Review: Under the baton of James Conlon, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus presented “Elijah” in performances April 11-13, of which I heard the last. Like the oratorio on its surface, which is to say in its entirety, what I heard was altogether above reproach. The only question was why it was undertaken at all.
Read the full story »Report: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced a bundle of developments at a press conference Wednesday morning, but the best news may have been the vigorous appearance and high spirits of music director Riccardo Muti.
Review: This is the story of a small world and a hidden gem. The jewel in question is the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester, a beautifully balanced, virtuosic Berlin ensemble with a youthful look that plays in the shadow of the Berlin Philharmonic. Yet, with two such orchestras sharing the splendid Philharmonie concert hall, this city is simply twice blessed.
Interview: The interpretive quest that led Chaon Cross to her fierce, blazing portrayal of Catherine, the brilliant but unmoored young woman in David Auburn’s “Proof” at Court Theatre, began in rehearsals with a lot of running around, getting under furniture and throwing things.
Preview: When Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo steps in front of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for concerts April 4-6, he will put the spotlight on Danish composer Carl Nielsen, a figure that has waxed and waned in the hearts of audiences and conductors alike over the last half century.
Preview: There’s a connection you can’t miss between actor Stephen Anthony, recently graduated from Florida State University, and the con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr., whom he plays in the national touring production of “Catch Me If You Can” that opens April 3 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. They both bounce around the country, never staying long in one place, pretending to be somebody they aren’t and oozing charm all the way.
Review: While it wasn’t quite the alpha and omega of Mozart’s numerous ventures into the piano concerto, the two works pianist Mitsuko Uchida performed March 28 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra did offer a telling perspective on a composer on top of the world and one who had seen all too much of it. ★★★★
Review: While the Tchaikovsky symphonies hardly belong to the exclusive province of Russian conductors, the free-wheeling, hair-raising Fourth Symphony that Tugan Sokhiev led with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on March 21 simply may not be an interpretive option within the DNA of conductors from other parts of the world. ★★★★
Review: ★★★★★
Interview: The actor who portrays Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” draws one of the greatest speeches in the Bard’s canon: the dramatically pivotal funeral oration for the slain Caesar. But that opportunity, says Dion Johnstone, whose eloquent and driven Marc Antony fires the current production at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, comes freighted with compact and perilous challenges. “From the moment Marc Antony enters the Senate and sees Caesar’s bloody corpse, with Brutus and the other assassins all still there, he’s in serious danger,” the actor says. “And despite his overwhelming grief, he has to think fast.”
Preview: The bus has a name. Priscilla. And the Priscilla that’s coming to Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre is the same ostentatious vehicle with the glittering high heel on top that once revolved on a Broadway stage. “The original creators didn’t think it could be done,” says Scott Willis, who stars as the aging transsexual performing artist Bernadette in “Priscilla Queen of the Desert.” “But when it’s time to shuffle off to Buffalo, they always find a way to do it.” The show plays Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre March 19-30.
Review: ★★★
Interview: Funny thing about film noir, says Justine C. Turner, who plays a sultry, sexy 1940s type in Don Nigro’s play “City of Dreadful Night” at The Den Theatre: It brought women out of the shadows, and made them multi-dimensional. “That’s the really great thing about my character. Anna is complicated. She’s both Madonna and whore, not just one or the other but good and bad at the same time,” says Turner, who tuned up for the defining noir style of “Dreadful Night” by watching Ida Lupino films from the 1940s.
Ravinia Festival Best Bets: If you want to branch out a bit musically, the summertime Ravinia Festival in Highland Park is a good place for it. There, classical music lovers sample niche-expanding novelties of the sort that gave Brooklyn Academy of Music its must-see reputation. College students picnic on the lawn for free when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performs. And family friendly movie prices rule for recitals featuring the latest contest winners and stars on the rise.
Preview: Teal Wicks made a name for herself as the misunderstood but resilient green girl Elphaba in “Wicked.” Shed of the body paint, she’s again playing a young woman who marches to her own drum as Emma, the fiancée (against all prudent counsel) of the mysterious Dr. Jekyll in the musical “Jekyll & Hyde.” Where Wicks is marching with it is right back to Broadway.
Review: Twice in the last two seasons the young Romanian-born conductor Cristian Macelaru has stepped into the same big shoes, replacing an indisposed Pierre Boulez on the podium of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. After the second look, on March 7, one can only join the applauding CSO musicians in saluting Macelaru as a star in the making. ★★★★
Preview: For German violin virtuoso Anne-Sophie Mutter, the observance of Polish composer Witold Lutosławski’s birth centennial this year is a personal celebration of music she calls “elevating, too poetic for me to put into words.” Mutter’s far-ranging recital with pianist Lambert Orkis, in the Symphony Center Presents series March 10 at Orchestra Hall, will include Lutosławski’s Partita, a five-movement work composed in 1984 for violinist Pinchas Zukerman but which also has a personal history for Mutter.
Interview: The play is called “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” and while there is indeed a tiger in it – dead for most of the story, wafting in and out of view as an existential ghost – our sympathies are not with the spectral creature but with a real man, an Iraqi gardener brought to heartbreaking life by Anish Jethmalani at Lookingglass Theatre.
Review: ★★★
Review: Among the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s most important relationships with conductors in their prime middle years is surely that with Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, 54, who led a concert of Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and Lutoslawski so compelling that it made one want to go back to the box office and do the whole thing all over again. Through March 3. ★★★★★
Review: Verdi’s “Rigoletto” is about a man’s tormented soul, and about his sheltered daughter, a young woman utterly innocent of the world – and the inexorable calamity that befalls them both. In all that, in the voices of baritone Andrzej Dobber and soprano Albina Shagimuratova and their moving rapport as protective father and enraptured daughter, the Lyric Opera of Chicago offers a “Rigoletto” deeply rewarding at its heart. Draw the circle larger, however, and the problems with this production become evident. ★★★
Review: On paper this looks like a no-brainer: American opera’s most influential composer of the 20th century transforming a gothic horror tale by Edgar Allen Poe, the 19th century’s master of the macabre. You can almost taste the possibilities for sustained tension and terror. Goth drollery is needed, but COT’s twice-twisted tale meanders. ★★★
Review: Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen once undertook total immersion in the music of Richard Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” an opera of lasting influence and extraordinary musical language, newly coined to express ecstatic, forbidden love and its all-consuming anguish. Today Salonen’s enthusiasm for exploring this operatic icon is undiminished. In addition to two concert performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of “Tristan’s” mesmerizing second act, he led “Beyond the Score” performances that explored the controversy over Wagner’s musical nugget, the Tristan chord, and its breakthrough potential to lead the ear beyond traditional harmonic bounds. Neither effort proved entirely successful. Through Feb. 24.
Review: In an obvious sense, Charles Fuller’s 1982 drama “A Soldier’s Play,” recently opened in a sharply detailed production at Raven Theatre, is about the virulent ugliness of racism as it persisted in the mid-20th century deep South. But more than that, Fuller’s story grapples with the despair and self-loathing that can infect the soul of an oppressed people. ★★★
Interview: One of the most appealing, indeed endearing, performances to be seen on Chicago theater stages this season is Gary Perez’s quietly philosophical, yet vaguely dangerous turn as Julio, the gay cousin and one true friend in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play “The ______ With the Hat” at Steppenwolf. Perez credits director Anna D. Shapiro with framing Julio as worldly-wise and possessed of a Zen-like calm, the one really centered character in a collection of loose cannons.