Articles in Classical + Opera
New York Aisle: Philharmonic tops off season with rare bounty of Honegger’s ‘Joan of Arc’
Review: From his earliest days as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert has indulged New York audiences with an end-of-the-season extravaganza, This year’s offering was Honegger’s dramatic oratorio “Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher,” a work rarely performed if only because of the magnitude of forces, starting with adult chorus, children’s chorus, 11 sung roles, and two lead actors.
CSO’s ‘French Reveries and Passions’: Spirit and imagination set crown on a dream festival
Festival Review: It’s that time of the year when orchestras change their pace, kick back a bit and come a-bloom with new ideas in the spirit of the warming clime. Thus the New York Philharmonic celebrates its 50th season of Concerts in the Parks, the Cincinnati Symphony’s May Festival gets underway, the Boston Symphony is deep into its Pops concerts. But the place to be this season is in the Windy City, where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is midway through an extravagant multidimensional festival “French Reveries & Passions.”
Piano wizardry rules as Chinese star Lang Lang mixes Chopin, calendar’s worth of Tchaikovsky
Review: Pianist Lang Lang’s recital May 9 at the Civic Opera House was, at its best, a display of brilliance of a high order. Taken end to end, it was also a curious affair. To say this lionized, still infectiously youthful Chinese pianist – he turns 33 on June 14 — is a technical wizard may be understatement. Lang Lang is one demonic virtuoso for whom the most daunting technical demands seem more like expressive opportunities than hazards of execution.
Ravel opera rarity (an armchair sings) injects pure fantasy, great fun into CSO French fest
Review: It isn’t every Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert that ends with the conductor leading a gaggle of children across the stage like the pied piper. But there he was, Esa-Pekka Salonen, smiling ear to ear, a little child’s hand in his, marching the Anima-Young Singers of Greater Chicago into view for their ovation after a deliciously witty performance of Ravel’s one-act opera “L’enfant et les sortilèges,” an evident if unexpected hit at the CSO’s “French Reveries and Passions” festival.
Musical accent unmistakable, French pianist Tiberghien gives CSO fest pitch-perfect start
Review: The French pianist Cédric Tiberghien turns 40 years old on May 5, but it was he passing out the presents May 3 at Orchestra Hall. His recital, devoted largely to Ravel and Debussy as the official opening event of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s three-week festival titled “French Reveries & Passions,” was a veritable shower of musical gifts from a pianist making his Chicago debut and, incredibly enough, still just barely known in the U.S.
Famous trouser roles folded away, opera star von Stade channels a queen of Egypt (Texas)
Interview: Frederica von Stade broke through to opera fame in the ’70s for her boyish roles that showcased a slim physique and impish wit. Now composers and directors seek her out for a new genre — dames and dowagers such as Myrtle Bledsoe in Ricky Ian Gordon’s “A Coffin in Egypt,” now onstage at Chicago Opera Theater.
Bernard Haitink, venerable master of Mahler, reveled in wonders of Seventh Symphony with CSO
Review: Not only with respect to age is Bernard Haitink, at 86, the eminence grise among Mahler conductors today. His association with Mahler’s symphonies is as close and authoritative as it is long. That profound perspective was again evident on April 9 when Haitink led a poetic excursion through the Seventh Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
‘Carousel’ at Lyric Opera: The stars shine in this merry-go-round. Steven Pasquale is Billy Bigelow
Review: The opening of this “Carousel” has everything going for it as the new Rob Ashford production lays out in the plainest way possible what a high-stakes risk your average small town takes when the traveling circus rolls in. Handsome carney barker Billy Bigelow – every father’s nightmare – and scantily clad carnival owner Mrs. Mullin step out from her trailer together for a mutual smoke, and in those first raw minutes the best aspects of this effort are on display. ★★★
Conductor Edo de Waart, in a hero’s return, guides CSO to the classical heart of Brahms
Review: It was a little more than two years ago, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra gearing up for a major Asia tour, that Dutch conductor Edo de Waart stepped in for ailing music director Riccardo Muti to lead a ringing performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”). He subbed again last season for Vladimir Jurowski. On March 26 and 28 he was back on the CSO podium for scheduled concerts featuring Brahms’ Symphony No. 3. The result was a finely wrought performance that showcased the orchestra at its patrician best.
Chen leads Chicago Sinfonietta, vocal forces through exuberant, sensual ‘Carmina Burana’
Review: The singular community spirit of Chicago Sinfonietta was on proud display March 23 at Orchestra Hall in a stylish, disciplined and roundly entertaining performance of Orff’s “Carmina Burana” conducted by the organization’s music director, Mei-Ann Chen. Featured with Chen’s chamber-size ensemble were two Chicago choruses, both prepared to a fare-thee-well: the choir of Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts and the Anima Young Singers of Greater Chicago.
