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The stars align – Muti, Ma, CSO – as visitors from U.S. orchestras catch a cosmic concert
Review: You could say the 600 representatives of symphony orchestras from around the country who heard the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with music director Riccardo Muti and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, were in the right place at the right time. If ever there was a musical nexus, this was one: the convergence of those particular performing forces and the work at hand, Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2, a sublime masterpiece captured at Orchestra Hall on June 14 in every dimension of its dark drama, searing introspection and virtuosic eloquence.
Spaces at the Art Institute frame MusicNOW as contemporary venture observes 20th year
Review: The MusicNOW endeavor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is in the middle of a roaring spring expansion under the cultivating flair of composers-in-residence Samuel Adams and Elizabeth Ogonek. The latest MusicNOW shoot was an experiment within three different spaces at the rambling Art Institute of Chicago, including Chagall’s America Windows room. And that was preamble to the MusicNOW grand finale, featuring two world premieres, on May 21 at Orchestra Hall.
‘Memphis’ at Porchlight: White guy, mad about black music and a girl, sends apple cart flying
Review: By now I have seen the gritty and electrifying musical “Memphis” – about the pre-dawn of rock ‘n’ roll, the modulation of black music into the white mainstream in the early 1950s – in three different stagings: the original Broadway production, the national tour and the current version mounted by Porchlight Music Theatre in its new home at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. This one feels, breathes, rips like the “Memphis” I’ve been waiting for. ★★★★★
‘Pretty Woman: The Musical’ is film-familiar, brimming with talent and poised for B’way
Review: You could hear the chuckles of recognition running through the Oriental Theatre audience when “Pretty Woman: The Musical” opened its largely delightful pre-Broadway run. It’s officially a world premiere that will play Chicago through April 15 before packing up for New York, where another round of development precedes the Broadway opening. The method of “Pretty Woman’s” transformation from the movie that half the American population has memorized line-for-line, into a staged production with entirely original music, is reliably loyal in its adaptation and solidly mainstream. ★★★★
Directorship extended, Muti returns to CSO with Mozart, fresh commitment, higher goals
Interview: Italian maestro Riccardo Muti is back in town and eager for another dive into Mozart with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Chicago and Wheaton March 15-17. The program, which features Mozart, fits right into the CSO music director’s primary artistic goals. Musing on the significance of a two-year extension that prolongs his responsibility to the orchestra through August 2022, Muti made it clear the job is about more than conducting alone. He pronounced himself ready to take on the work of keeping the 127-year-old orchestra whole, fit, and facing its future.
CSO’s concerts at Carnegie Hall were grand, but splendor also was writ small – in encores
Review: If the two ambitious programs delivered at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Feb. 9 and 10 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Riccardo Muti roundly summarized the nearly eight seasons of Muti’s directorship, the essence of it – and maybe the key – was articulated in the encores.
CSO premieres Higdon’s Low Brass Concerto, spotlighting veteran foursome of the orchestra
Review: On the one hand, Jennifer Higdon’s solidly crafted Low Brass Concerto, which received its world premiere Feb. 1 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Riccardo Muti, enjoyed artful framing by three brilliant pieces from by a wide range of top-flight composers from the past. On the other hand, well, see above. The premiere featured four veteran members of the CSO brass section.
Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, in heady debut with CSO, lights up Bernstein, Bartók
Review: Mark the name of 37-year-old Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, who made his subscription debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Jan. 18. My guess is that few in the audience had heard of him, that no one who was there will forget him, and that he will soon be back.
Grant Park Festival will celebrate youth, honor composer Bolcom at 80 and roll out premiere
Report: A large-scaled world premiere for chorus and orchestra, a celebration of composer William Bolcom’s 80th birthday and a parade of stellar young soloists highlight plans for the Grant Park Music Festival’s 2018 summer, announced June 9. Centerpiece of the 10-week series of free concerts, June 13-Aug. 18 at Millennium Park’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion and other venues throughout the city, will be the premiere of an as yet untitled work for orchestra and chorus by Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds.
