Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Branching Out
I've created a second blog, de Pennatibus, specifically for all my birding excursions and photography. All bird posts previously residing on the Tonic Blotter have been moved there, along with all links to birding websites and blogs. This should help disentangle some of my varied interests and make the Tonic Blotter more music/culture focused.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Thank God for Extra Virgin Olive Oil!
Riccardo Muti is to be commended. While Gustavo Dudamel and Alan Gilbert opened their respective orchestra's seasons with at least one big, red meat blockbuster on the program, Muti (who doesn't really start his job here until next season) chose Bruckner's rarely performed Second Symphony as the keystone of this week's series of concerts. OK, so this wasn't the official season opener for the CSO--Paavo Järvi took care of that, and there was another regular concert week with Yan-Pascal Tortelier in between as well--but this week was promoted as a welcome-home-party for the new music director, a year in advance of his official debut in that role ("Benvenuto Maestro!" posters were everywhere), so for all practical purposes this was the "real" season opener.
I went to the Saturday afternoon performance that consisted only of the Bruckner, omitting the Mozart Jupiter Symphony and followed by a "Town Hall" (sans armed right-wing protesters) with Maestro Muti (and tangentially connected by sheer coincidence of timing to the city's Burnham Plan Centennial festival).
What has always fascinated me about Bruckner is his synthesis of a long tradition of Western church music with an expanded classical symphonic structure and a prescient anticipation of the modernity to come, while utilizing the resources of the full romantic Wagnerian orchestra. Bruckner's works at once sound both strangely archaic and yet too modern to have come from the pen of a contemporary of Brahms. It is this richness of influences that allows for such a breadth of interpretive variety. From Jochum's rambunctious jollity to Furtwängler's fire and brimstone to Celibidache's patient search for Nirvana, there are countless plausible and convincing, yet seemingly utterly incongruent ways of approaching Bruckner.
Muti's take was to basically imagine this early symphony as a sort of extended-play Schubert, taking the fragments of Austrian folk dance and song and tossing them about to weave a warm, richly textured quilt of sound. The second movement could have benefited from a bit more breadth to allow the musical ideas space to breathe and develop, and the tempo of the opening of the Finale at one point threatened to endanger clarity of articulation, but otherwise Muti's tempo choices were rather within the historic norm. The reason then that Muti's performance was allegedly five minutes shorter than others, as some critics claimed, had less to do with his choice of tempo than with his choice of the Nowak edition, which eliminates some repeated material in the Scherzo and trims some fat off the Finale compared to the Haas edition, which was frequently used by others in the past, as well as possibly a few additional cuts of Muti's own making.
There is no question that the CSO is immensely enjoying its collaboration with its new music director. The mutual enthusiasm for joint music-making could be both heard and seen. Yet, I think that Muti has not yet fully accustomed himself to harnessing the sonic resources of the CSO. Granted that Muti is a conductor who prefers a rich wall of sound to a Boulezian sort of clarity where each voice can be appreciated in isolation, there were still passages where middle voices were swallowed up too much by brass and/or strings. Similarly, a number of crescendos tended to plateau considerably too early. And while there was nothing to complain about the musicality of any given passage, some movements--the Adagio in particular--did not hang together quite as well as possible.
The Bruckner Second is one of the pieces (along with the Brahms and Verdi requiems and Prokofiev's 3rd, e.g.) which Muti has been studying and performing intensively in the last few seasons, and which he has taken with him from orchestra to orchestra. I thus happened to catch a broadcast of a performance he conducted of this work with the Vienna Philharmonic from last season. That performance flowed a bit better and had fewer of these balancing issues. So my criticism above has nothing to do with Muti's interpretation as such, but rather with his success at reproducing that idea yesterday afternoon. And that is not to say that the CSO does not play like Vienna. Quite to the contrary, the CSO sounded glorious yesterday, especially the strings and the woodwinds (even principal flute Mathieu Dufour clearly found this week's concerts important enough to bless us with his presence).