Chicago Bach Choir’s vivid ‘St. John Passion’ was forged from the stuff of lasting memories
Review: One can come away from a profoundly affecting musical experience with any number of dominant feelings: enlightenment, exaltation, transcendence, solemnity among them. After hearing the Chicago Bach Choir and Orchestra perform its namesake’s “St. John Passion,” I walked out into the brisk spring night air with a singular sense of privilege. The performance conducted by John Nelson on March 20 at the Harris Theater surely belongs among the concerts that will endure in memory.
Prelude to a fête française: CSO concert fare anticipates big Gallic do, or has it started?
Review: Although it was not billed as such, the March 19-21 concerts of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma and conductor Charles Dutoit made it seem as if the French-focus “Reveries and Passions” festival, coming in May and June at Symphony Center, is already underway. Allons-y!
In two iconic figures of classical music, Muti reveals more to treasure in concert with CSO
Review: Who knew that a big middle-period work by Beethoven and a Tchaikovsky symphony would add up to a completely new concert experience? But such was the exhilarating sum of a Chicago Symphony Orchestra program that paired Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano, Violin and Cello with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor conducted by CSO music director Riccardo Muti.
Violinist Shaham turns to brisk Baroque Bach, recast in modern frame of super-slow videos
Review: After hearing Bach, there are melodies that linger in the memory, as if the brain is sorting bits to savor in pursuit of its own afterglow. But after listening to the Bach of Gil Shaham at Orchestra Hall in a world premiere collaboration with video artist David Michalek, there are images that linger, too.
Muti advances campaign for Scriabin as CSO delivers many-splendored Second Symphony
Review: Riccardo Muti’s season of advocacy for the symphonies of Alexander Scriabin must be reckoned a blazing success, even with one work remaining for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director to conduct when he makes his final appearances of the season at Orchestra Hall in June. Scriabin’s Second Symphony, currently featured in CSO concerts that continue through March 3, makes the point of musical merit as well as that of historical neglect.
Klezmer opera ‘The Property’ melds nostalgia, renewal in music awash with Old-World charm
Feature Review: “The Property,” a new vest-pocket opera that burst onto the Chicago scene Feb. 25, is the sweet-spirited musical brainchild of a 28-year-old Minsk-born Polish composer Wlad Marhulets, who makes a living these days tooling music for films in L.A. Marhuletz came to the Lyric Opera by way of klezmer madness — not a disease, rather an exhilarating state of mind. Through March 5.★★★
Lyric Opera staging of Weinberg’s ‘Passenger’ casts intimate light on life, death at Auschwitz
Review: The first impression of “The Passenger” by the Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg, whose Holocaust-inspired 1968 opera has been circulating the globe since its belated 2010 world premiere, is that of a major composer in his prime. Conducted with searing authority by Andrew Davis, the illuminating Lyric Opera of Chicago presentation of “The Passenger” seemed familiar right away. Weinberg was typically referred to as a lesser-known member of Shostakovich’s inner circle, but in fact he was on top of his world. ★★★★
Snatched from oblivion, post-Holocaust opera ‘The Passenger’ makes a rescue stop at Lyric
Report: “The Passenger,” a late-blooming 1968 opera by the Polish-born Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg, will have its Chicago Lyric Opera premiere as part of a whirlwind of introduction in Austria, Poland, England, the U.S. and Spain. Director David Pountney and author Zofia Posmysz talk about why.
Double debut doubles pleasure as Nézet-Séguin and Rotterdam Philharmonic take Chicago bows
Review: It was one of those double-take realizations, the improbable fact that conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the high-profile 39-year-old music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, had never conducted in Chicago – not with the Chicago Symphony, not at all. That – what shall we call it, oversight? – was corrected in stunning fashion when Nézet-Séguin brought his other orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, to Orchestra Hall on Feb. 20 with a program of Ravel and Prokofiev that confirmed every good report about the conductor and proved little short of revelatory about the Dutch ensemble.
Balm for a winter weekend, Mozart’s Requiem casts warming glow in hands of Muti and CSO
Review: It was a sad time for Chicago’s musical community, which had lost two respected musicians within days of each other. By astonishing coincidence the scheduled program, dedicated to their memory, included the Requiem by Mozart, whose own life slipped away from him as he wrote it. A bit of the Lacrymosa is the last passage in Mozart’s own hand.