Muti leads CSO, pianist Gerstein in eloquent Brahms and chamber-scaled rarity by Strauss
Review: Any deeply satisfying concerto performance bespeaks a close collaboration between soloist and conductor, yet even by that measure the majestic and probing Brahms First Piano Concerto delivered by Kirill Gerstein with Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Nov. 17 was a rare, one might say time-stopping, experience.
Role Playing: Joel Reitsma drew moral profit from banker-captor clash of ‘Invisible Hand’
Interview: Joel Reitsma creates a convincingly distressed investment banker who parlays his expertise into a desperate, life-preserving deal with his Pakistani captors in Ayad Akhtar’s “The Invisible Hand” at Steep Theatre. But Reitsma admits up front that he knows little about the trading game; and besides, he’s quick to add, the play isn’t about the stock market anyway. It’s about the corrosive power of money.
Louis Lortie keys on the virtuosity of Liszt’s vivid, peripatetic life as a Romantic artist
Review: The Symphony Center piano series opened Oct. 8 with an astounding concert by the French Canadian pianist Louis Lortie devoted entirely to Liszt’s masterful “Années de pèlerinage.” This was a rare and ravishing performance evoking Liszt’s years of pilgrimage as an itinerant virtuoso. Throughout the two halves of the concert you could hear a pin drop in Orchestra Hall.
Role Playing: Cristina Panfilio spreads wings she didn’t know she had as midsummer Puck
Interview: Cristina Panfilio, the disarmingly sly and funny – and athletic! – Puck in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at American Players Theatre, didn’t see it coming. The role of the mischievous fairy sprite with magical powers is normally played by a male actor. When director John Langs phoned her and cold-pitched her the part, she was flattered, of course. The Chicago-based actress was also overwhelmed by the thought.
CSO’s June fare offered smart change of pace, and a swim with ‘Jaws’ live tops off the month
Review: Bustin’ with freshness, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s June has been almost a season unto itself. The programs have been rich, novel and imbued with summer’s ease. Packed houses have been treated to programs of considerable class, as the names of Riccardo Muti, Susanna Mälkki, John Williams and Branford Marsalis imply. And there is still a big fish in the sea.
Pair of Mozart masters light it up with the CSO — no hurdle’s too high for Honeck or Lewis
Review: The Chicago Symphony is, at its present time in history, a Mozart orchestra of sheer delight. With Austrian guest conductor Manfred Honeck and English pianist Paul Lewis as able interlocutors, the nimble ensemble has the brightness, delicacy and tensile strength to float long lines at breakneck speeds, remaining ever lyrical while having wicked fun.
Austrians arm in arm: Manfred Honeck brings multidimensional Mozart to four CSO concerts
Preview: Manfred Honeck, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, returns to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to lead concerts June 8-13 that might be characterized as a theme with variations. The theme is Mozart; the variations are, well, comprehensive. “To celebrate Mozart in just one concert program is never easy,” says the maestro, in his ninth year with Pittsburgh at age 58. “How do you make choices among so many masterpieces?”
Muti, leading the CSO through Brahms cycle, says unsuspected sadness edges symphonies
Interview: Riccardo Muti has been conducting the symphonies of Brahms for 45 years, but to his current total immersion project with the Chicago Symphony he brings the excitement of a perpetual student. In a conversation with Chicago On the Aisle, after performing the First and Second Symphonies and with the Third and Fourth scheduled through May 13, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s music director said he was thrilled with the way things were going and conveyed the exhilaration of discoveries that have put into focus his remarkable experiences with Brahms as a young man.
In a many-splendored program, Muti and CSO match world premiere, Uchida’s Beethoven
![3/16/17 8:35:06 PM -- Chicago, IL, USA
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Conductor
Mitsuko Uchida piano
Rossini Overture to La scala di seta
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3
S. Adams many words of love
[World Premiere, CSO Commission]
© Todd Rosenberg Photography 2017](https://chicagoontheaisle.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Feature-1-5.jpg "In a many-splendored program, Muti and CSO match world premiere, Uchida’s Beethoven")
Review: With music director Riccardo Muti back on the podium, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra delivered a bravura world premiere with Samuel Adams’ “many words of love,” framed by an elegant and emotionally charged performance of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with soloist Mitsuko Uchida and a vivacious account of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony, which remarkably enough the CSO had not played since 2003.