The "Town Hall" meeting that followed was an opportunity for the audience to meet the new music director more or less in person, albeit mediated by CSO Artistic Administrator Nick Winter. An audience amounting to approximately 2/3 of the capacity of the main floor took up the invitation. What was intended as an hour-long Q & A session was quickly turned into an afternoon of storytelling with the gregarious maestro, who with ease free-associated his way far away from the original questions, often getting himself into trouble, e.g. when outlining the "big difference" between a monk and a woman or likening an invitation from a world-class orchestra to the overtures of an attractive female. Thus Muti managed to meander from strictly musical issues seamlessly to, e.g., explaining the differences between Chicago and Neapolitan pizza (both of which he allegedly likes - "Chicago pizza is forty times thicker"). While amusing, over the course of the hour Winter only managed to ask only maybe three and a half questions from the pile that was sent in by audience members, all of them more or less of a softball type. (I guess my questions about his thoughts on mandatory retirement age and the importance of recordings for the orchestra will have to wait.)
A few interesting things did emerge in the session, however. For one, Muti has no overt plans of remaking the sound of the orchestra, an issue he feels is "an American obsession". Muti, who was in equal parts praised and damned for the changes he brought to the supposedly trademark "Philadelphia Sound" during his tenure there, obviously still feels this to be a slightly sore spot and said that the sound of the orchestra is more the result of the musicians and their pedagogical pedigree than of the music director's doing. That being so, it seemed that had the sound of the CSO not already changed substantially over the course of Daniel Barenboim's tenure, Muti accepting the orchestra's invitation would probably have been considerably less likely. When asked about what makes the CSO special, Muti replied that the orchestra today is no longer characterized simply by a world class brass, but has world class strings and woodwinds as well and is capable of the greatest dynamic range of any. But there is another reason why a CSO invitation to Muti some decades ago would probably have been less attractive: "Olive oil ... extra virgin, is even better." Unlike the culinarily benighted Germany of the 1970s, it is not hard to find proper Italian food supplies in Chicago in the new millennium. A fact that makes it easier for Muti to "make [the orchestra] an extension of my family, and let's forget that there is the Atlantic in between."
So, in that spirit, benvenuto Maestro Muti, and should you ever crave proper Neapolitan pizza, do check out Spacca Napoli in Ravenswood.
I went to the Saturday afternoon performance that consisted only of the Bruckner, omitting the Mozart Jupiter Symphony and followed by a "Town Hall" (sans armed right-wing protesters) with Maestro Muti (and tangentially connected by sheer coincidence of timing to the city's Burnham Plan Centennial festival).
What has always fascinated me about Bruckner is his synthesis of a long tradition of Western church music with an expanded classical symphonic structure and a prescient anticipation of the modernity to come, while utilizing the resources of the full romantic Wagnerian orchestra. Bruckner's works at once sound both strangely archaic and yet too modern to have come from the pen of a contemporary of Brahms. It is this richness of influences that allows for such a breadth of interpretive variety. From Jochum's rambunctious jollity to Furtwängler's fire and brimstone to Celibidache's patient search for Nirvana, there are countless plausible and convincing, yet seemingly utterly incongruent ways of approaching Bruckner.
Muti's take was to basically imagine this early symphony as a sort of extended-play Schubert, taking the fragments of Austrian folk dance and song and tossing them about to weave a warm, richly textured quilt of sound. The second movement could have benefited from a bit more breadth to allow the musical ideas space to breathe and develop, and the tempo of the opening of the Finale at one point threatened to endanger clarity of articulation, but otherwise Muti's tempo choices were rather within the historic norm. The reason then that Muti's performance was allegedly five minutes shorter than others, as some critics claimed, had less to do with his choice of tempo than with his choice of the Nowak edition, which eliminates some repeated material in the Scherzo and trims some fat off the Finale compared to the Haas edition, which was frequently used by others in the past, as well as possibly a few additional cuts of Muti's own making.