Sex and the single troubadour: Lyric Opera turns heat up in earthy take on Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser’
Review: It’s a bleak, war-torn world that greets Wagner’s prodigal troubadour in the Lyric Opera’s potent, sensual and yet strikingly unromanticized production of “Tannhäuser.” Typical of a current trend, the Lyric version – created by Covent Garden’s Royal Opera and now seen in Chicago for the first time – brings the story into a timeless present. Though generally dark, this treatment also energizes, and vibrantly colorizes, the prologue’s protracted sex romp at the Venusberg. ★★★★
From ‘Romeo’ to ‘Figaro,’ love rules as Lyric plans eight operas, ‘King and I’ for 2015-16
Report: You know that Valentine’s Day is just around the corner when the romantic couplings planned for the Lyric Opera’s 2015-16 season are the stuff of headlines. The game of love becomes a delicious frenzy when lots of money and a very attractive widow are at stake: Soprano Renée Fleming will be playing her “Merry Widow” title role to the hilt with baritone Thomas Hampson beginning Nov. 14 and into the holiday season. We provide details.
Muti’s mighty Chicago forces wind up Carnegie campaign with impressive reprise of Prokofiev
Review: There was a wild and welcome counter-intuitive energy to the final program that Muti brought to his trilogy of concerts with the Chicago Symphony and Chorus at New York’s 57th Street temple of music, in the wake of a travel-hampering blizzard on the eastern seaboard and another underway in Chicago.
Andrew Patner dies; noted Chicago arts critic was 55
Report: Andrew Patner, critic-at-large at WFMT FM (98.7) and a contributing classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, died Feb. 3 after a brief illness. He was 55 years old. “It is with a profound sense of sadness, sorrow and shock that we must announce that our dear friend and colleague, Andrew Patner, passed away this morning after a very brief battle with a bacterial infection that overwhelmed his body,” Steve Robinson, general manager of WFMT, said in a statement.
Tour is a tour is a tour? Not for CSO and Muti, bettering Paris-Vienna best at Carnegie Hall
Review: Perhaps it’s simply a matter of time zones and surroundings, but the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, playing the same music it had performed in its recent visit to Paris and Vienna, delivered a knockout performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Jan. 30 that outshone its best in those European capitals.
As Chicago Symphony unveils 2015-16 season, Muti pushes live streaming, concerts in Cuba
Report: At a Symphony Center press conference, where details of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 2015-16 season were released, music director Riccardo Muti expressed a three-fold desire to increase connections with Chicago’s many ethnic communities through neighborhood events, press forward with cutting-edge multimedia recordings and live-from-Chicago events that can reach a worldwide internet audience, and widen the CSO’s touring horizons beyond the U.S. and Europe to include newly open Cuba and “all the East, which is the future.”
Tatiana Serjan’s electrifying Tosca sparks supercharged new production at Lyric
Review: ★★★★ Rekindling the fire, even the sense of surprise, in an opera as frequently mounted as Puccini’s “Tosca” is no small trick. But that is precisely the triumph of the new production that opened Jan. 24 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago – a mesmerizing night of music theater imaginatively staged, perceptively conducted and gloriously sung. In her Lyric debut as Tosca, Russian soprano Tatiana Serjan displayed a voice of great beauty, flexibility and power, all marshalled to ringing drama effect.
21-year-old Atlanta Symphony bassoonist wins post as new principal with Chicago Symphony
Report: Keith Buncke was still a Curtis Institute of Music student in February 2014 when he won the principal bassoon job, at 20, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Now 21, he has taken a second bounce, and it’s a big one – to become the new principal at the CSO.
Bronfman, Muti and CSO sketch chamber music on vast canvas of Brahms’ 2nd Piano Concerto
Review: In broad, round terms, the figure of pianist Yefim Bronfman taking his seat at the keyboard to play Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conductor Riccardo Muti on Jan. 15 immediately brought to mind images of the composer in exactly that posture. When Bronfman’s serene – really beyond sublime – performance had ended, that evocative association only felt confirmed.
American music is lodestar of 2015 Grant Park concert constellation; price is heavenly – free
Preview: It is one of the glories of Chicago’s summer and a thrilling populist tradition, the Grant Park Music Festival at Millennium Park, where the one-size-fits-all lawn price – free! – means that if you’ve got a blanket, your place under the stars is guaranteed. Artistic director Carlos Kalmar reflects on the 2015 season, just announced, which celebrates American greats alongside an appealing mix of symphonic classics. The stage of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion is framed by the signature billowing stainless steel forms of architect Frank Gehry.
