Articles in Classical + Opera
Chicago Philharmonic summons dark spirits with high-spirited ‘Haunted Hearts’ concert
Review: The Chicago Philharmonic’s “Haunted Hearts” Halloween weekend concert was a clever, idiosyncratic program with both frightful and delightful works, ranging from horror masterpieces like Bernard Herrmann’s score to “Psycho” to the standout piece, C. P. E. Bach’s Fifth Symphony. Four “haunted” pieces formed the middle of the concert, all sharing some relation to film.
Young maestro walks into house Reiner built, confronts CSO and a daunting Strauss legacy
Review: It must be with a certain prideful reluctance that the musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra face each new generation of conductors eager to take their own shot with one of the most famous works in its recorded legacy – Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra.” The 38-year-old Colombian conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada did not score a clear success despite a lot of bounce and body language in every single beat.
Second City and Lyric Opera send up Wagner with ‘Longer, Louder’ (funnier) take on ‘Ring’
Review: The setting is Transylvania. Oh, wait a minute. I mean Schaumburg, and Bayreuth. I was confusing “Longer, Louder Wagner!,” the wild and crazy Second City-Lyric Opera of Chicago send-up of Wagner’s “Ring” operas, with the Mel Brooks-Gene Wilder film “Young Frankenstein.” Silly me. And yet…he is alive! ★★★
CSO reports artistic, financial gains but shows little progress in restoring its recording legacy
Report: As orchestras around the country claw their way toward better health in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association (CSOA) shared some upbeat news on Oct. 26 at the orchestra’s annual meeting. The love affair between the orchestra and its celebrated music director Riccardo Muti still flourishes.
Evening of scholarly clowning opens 30th year for early-music masters the Newberry Consort
Review: For the perennially devoted followers of the Newberry Consort, which this season celebrates its 30th anniversary of presenting concerts of music from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, the concert experience is a beguiling paradox: entertainment that’s very old and yet at the same time quite new.
Young German conductor shows his mastery, doubles down in Chicago Symphony debut
Review: The 33-year-old German conductor David Afkham made a doubly impressive debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Oct. 20, leading a finely feathered and emotionally searing account of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony and showing no less mastery in his collaboration with Emanuel Ax in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major.
Dover Quartet, tackling Mozart and Beethoven, looks ready for heights of great predecessors
Review: When the members of the Dover Quartet were students at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, they were mentored by former members of the now-disbanded Guarneri, Vermeer and Cleveland quartets. It is not surprising, then, that the eight-year-old foursome hopes to follow in the footsteps of those distinguished groups, and if its superb concert Oct. 18 at Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall was any indication, the ensemble is well on its way to accomplishing that goal.
CSO and Muti turn spotlight on principal cello, and flash a thrilla on docket for European tour
Review: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s current series of concerts with music director Riccardo Muti spotlights one of its own — principal cellist John Sharp in an elegant and lyrical turn through the Schumann concerto. But the program also previews the CSO’s January tour of Europe, and the performance Oct. 14 no doubt anticipated the coming response abroad: The crowd went wild.
Amid tragic power of Lyric Opera’s ‘Lucia,’ Shagimuratova touches the soul of bel canto
Review: For Donizetti’s bel canto masterpiece “Lucia di Lammermoor,” the Lyric Opera of Chicago has chosen well to wrap the dazzling young Russian soprano Albina Shagimuratova in the vintage production of British director Graham Vick. Despite its age, there’s something very modern about Lucia’s murderous disintegration in Vick’s not-to-miss installment at the Lyric. The role of the innocent and doomed Scottish lass Lucia features one of the greatest mad scenes in all of opera. ★★★★
Apollo’s Fire, in belated Chicago debut, brings heat, refined style to evening of Baroque fare
Review: Even though Apollo’s Fire is based just across the Great Lakes in Cleveland and has attained international attention during its nearly 25-year-history, it had never performed in Chicago. That odd omission came to end Oct. 14 in the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall when the 16-member period-instrument ensemble opened the UChicago Presents’s 2016-17 with plenty of sparks if not a full-fledged blaze.
