Deceptively Simple

She died

Pretty-pretty Elizabeth Futral's Traviata stood dramatically out from the rest of the cast Saturday at Lyric Opera's opening gala, but that is rather faint praise for such an achievement. Baritone Mark Delavan soon warmed up as Germont after some tight singing in Act II, and the duet between him and Futral was one of the evening's high points, but tenor Joseph Calleja struggled, as the youthful Alfredo, with wooden phrasing and a voice whose mushy core didn't firm up until Act III.

Futral's coloratura proved up to the dramatic demands of Act I, especially in her ironic treatment of "Ah, fors e lui." She took a nice, comfy, extended pause (she luved that fermata!) before flinging out a gleaming E flat in the cabaletta "Sempre libera," but if that's what it takes for an interpolated high note of that quality, it's not a big deal. Her slide from toast of Paris to dying swan came through in her acting and her vocalism as she choked out her raging words at the end. I imagine Renee Fleming will have some different, more melodramatic ideas about how this role should go when she takes it over in January, and I imagine it will be less effective. But that's why we go back to the opera house.

The other good news was in Lyric Opera's chorus, which has lost none of its vigor or cohesiveness with the departure of Donald Palumbo for the Metropolitan Opera. The new chorus master, Donald Nally, deserves credit for keeping a good thing going. Bruno Bartoletti also led a fine reading, with high violins lending extra pathos to Violetta's death, and staying carefully attuned to the singers' whims. Of course, Calleja had very few whims and kept any ideas about rubato to himself, plodding along squarely in time, so he made Bartoletti's job pretty easy. (And what was up with all that pawing he was laying on poor Futral in Act I? That's not attraction, that's grounds for assault.)

Next up, La Bohème on Monday, with Elaine Alvarez. Opera Chic has the interview.

Photo: Joseph Calleja and Elizabeth Futral, by Robert Kusel

Gheorghiu out of Chicago, out of Bohème (Updated) (Twice: Gheorghiu speaks)

"It's been great when she's at rehearsals," chuckled a Lyric Opera staffer earlier this week when asked how Angela Gheorghiu (Mimì) and Nicole Cabell (Musetta) were getting on as they prepared for La Bohème, which opens October 1. Turns out Miss Angela missed six of the ten, according to the Tribune, and was fired from the production. Said production, directed by Renata Scotto, will open with Elaine Alvarez as Mimì, instead.

Gheorghiu was spotted Tuesday at the Metropolitan Opera's production of Romeo et Juliette, starring Roberto Alagna, and reportedly looked pretty hot. Skipping town was one reason cited for the dismissal. More on this as information comes out.

Update: Lyric Opera general director William Mason's statement follows.

“Miss Gheorghiu has missed six of ten rehearsals, including the piano dress rehearsal and both staging rehearsals with the orchestra. She missed one of the most critical stage-orchestra rehearsals when she left the city for New York without permission, a direct violation of her contract. In addition, she refused to attend fittings for the new costumes which she herself had demanded.

“It is with tremendous regret and sadness that we are compelled to take this action, but Miss Gheorghiu’s actions have shown total disregard for Lyric Opera’s dedicated personnel and for her fellow artists.

"Were we to accommodate Miss Gheorghiu’s behavior, we would be doing so at their expense, and at the cost of undermining Lyric’s commitment to our patrons to produce only finely crafted performances of impeccable quality.

"We cannot and will not make those compromises.”

Update 2: Calling Alagna's Met Opera appearance a "very important moment" in a statement from her press agent, Gheorghiu says she asked permission to go to New York, but was denied. Here's her statement.