There is no question that the CSO is immensely enjoying its collaboration with its new music director. The mutual enthusiasm for joint music-making could be both heard and seen. Yet, I think that Muti has not yet fully accustomed himself to harnessing the sonic resources of the CSO. Granted that Muti is a conductor who prefers a rich wall of sound to a Boulezian sort of clarity where each voice can be appreciated in isolation, there were still passages where middle voices were swallowed up too much by brass and/or strings. Similarly, a number of crescendos tended to plateau considerably too early. And while there was nothing to complain about the musicality of any given passage, some movements--the Adagio in particular--did not hang together quite as well as possible.
The Bruckner Second is one of the pieces (along with the Brahms and Verdi requiems and Prokofiev's 3rd, e.g.) which Muti has been studying and performing intensively in the last few seasons, and which he has taken with him from orchestra to orchestra. I thus happened to catch a broadcast of a performance he conducted of this work with the Vienna Philharmonic from last season. That performance flowed a bit better and had fewer of these balancing issues. So my criticism above has nothing to do with Muti's interpretation as such, but rather with his success at reproducing that idea yesterday afternoon. And that is not to say that the CSO does not play like Vienna. Quite to the contrary, the CSO sounded glorious yesterday, especially the strings and the woodwinds (even principal flute Mathieu Dufour clearly found this week's concerts important enough to bless us with his presence).
The "Town Hall" meeting that followed was an opportunity for the audience to meet the new music director more or less in person, albeit mediated by CSO Artistic Administrator Nick Winter. An audience amounting to approximately 2/3 of the capacity of the main floor took up the invitation. What was intended as an hour-long Q & A session was quickly turned into an afternoon of storytelling with the gregarious maestro, who with ease free-associated his way far away from the original questions, often getting himself into trouble, e.g. when outlining the "big difference" between a monk and a woman or likening an invitation from a world-class orchestra to the overtures of an attractive female. Thus Muti managed to meander from strictly musical issues seamlessly to, e.g., explaining the differences between Chicago and Neapolitan pizza (both of which he allegedly likes - "Chicago pizza is forty times thicker"). While amusing, over the course of the hour Winter only managed to ask only maybe three and a half questions from the pile that was sent in by audience members, all of them more or less of a softball type. (I guess my questions about his thoughts on mandatory retirement age and the importance of recordings for the orchestra will have to wait.)
A few interesting things did emerge in the session, however. For one, Muti has no overt plans of remaking the sound of the orchestra, an issue he feels is "an American obsession". Muti, who was in equal parts praised and damned for the changes he brought to the supposedly trademark "Philadelphia Sound" during his tenure there, obviously still feels this to be a slightly sore spot and said that the sound of the orchestra is more the result of the musicians and their pedagogical pedigree than of the music director's doing. That being so, it seemed that had the sound of the CSO not already changed substantially over the course of Daniel Barenboim's tenure, Muti accepting the orchestra's invitation would probably have been considerably less likely. When asked about what makes the CSO special, Muti replied that the orchestra today is no longer characterized simply by a world class brass, but has world class strings and woodwinds as well and is capable of the greatest dynamic range of any. But there is another reason why a CSO invitation to Muti some decades ago would probably have been less attractive: "Olive oil ... extra virgin, is even better." Unlike the culinarily benighted Germany of the 1970s, it is not hard to find proper Italian food supplies in Chicago in the new millennium. A fact that makes it easier for Muti to "make [the orchestra] an extension of my family, and let's forget that there is the Atlantic in between."
So, in that spirit, benvenuto Maestro Muti, and should you ever crave proper Neapolitan pizza, do check out Spacca Napoli in Ravenswood.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Alex Ross Gets a New Home
With his award-winning eponymous book a complete success, Alex Ross has decided to move on, leaving his old blog, The Rest is Noise, mainly as a repository for his book-related 20th century audio samples. The New Yorker has created a new space for him at Unquiet Thoughts where Ross will continue to post on music. Check it out.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Bad, Bad Blogger...
I know, I know. I have been a bad blogger. Not updating for months. Anyway, time to resume reviews...
