Review: On Thursday and Saturday nights, May 2 and 4, the fare was exotic classicism, Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” spotlighting both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut of conductor Elim Chan and the bewitching solos of associate concertmaster Stephanie Jeong. On Friday night and Sunday afternoon, all eyes were on the big screen suspended over the orchestra for a showing of director Steven Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi charmer “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” with the CSO providing John Williams’ indispensable musical score live.
Read the full story »Review: A meeting of minds, of sensibilities, between director Ron OJ Parson and playwright August Wilson illuminates a lyrical, joyful and heartbreaking production of Wilson’s “Seven Guitars” at Court Theatre, delivered by an ensemble that’s as sly as it is polished. ★★★★★
Report: Mieczysław Weinberg, perhaps the best Soviet composer you never heard of, was the “other story” at a Lyric Opera of Chicago press conference Jan. 17 when a new Wagner “Ring” Cycle was announced. But Weinberg’s recently revived opera, “The Passenger,” inspired by a Holocaust novel, is making the international rounds and will arrive at the Chicago Lyric in early 2015, as excitement grows for this prolific composer and esteemed friend of Shostakovich.
Interview: Brad Armacost’s earthy, funny and deceptively nuanced portrait of the blind, drunken brother of a lost soul in Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer” was shaped in part, he says, by a blessing and a curse. How Irish that both circumstances should spring from the same source. Armacost’s performance as the devoutly plastered Richard Harkin, in Seanachai Theatre’s brilliant go at “The Seafarer,” is his second pass at the play in recent Chicago seasons.
Report: With headliners Christine Goerke and Eric Owens — two breakthrough American Wagner singers that everyone is seeking – Lyric Opera of Chicago announced Friday that it will embark on a new David Pountney production of the “Ring” Cycle starring Owens as the great god Wotan and Goerke as Brünnhilde, his beloved Valkyrie daughter. The cycle’s four operas are to be unveiled one by one in consecutive seasons beginning in 2016-17, and then in total-immersion festival form, over the course of three weeks in April 2020.
Preview: Baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Christoph Eschenbach have collaborated many times on Schubert’s famous song-cycles – including the tragic “Schöne Müllerin,” which they will perform Jan. 19 at Orchestra Hall. It is an ever-evolving dramatic adventure, says Eschenbach, literally a flowing river which these two actors, baritone and pianist, can never experience twice in the same way.
Review: It is a tragedy as timeless as it is trackless, Zinnie Harris’ “Sostice,” now in its U.S. premiere run at A Red Orchid Theatre. Tellingly, the play is set nowhere in particular, though more or less in the present. But the divided people, the shattered family, the loss of innocence, the appalling cost of violent conflict – these things register with immediacy, with photographic clarity. ★★★
Report: The sail-like hall on the shore of Tenerife, one of Spain’s Canary Islands off the African coast, was home for two concerts by the touring Chicago Symphony Orchestra this week. The famous archipelago is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its winter music festival, where music director Riccardo Muti and the CSO were headliners. Now, they’re off to Germany.
Review: Soprano Racette may not look like a fragile 15-year-old Japanese bride, but then few dramatic sopranos who specialize in Italian opera do. Yet Racette is one of those singing actresses who can make you believe just about anything, so sincere is her art and so particular her skills. ★★★★
Report: Music director Riccardo Muti and the CSO are set to give four performances in the Canary Islands Jan. 10-14. Spain’s idyllic archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa offers architecturally striking concert halls. But the touring musicians were no less subject to travel woes in Chicago’s frigid winter than the rest of us, missing their Madrid connection.
Preview: Onstage romance doesn’t come more charged or emotionally draining than the supernatural stuff of “Ghost The Musical,” says Katie Postotnik, co-star of the nationally touring production that opens Jan. 8 at the Oriental Theatre.
Review: You never know what pared-down, free-wheeling adaptation of Shakespeare you’re going to get at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. But even for CST, its 1940s setting of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” complete with a musical track of period pop tunes, takes fast-and-loose into a new dimension. It’s also a complete delight. ★★★★
Review: It’s hard to imagine a sweeter greeting for the New Year than Seanachai Theatre’s announcement that it will extend its luminous production of Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer” – originally scheduled to close Jan. 5 – for another four weeks. Lovely, lads, lovely. ★★★★★
Interview: For many, “…where the murmurs die…” will constitute a first Rands encounter. Indeed, this intimate marvel from 1993 is the perfect piece for it, whether one hears it shimmer in the live acoustical space of Orchestra Hall or through a pair of earphones.
Review: The sixth time is a charm for Larry Yando as that grasping, covetous old sinner Ebenezer Scrooge in the Goodman Theatre production of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Or I should say, a charm again — just like Yando’s previous five outings in the part. His irascible but salvageable and very funny misanthrope remains a Scrooge for the young in heart and imagination. ★★★★
Report: Deborah F. Rutter, president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, has been named president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., effective Sept. 1, 2014.