Angela Gheorghiu: “My husband Roberto is singing two major roles at the Metropolitan Opera. [Alagna sings Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, to open October 8.—ed.] I asked Lyric Opera to let me go to New York for two days to be with him and they said “no.” But I needed to be by Roberto’s side at this very important moment. I have sung Bohème hundreds of times, and thought missing a few rehearsals wouldn’t be a tragedy. It was impossible to do the costume fitting at the same time I was in New York. Coming back from New York, I caught a cold—a most unfortunate coincidence. I saw the company doctor when I returned and he prescribed antibiotics. I just wanted to get well. My colleagues knew about this and were supportive. Of course, I’m very sad that this has happened as I was very eager to sing in Chicago.”

Watery house music, Sacks writ small

House Calls. Time Out Chicago, September 27, 2007. In the Shedd Aquarium, the Fifth House Ensemble sets up shop. Also, my brief review of Oliver Sacks's warmly written Musicophilia is in this week's magazine. As Alex Ross noted, he was interviewed in Wired this month, and compiled an imposing iPod playlist, too. (Don Giovanni, the B Minor Mass, and Mozart's Requiem ?) The public talk I quoted from in the review can be found here.

We like the university presses

Poking my head above the ground for a moment to point you to two noteworthy book sales. The University of California Press is holding its annual Dirt Cheap Online Sale, and it lives up to its name. Kyle Gann's Music Downtown can be had for $6.95 ($5.95 paperback), Mark Katz's Capturing Sound is available for $12.95, and there's more from Susan McClary, Simon Morrison, and other notables. Ruth Ben-Ghiat's Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 is an engrossing study of a time and place left largely unstudied and undiscussed among musicians. Also representing the critical community is the Orange County Register's Timothy Mangan, who co-edited Paul Bowles on Music with Irene Herrmann. (They've also knocked a whopping $20 off Richard Taruskin's Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, which is now an eminently affordable $175. No, I didn't forget a decimal point.)

Yale University Press is also holding a half-off sale, and they have Terry Teachout, studies of Bach's B Minor Mass, and biographies of Adorno, Kenneth Tynan (a DecSimp hero), Kafka, and Ben Franklin. Music and the books I mentioned are under the Humanities tab, reflecting a heartening belief in the Medieval Quadrivium. Or simply categorizational ease, it's hard to tell.

Show officially on road

Mr. Tonic Blotter offers another perspective on the Chicago Symphony concerts with Riccardo Muti—"Note to self: next time don't sit in the Terrace when nine horns and the pipe organ are in use"—along with partially ID-ing the ponytailed dude who, on Thursday night, offered up the lustiest "Bravo!" heard in the hall in years following, I kid you not, Hindemith's Nobilissima Visione. Tonic Blotter features a shiny new design, too. Also not to be missed is Fool's Gold Coast's tale of a co-worker's son who was abducted by aliens along with Boutros Boutros-Ghali "in the early 1990s."

The eleven-concerts-in-seven-days ICEFest 2007 is underway, and featured an astonishing performance of Philippe Manoury's cyclical Cruel Spirals last evening at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. The devastating work is in the mold of Boulez's Marteau and Kurtág's Scenes from a Novel, with poetry by Jerome Rothenberg reflecting on the will of the majority and the legacy of the concentration camps. I greatly doubt that another soprano could be more compelling singing it than Tony Arnold. I'll also be at ICEFest V on Tuesday evening, featuring ICE's harpists and guitarists, as well as VII and VIII. Say hi if you're also there.

I have looming deadlines to meet and lectures to prepare, and an earful of Paul Lewis playing Beethoven. The season has begun.

Playlist

Eleni Mandell Miracle of Five (Zedtone)

Philippe Quint Mikos Rozsa: Music for Violin and Piano (Naxos)

John Luther Adams Red Arc/Blue Veil (Cold Blue)

London Symphony Orchestra Handel: Messiah. Susan Gritton (s), Sara Mingardo (a), Mark Padmore (t), Alastair Miles (b), Sir Colin Davis, conductor (LSO Live)

Steve Lampert Music from There. Lampert, trumpet and composer (Bridge)

Mari Kimura Music for violin and electronics (Nancarrow, Tania Leon) (Bridge)

Theory, meet practice

The aggressive dance between the Chicago Symphony and Riccardo Muti continued last night, as Muti again built a program out of colorful twentieth century (mostly) works. The program of Tchaikovsky, Hindemith and Scriabin could just as well have turned into a chance for the orchestra to show off its ensemble precision and bone-crunching volume, but Muti dialed it down into an exquisitely musical performance.