Tortelier subs for Abbado
The second week of the new CSO season brought us another round of the eternal conductor-substitution-crapshoot. This one turned out not so bad, after all. Roberto Abbado, Claudio's nephew, had to bow out due to a post-operation infection and was replaced on short notice by Yan-Pascal Tortelier, himself the son of the famous late French cellist Paul Tortelier. Sadly, the substitution also produced an unwelcome program change: the originally programmed and rarely heard Horace victorieux by Honneger was axed in favor of Fauré's Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande - a work that is only about a quarter as interesting when our two-timing principal flutist is out of town, busy playing for Dudamel's inaugural season opener in LA. (That concert, BTW, can be heard streaming online here. Chicago listeners will hear echoes of his CSO debut two years ago in his unique take on the Mahler - though I would say his CSO performance had a bit more spontaneity.)
The last time I heard Joshua Bell, it was a massively underwhelming affair. Bell's emaciated tone was no match for the sheer dimensions of Carnegie Hall. Jeremy Denk's somewhat percussive pianism did not help matters much and Bell's own mannerisms undid much of what would have otherwise been laudable about his performance. This concert was a mildly better affair. Aided perhaps by the fact that he was permitted to borrow the famed "Vieuxtemps" Guarneri del Gesù for his three-concert Chicago stint, Bell did a somewhat better job of projecting. Still, given the immense sonic resources of the instrument in his hands, his performance was more of a reminder of potential unrealized than a satisfying musical experience. All Guarneris have a massive sound in the lower register unlike any other violins. But with Bell's reluctance to dig in you wouldn't have known.
Bell's Bruch concerto was mostly solid, with hardly any of the mannerisms I heard in his last recital. Yet, he is still very much a chamber musician who happened to walk onto a concert stage. Bell most of the time seems to be playing for himself. Which is fine if you happen to be a fly on the wall in a drawing room. But a concert hall like Orchestra Hall has a certain size, and an orchestra like the CSO has a certain volume, and as a soloist one has to contend with that in order to reach the (admittedly not nearly capacity) audience. Bell still has a habit of making sudden decrescendos which all too often swallow up the following passage work, making it practically inaudible. Tortelier did a decent job, given the short notice, though he was not able to quite fold the brass into the whole. But then again, rare is the guest conductor who does. The Saint-Saëns Introduction and Rondo capriccioso that followed after intermission was notable mostly for featuring timpani that were tuned to the moon.
The highlight of the evening was unquestionably Saint-Saëns' Symphony No.3 "Organ". Unlike in the preceding works, here Tortelier seemed truly in his element, conducting a familiar old favorite with love and from memory. And here the CSO, apart from a minor woodwind pileup in the first movement, finally sounded like the world class orchestra it is. Tortelier nicely structured the drama without resorting to histrionics, balanced the orchestra very well, elicited superb playing from the strings and generally produced an engrossing rendition of this often browbeaten work.
Happy birthday, Camille!
De Niese Returns to Met
In brief: I happened to be in New York the week before last and couldn't pass up the opportunity to hear the season premiere of Le Nozze di Figaro with Danielle De Niese returning to the opera house and the opera that launched her career, this time in a new role as Susanna. De Niese is an all-around opera artist more than she is simply a singing diva. As such, the role of Susanna as played by de Niese might not be what the typical operagoer expects. She is more concerned with projecting a character than wowing you with her singing, which makes her more suitable to a figure like Cleopatra. Her Susanna was perhaps not vocally the most interesting, but a that much more credible dramatic character in her interactions with the other members of the cast. Not that there was anything wrong with how she sang. Her Susanna became a person whose fate you actually cared about, rather than just admiring the singing from a distance, and that is no small achievement. Vocally, Isabel Leonard stole the show as Cherubino. Inexplicably, Emma Bell as the Countess received the biggest applause, despite her Porgi amor starting off much too loud and consisting of "nothing but vibrato", as OperaChic aptly put it. Dan Ettinger, giving his Met conducting debut, acquitted himself decently for the evening, but still needs to be reminded that singers do occasionally need to breathe. Some of the larger ensemble numbers tended toward messiness a bit too often. Fabio Luisi takes over the second half of this production's run in late November.