CSO trombonist proves master of the mystical in premiere of Vine suite ‘Five Hallucinations’
Review: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra was back in the new music business this week, as the remarkable virtuoso trombonist Michael Mulcahy, a member of the CSO’s brass battalion, performed the world premiere of a freely associative five-movement extravaganza for trombone and orchestra by Australian composer Carl Vine.
Ear Taxi festival roars onto Chicago’s music scene, bringing six-day blitz of fresh sounds
Review: An extraordinary six-day event celebrating the “now” side of classical music, Ear Taxi: Chicago Festival of New Music, opened Oct. 5, turning the spotlight on Chicago as a hotbed of musical creativity. The binge brings together 88 composers and more than 300 musicians and features a mind-blowing 54 world premieres.
‘Das Rheingold’ at Lyric Opera: A new ‘Ring’ venture begins with sly winks, great singing
Review: If the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s enchanting production of “Das Rheingold” proves to be, like the opera itself, an augury of things to come, we’re in for a magical ride across the company’s four-year project to re-create Wagner’s epic tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung.” ★★★★
DiDonato, Muti conjure Martucci song cycle, then the CSO delivers a Beethoven thriller
Review: Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti has long and eagerly shared his love for some 19th-century Italian composers who are otherwise slipping into history. For Giuseppe Martucci’s formidable song cycle “La canzone dei ricordi” (Song of Remembrance), Muti brought in another persuasive advocate, the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato. An electrifying Beethoven Seventh Symphony lit up the concert’s second half.
As Lyric prepares to launch its ‘Ring’ cycle, maestro pledges characters as gold standard
Review: Andrew Davis, music director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago and conductor of the company’s new four-year “Ring” cycle, which gets underway Oct. 1 with “Das Rheingold,” speaks with resolute pride about the focus of this prodigious enterprise. “We all wanted very much to make sure the characters were the most important thing,” says the maestro.
To young lives at risk, Muti and 2 opera stars bring close encounter with voice in full glory
Report: Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato was about to make her Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut with music director Riccardo Muti in a rare Italian work, and bass-baritone Eric Owens, over at the Lyric Opera, was readying the role of Wotan, king of the gods in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, for the first time in his career. Yet these three internationally celebrated artists made time to perform for youths within the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, where boys in conflict with the law, most in their mid to late teens, are held for an intensive period of education and intervention designed to set them on a safer course.
Riccardo Muti, CSO and Bruckner: The sequel delivers a radiant view of Seventh Symphony
Review: Picking up right where they left off at the end of last season, with glorious Bruckner, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and music director Riccardo Muti opened their 2016-17 series Sept. 22 by illuminating the sonorous towers and spiritual depths of the Seventh Symphony. And after a drawn-out period in flux, the CSO finally has a settled on its quartet of solo winds.
Haymarket moves from Baroque to Classical with Joseph Haydn’s ‘Desert Island’ treasure
Review: A sense of joyous buoyancy is the hallmark of productions at the Haymarket Opera Company, where lovingly honed details go hand in hand with imaginative concepts for historical sources. The latest is Haydn’s charming chamber opera “L’isola disabitata” (The Desert Island), first performed at the court theater of the Hungarian Prince Esterhazy. Thus Haymarket departs from its customary Baroque repertoire and races toward the modern sounds of 1779.
Lyric Opera singers sparkle in summer finale, casting auspicious light on coming season
Review: A concert exhibition of “Stars of the Lyric Opera,” which brought down the curtain on this summer’s Grant Park Music Festival on Sept. 9, offered a promising augury of the Lyric’s impending season, which opens Oct. 1 with Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” – herald of the company’s planned “Ring” cycle.