Review: It was the nightmare you thought you could only wish for, conductor Stéphane Denève’s hallucinogenic, careening, brilliant turn through Berlioz’ “Symphonie fantastique” with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Dec. 5 at Orchestra Hall. ★★★★★
Review: A piece of the American dream. That’s really all the ambitious, optimistic Lank wants for himself and his sister Chelle in Dominique Morisseau’s blistering – and touchingly funny – drama “Detroit ’67,” currently illuminating the stage at Northlight Theatre. ★★★★
Review: There’s garden variety theatrical intimacy, and then there’s the astonishing, welcome-to-the-family tumult of Bruce Norris’ “Clybourne Park” in the living room space that is Redtwist Theatre. ★★★★★
Interview: Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is what G.B. Shaw might have called the perfect Mahlerite. Not only his baton but his heart as well beats to the subtle impulses of yearning, angst and mockery that permeate and shape Gustav Mahler’s epic creations. Newly refocused on the subject, this Mahler maestro leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in four performances of the Ninth Symphony Nov. 21-24 at Orchestra Hall.
Preview: For its second tribute in this Verdi year, the Lyric Opera of Chicago will present, so to speak, the whole truth about “La traviata.” And Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka, a young but well-tested Violetta making her Lyric debut, is wholly on board with that.
17th in a series of season previews: Victory Gardens is a theater company built on new plays, says artistic director Chay Yew: “Our audiences comes expecting to see the unexpected.” Thus the 2013-14 season opens Nov. 15 with the “co-world premiere” of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate,” about three adult siblings circling – and colliding – over the division of their deceased father’s estate. And that’s followed by the world premiere of Marcus Gardley’s “The Gospel of Lovingkindness.”
Preview: When the Montenegrin virtuoso guitarist Miloš Karadaglić performs Nov. 11 at the City Winery of Chicago, he’ll be there under the aegis of a bold, off-beat international project to present major classical artists in club settings. Dubbed Yellow Lounge, the worldwide series is the creation of Universal Music Classics – parent of the celebrated recording labels Decca and Deutsche Grammophon — and named for DG’s distinctive yellow label.
Review: Upon thoughtful examination, the outwardly splendid edifice that is Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony reveals a no less magnificent interior. Articulating the one aspect without losing sight of the other might even define the work’s core interpretive challenge. Inside and out, front to back, conductor Bernard Haitink led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a performance of consummate completeness Thursday night at Orchestra Hall. ★★★★★
Review: The mind-blowing early treat this piano recital season has been successive Bach concerts that would have left the composer himself impressed by the feats of memory and endurance on display — Hungarian pianist András Schiff performing all six Partitas and American pianist Jeremy Denk performing the 30 “Goldberg” Variations at Symphony Center.
Review: Danny has no visible scars, no missing limbs, but this former British soldier bears deep wounds from his tour of duty in Iraq. He is the tormented, dangerous antihero of playwright Simon Stephens’ “Motortown,” now in a riveting North American premiere run at Steep Theatre. ★★★★
Report: First, the German bass-baritone Falk Struckmann, singing the role of the evil Iago in Verdi’s “Otello,” lost his voice suddenly to an allergy flare-up during opening night of the Lyric Opera’s 59th season, causing a frantic search for the understudy. Now it’s the Otello’s turn. Johan Botha has dropped out of the production’s remaining performances. The South African heldentenor, plagued by severe back pain, has returned to Vienna for treatment. American heldentenor Clifton Forbis replaces him for performances Oct. 29 and Nov. 2.
Review: The first rule regarding “We Will Rock You,” winding up a whistle-stop week at Chicago’s Cadillac Palace at the beginning of an eight-month U.S. tour: If you’re not a Queen fan, you need to bone up. Not that this is difficult. ★★★
Review: This weekend’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra program is a curiously mixed affair. At intermission, I was exhilarated at having witnessed Kirill Gerstein’s virtuosic and sly performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2. On the other hand, by the time conductor Semyon Bychkov had made it to the end of a solidly fashioned performance of William Walton’s sturdily made Symphony No. 1, I was wondering why, some 80 years along, are American orchestras still dusting this off?
Report: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association set records in fiscal 2013 with $23.2 million in ticket sales and $29.8 million in contributed income. The 2013 fiscal tally, presented Oct. 23 at the Association’s annual meeting, also showed a slight operating deficit of 0.2 percent, or $169,000 on expenses totaling $73.8 million. The CSOA reported a healthy 44 percent of fiscal 2013 revenue was earned, through ticket sales and other sources.
Review: Life sucks, and then you die. If that dark existential view sometimes can seem like the only certainty, taxes being at least negotiable, it is repudiated – with gentleness and magical wit — in Noah Haidle’s new play “Smokefall,” presented in its “co-world premiere” at Goodman Theatre. ★★★★★