Tortelier subs for Abbado
The second week of the new CSO season brought us another round of the eternal conductor-substitution-crapshoot. This one turned out not so bad, after all. Roberto Abbado, Claudio's nephew, had to bow out due to a post-operation infection and was replaced on short notice by Yan-Pascal Tortelier, himself the son of the famous late French cellist Paul Tortelier. Sadly, the substitution also produced an unwelcome program change: the originally programmed and rarely heard Horace victorieux by Honneger was axed in favor of Fauré's Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande - a work that is only about a quarter as interesting when our two-timing principal flutist is out of town, busy playing for Dudamel's inaugural season opener in LA. (That concert, BTW, can be heard streaming online here. Chicago listeners will hear echoes of his CSO debut two years ago in his unique take on the Mahler - though I would say his CSO performance had a bit more spontaneity.)
The last time I heard Joshua Bell, it was a massively underwhelming affair. Bell's emaciated tone was no match for the sheer dimensions of Carnegie Hall. Jeremy Denk's somewhat percussive pianism did not help matters much and Bell's own mannerisms undid much of what would have otherwise been laudable about his performance. This concert was a mildly better affair. Aided perhaps by the fact that he was permitted to borrow the famed "Vieuxtemps" Guarneri del Gesù for his three-concert Chicago stint, Bell did a somewhat better job of projecting. Still, given the immense sonic resources of the instrument in his hands, his performance was more of a reminder of potential unrealized than a satisfying musical experience. All Guarneris have a massive sound in the lower register unlike any other violins. But with Bell's reluctance to dig in you wouldn't have known.
Bell's Bruch concerto was mostly solid, with hardly any of the mannerisms I heard in his last recital. Yet, he is still very much a chamber musician who happened to walk onto a concert stage. Bell most of the time seems to be playing for himself. Which is fine if you happen to be a fly on the wall in a drawing room. But a concert hall like Orchestra Hall has a certain size, and an orchestra like the CSO has a certain volume, and as a soloist one has to contend with that in order to reach the (admittedly not nearly capacity) audience. Bell still has a habit of making sudden decrescendos which all too often swallow up the following passage work, making it practically inaudible. Tortelier did a decent job, given the short notice, though he was not able to quite fold the brass into the whole. But then again, rare is the guest conductor who does. The Saint-Saëns Introduction and Rondo capriccioso that followed after intermission was notable mostly for featuring timpani that were tuned to the moon.
The highlight of the evening was unquestionably Saint-Saëns' Symphony No.3 "Organ". Unlike in the preceding works, here Tortelier seemed truly in his element, conducting a familiar old favorite with love and from memory. And here the CSO, apart from a minor woodwind pileup in the first movement, finally sounded like the world class orchestra it is. Tortelier nicely structured the drama without resorting to histrionics, balanced the orchestra very well, elicited superb playing from the strings and generally produced an engrossing rendition of this often browbeaten work.
Happy birthday, Camille!
De Niese Returns to Met
In brief: I happened to be in New York the week before last and couldn't pass up the opportunity to hear the season premiere of Le Nozze di Figaro with Danielle De Niese returning to the opera house and the opera that launched her career, this time in a new role as Susanna. De Niese is an all-around opera artist more than she is simply a singing diva. As such, the role of Susanna as played by de Niese might not be what the typical operagoer expects. She is more concerned with projecting a character than wowing you with her singing, which makes her more suitable to a figure like Cleopatra. Her Susanna was perhaps not vocally the most interesting, but a that much more credible dramatic character in her interactions with the other members of the cast. Not that there was anything wrong with how she sang. Her Susanna became a person whose fate you actually cared about, rather than just admiring the singing from a distance, and that is no small achievement. Vocally, Isabel Leonard stole the show as Cherubino. Inexplicably, Emma Bell as the Countess received the biggest applause, despite her Porgi amor starting off much too loud and consisting of "nothing but vibrato", as OperaChic aptly put it. Dan Ettinger, giving his Met conducting debut, acquitted himself decently for the evening, but still needs to be reminded that singers do occasionally need to breathe. Some of the larger ensemble numbers tended toward messiness a bit too often. Fabio Luisi takes over the second half of this production's run in late November.
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