Channeling film-maker Eisenstein, Muti directs epic struggle in Prokofiev’s ‘Ivan the Terrible’
Review: Even for Riccardo Muti, it was an extraordinary night at the symphony. The maestro’s latest musico-dramatic assemblage, Prokofiev’s “Ivan the Terrible,” received its Chicago Symphony premiere featuring longtime Muti friend Gérard Depardieu as Russia’s ruthless Tsar Ivan IV. The performance was nothing short of operatic in the majesty of its vision, the grandeur of its pageantry and the grip of its blood-red emotional palette.
CSO in Europe: At La Scala and Musikverein, Muti and his band receive a glowing welcome
Report: There’s no place like home, if even it’s your leader’s home away. In the welcoming embrace of Vienna’s acoustically splendid Musikverein concert hall, the touring musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra made themselves very much at home, thank you. For music director Riccardo Muti, the musical hearth is wherever you feel the love, where you’re adored, where you’re The Man. That’s Vienna, where Muti has made guest appearances with the Vienna Philharmonic for 46 consecutive years. But it’s also – and make no mistake about this – Milan, where the CSO played two concerts at the legendary Teatro alla Scala opera house, Muti’s house for two decades.
CSO in Europe: Epic escalator, untested hall greet orchestra at Hamburg Elbphilharmonie
Review: Some 600,000 of the curious, and proud, already have taken the long, long escalator ride from street level to the eighth-floor lobby of Hamburg’s brand-new Elbphilharmonie concert hall, where the Chicago Symphony in concerts Jan. 14-15 became the first foreign orchestra to perform on its stage. Both the curiosity and the pride were understandable.
CSO in Europe: Exuberant reception in Paris launches orchestra’s exploration of new halls
Review: The Parisians made their assessment quickly about the matchup of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonie, the city’s splendorous two-year-old concert hall. That judgment, delivered by a packed house, was loudly affirmative after the first piece on the Jan. 13 program conducted by music director Riccardo Muti. And it only grew more raucous as the night went on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘The SpongeBob Musical’ is deep-sea delight for kids, with a whale of a payoff for parents
Review: Ah, to be 10 years old again, and to take in “The SpongeBob Musical” in all its innocent, fanciful charm, its splendorous undersea-world colors, its goofy but (mostly) good-hearted characters. If you’re 10, the “pre-Broadway world premiere” of “SpongeBob” will for sure get five stars, or maybe starfish, like this: Starfish, Starfish, Starfish, Starfish, Starfish. In real stars: ★★★★
Lawn awaits, stars have got you covered: Downbeat is coming up at Grant Park Fest
Preview: The Grant Park Music Festival is the nation’s only free, outdoor classical music series of its kind, one of the glories of Chicago’s summer. Each year the Festival presents ten weeks of lawn concerts at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. Here are the 2016 highlights.
Pianist’s CSO debut in Beethoven concerto spins spotlight in a mainly Mozart program
Review: For anyone who heard 34-year-old German pianist Martin Helmchen’s scintillating Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut June 9, the only question is surely this: When will the masterly pianist, a formidable presence in Europe since he won the Clara Haskil International Competition 15 years ago, return to Chicago not only to perform with the orchestra again but to play a recital in the Symphony Center Presents series?
Pianist Yefim Bronfman delivers a grand tour of fire and poetry in Prokofiev ‘war sonatas’
Review: Pianist Yefim Bronfman brought his traveling cycle of Prokofiev’s three so-called “war sonatas” to Orchestra Hall on May 1, and a mesmerizing, virtuosic portrait of the composer in wartime it was. The sonatas represent not so much a sequence of tone paintings of a shattered world as they do states of mind of a keenly attuned composer – one who had, with profound yearning, returned to the bosom of his mother country in the early 1930s after years of wandering in the West.
