difficult to imagine a more striking contrast than CSO music-director-designate Riccardo Muti’s performances of the Verdi “Requiem” last January and his rendition of Brahms’ “A German Requiem” last week.  With Verdi, Muti was in his element and the result was an experience as exciting as it was poignant and prayerful.  With Brahms, Muti was in way over his head and was unable to make sense of Brahms’ intentions, which were to offer comfort and conciliation. In Muti’s hands, the usually foolproof work which even amateur choral societies can usually bring off, fell decidedly flat. Not only was this the slowest and most turgid traversal of the work imaginable, but there was little by way of dynamic contrast, to say nothing of heart. This was a cold, cold, cold performance that showed us that decades of leading operas at La Scala is no guarantee that Muti will triumph just because the forces are expansive.   Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Keeping up with Riccardo Muti while he has been in town these two weeks has not been an easy task: not only has he been rehearsing the orchestra, conducting concerts and already holding auditions, but he charmed CSO trustees, the media, the public at large, even the mayor. The big discussion with the mayor was about “Chicago pizza,” which Muti admits he likes, despite it being “forty times thicker” than what his native Neapolitans, whom he insists invented the dish, would call pizza.  “Thirty years ago in Germany I found that it was very easy to make music there, but you couldn’t eat there: there was no olive oil in the entire country.” As to why Muti picked Chicago over New York, which had courted him for years: “Every place makes the claim that theirs is the best orchestra in the world. It turns out that Chicago is right and the rest are lying. Saying ‘yes’ to leading an orchestra is much like becoming involved with a beautiful lady: yes, you could have a ‘fling,’ but sometimes you meet one that is so interesting, so fascinating, that you want to share your intellect and bond much more deeply.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

When the announcement was made in May of 2008 that Riccardo Muti had been made music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra after a four-year search, I was quick to note in a Newcity cover story on the process and a “Chicago Tonight” appearance that the Austro-Germanic repertoire of Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler and Richard Strauss, i.e. the CSO’s bread-and-butter repertoire, was not particularly associated with Muti. “Anyone who knows me knows that I conduct music from the Baroque to modern, only the blind or deaf wouldn’t know this,” countered Muti a month later at his first area press conference. Not helping matters was that his only scheduled concerts for the following season—last year’s memorable performances of Verdi’s Requiem”—played to his best-known strength: Italian vocal music. Quite cleverly, Muti is addressing the repertoire issue head-on a year before his official tenure begins by offering two weeks of programs that are all Austro-Germanic: Mozart and Bruckner this week, and Brahms next. By performing a well-known Mozart symphony (No. 35, the “Haffner”) alongside an obscure early Bruckner symphony (No. 2), we should learn a lot about what to expect in the Muti era. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The Chicago Symphony summer season at Ravinia has been starting later and later as the CSO downtown season has gradually been expanded further into June (the season used to end in May), this year scheduling its three-week Dvorak Festival to coincide with the American Symphony Orchestra League convention. This has meant that Ravinia has had to count on pop acts and recitals to fill in more than a third of its schedule before the CSO was able to begin its Ravinia residency this year.  The centerpiece of the CSO’s opening night at Ravinia is the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, which many consider the most important work ever written in the genre. Russian-Israeli pianist Yefim Bronfman will be the soloist; it was Bronfman who introduced the “Steadfast Tin Soldier” animated segment in Disney’s “Fantasia 2000″ and whose memorable performance of the opening movement of the Shostakovich First Piano Concerto with former Ravinia music director James Levine and the CSO was used in the film.  The Mendelssohn bicentennial will be celebrated with a rare performance of his exuberant First Symphony, a youthful work written when the composer was a mere fifteen years old, a year before writing his popular Octet, and two years before writing his famous “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Overture.  James Conlon conducts.  (Dennis Polkow)

July 7, 8pm, Ravinia Festival, Lake-Cook & Green Bay Roads, Highland Park, (847)266-5000. $10-$55.

RECOMMENDED

It wasn’t so long ago that the common perception existed that Antonin Dvorak was a kind of poor man’s Brahms, i.e., a composer who sugarcoated Czech folk tunes and gypsy rhythms with Romanticisms and who would be forever doomed to be second-tier amongst nineteenth-century composers because his music was viewed as derivative. Brahms himself expressed a different view, and is quoted as saying that he would have been “happy to think up themes as good as those that Dvovak had discarded.”  The Chicago Symphony begins a three-week Dvorak retrospective this week under British conductor Sir Mark Elder that is reflective of the intimate relationship that the orchestra has had with the Czech composer’s music virtually since its inception: Dvorak’s “Scherzo capriccioso,” Op. 66, a virtuoso showpiece which opens the festival, was performed during the CSO’s first 1891-1892 season by its founder and first music director, Theodore Thomas, when the piece was less than a decade old; it remained a popular showpiece for the orchestra into the 1940s before falling out of the general repertoire. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

When 80-year-old conductor Bernard Haitink emerged for the first of his spring CSO concerts last week, he looked so frail that you wondered if he was going to make it to the podium.  Haitink had reportedly pinched a nerve and was sporting a cane, moving very deliberately and settling slowly into a chair to conduct the monumental Bruckner Eighth Symphony.  Perhaps this brush with mortality made Haitink and the orchestra more introspective than usual, but the performance that followed ranked with the greatest Chicago Symphony Bruckner performances of recent decades and was by far the most transcendent that Haitink and the Chicago Symphony have made together in what has become a legendary partnership during the autumn of Haitink’s career.  This week’s program—the last of Haitink’s spring area appearances and a dress rehearsal of sorts before Haitink and the CSO take both of these programs to Carnegie Hall next week—centers around a shorter and earlier symphony, the Schubert Ninth Symphony, but will be preceded by other works drenched in the post-Wagnerian sound world that Bruckner represents as well.  Anton Webern’s “Im Sommerwind” (“In the summer wind”) is the last of Webern’s works before he abandoned tonality completely for twelve-tone music and represents post-Wagnerianism at its most tangy and chromatic, sharing a similar sonority to his teacher Arnold Schoenberg’s last pre-serial work, the Expressionistic “Verklärte Nacht.”  Mahler will be represented by his “Rückert” Lieder, some of his most glorious settings for voice and orchestra most of which date from the same inspired summer as most of his Fifth Symphony and but which are rarely done together because of their awkward length.  (Claudio Abbado programmed and recorded them here way back in 1981 to fill out a Mahler Fifth Symphony LP.)  Dutch mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn, a frequent Haitink collaborator last heard here last fall for the Mahler Second “Resurrection” Symphony and known for her exquisite lieder interpretations, will be the soloist.  Note that the Brahms First Symphony will replace the Schubert Ninth for the Tuesday night performance only.  (Dennis Polkow)

April 23-28, Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, (312)294-3000.