Freshening Chicago early-music scene, native son leads vocal quintet His Majestie’s Clerkes
Preview: Resounding at sunset in the shadow of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, a new all-male vocal ensemble called His Majestie’s Clerkes is making its debut at St. John’s Cantius as part of Chicago’s rapidly expanding early music scene.
Sticking with true hand of Mozart, Kalmar leads ethereal Mass with Grant Park forces
Review: Conductor Carlos Kalmar took the purist’s path to Mozart’s unfinished Mass in C minor in a performance Aug. 5 with the Grant Park Festival Orchestra and Chorus. But even with the work in its original abbreviated form, the experience was long on the rewards of style, precision and expressive sensibility.
Montana Aisle: Where earth meets cosmos, new Tippet Rise center melds music with art
Report: On the high rolling hills in south central Montana, on a vast spread of land within hailing distance of Yellowstone, an artistic convergence has come to pass in the most improbable of forms: Beethoven has met his second self.
‘Firebird,’ transfigured as ballet with puppets, made image of rebirth in S. African production
Review: The original story behind Stravinsky’s ballet music for “The Firebird” is one of transcendence: evil vanquished and good souls restored to life. So it isn’t such a great stretch to the re-imagined ballet, as a danced parable with giant puppets, presented by Janni Younge Productions at the Ravinia Festival. It tells tell twin tales of personal self-discovery and South Africa’s continuing struggle for social reclamation two decades after the end of apartheid.
James Levine returns to Ravinia and the CSO, and a tempest gives place to maestro’s Mahler
Review: Even Mother Nature fell silent to listen when conductor James Levine made his much anticipated, storm-framed return to the Ravinia Festival on July 23. Levine led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a transcendent performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor (“Resurrection”), the very work with which he had made his emergency debut at Ravinia 45 years ago.
Legacy of African American music lights up Grant Park fare accented by jazz, spirituals
Review: From the pages of African American history, lines of musical heritage intertwined in a concert as appealing as it was fresh and diverse when the Grant Park Festival Orchestra was joined by jazz violinist Regina Carter and the vocal trio TreDiva at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.
In Ravinia debut, Russian conductor Petrenko leads CSO in a night of romantic storytelling
Review: It was a night of narratives – not told in words, but hardly less vividly conveyed as the emotional storylines of a Ravinia Festival concert July 20 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.
Back on Grant Park podium, Christoph König revisits Bruckner with ‘Romantic’ Symphony
Interview: Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 (“Romantic”) was the Austrian composer’s break-out work, the one that critics and audiences in late 19th-century Vienna finally took to their hearts. It has remained Bruckner’s most popular symphony, and conductor Christoph König can give you a thousand reasons why. The German maestro will preside over the splendorous Fourth in free concerts July 15 and 16 at Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.
Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis reaches back to his classical prime to write a violin concerto
Preview: For renowned jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, working in the classical realm does not mean crossing over to some foreign stylistic territory, but rather returning to familiar musical ground. His Concerto in D (for Violin and Orchestra) receives its American premiere July 12 at the Ravinia Festival performed by violinist Nicola Benedetti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Cristian Măcelaru.
Emerson String Quartet to explore late Haydn with one-night immersion at Ravinia Festival
Preview: Philip Setzer, founding violinist with the celebrated Emerson String Quartet, calls the sort of program his foursome will play at the Ravina Festival on July 5 a form of biography: a body of works from the hand of a single composer. In this case, it’s the six quartets of Haydn’s Op. 76, which took the Austrian master – and the form – to a new place.
Slow start to a musical adventure is challenge at Grant Park concert, then the good times roll
Review: The Grant Park Music Festival likes to break from the routine in programming and presentation. Sometimes it does so in dramatic ways, and sometimes the departures are more subtle, as they were during a concert June 29 in Millennium Park’s sprawling Pritzker Pavilion. This evening began at a crawl — until Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen brought vitality, and elegance, to a Chopin piano concerto.