Hindemith's suite from the ballet Nobilissima Visione received a lusty reading, with the strings producing a warm, rich and deep tone. Hindemith's homophonic writing has never sounded so Straussian, and the ecstatic pealing of the winds and brass heightened that effect. And that was the problem, since a composer as contrapuntal as Hindemith comes off as turgid with that level of throb. The fife and drum dialogue in the second movement was played with pleasing charm by pixieish flutist Jennifer Gunn and Cynthia Yeh, the CSO's new principal percussionist. It had the necessary clarity the rest of the work lacked.

Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy ended the program, and let the orchestra splash around in its gaudy variety. Muti, as always, kept a tight rein on events, and managed some truly blistering climaxes, but even he can't get around the fact that the Poem of Ecstasy is almost entirely effects in search of a cause.

Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 ("Pathetique") began the program, and what seemed a good on idea on paper proved less ideal upon execution. Tchaikovsky's monumental elegy preceded celebrations of ecstasy that were painted on smaller canvasses, and it felt as if you were looking at a giant fresco, then turned a corner and had to screw up your eyes to absorb two watercolors. Not to mention the strain the program order places on the brasses, who have to shoulder through the symphony, which is a big blow, and then turn around and bang through the Poem of Ecstasy, which is another big blow. Endurance audibly—barely, but still—became an issue for a few of the players last night. If there's time to reprint the European tour programs, they should think about reversing the order.

This program should especially be flipped if Muti and the orchestra deliver what they did last night in Tchaikovsky's final symphony. The doom-laden opening entered sparingly, and the final decrescendo faded with the dying light of a candle recently extinguished. (While the CSO has always long been praised for its loudness, it can also play at ear-stretching levels of softness.) Along the way, Muti kept the energy level high by continually encouraging players to move phrases beyond the bar lines. Together, they uncovered the tragic nature of this work without any sentimentality or displays of brute force, or drawing any attention to their considerable ensemble greatness. I can't imagine more than a hundred musicians gathered in one place all displaying such selfless devotion to a score.

A bridge not too far

Posted earlier to Out and About, the Time Out Chicago blog.

The Art Institute broke ground this morning on the Nichols Bridgeway, which will connect Millennium Park to the museum’s new Modern Wing. Both are scheduled to be completed by the summer of 2009, and if you’ve been paying close attention to the Art Institute’s updated-every-15 minutes webcam, you already know that construction is well underway. A ceremony before the groundbreaking featured comments from Mayor Daley, Art Institute president James Cuno, Art Institute chairman of the board Thomas Pritzker, Millennium Park chariman John Bryan, John Nichols, whom the bridgeway is named after and who gave a major donation towards it, and, last but not least, the Italian architect Renzo Piano, who designed both structures.

The Modern Wing, on Monroe Street just south of Columbus Avenue, will increase the museum’s square footage by almost a third to 1,000,000. The 264,000 square-foot space will include the museum’s educational spaces, along with galleries for contemporary art, modern art (yes, there’s a difference; no, this is not the space to explain it), photography and architecture. There will also be a restaurant on the third and highest floor, and that’s also the floor where the bridgeway will touch down.

Starting a couple hundred feet inside Millennium Park, the 620-foot pedestrian bridge will rise at a five-percent grade over Monroe before connecting to the museum. It’s composed of structural steel, which will be painted white, a stainless steel mesh and aluminum planking. The planking will have an anti-slip coating on it. "This is way beyond a physical addition," said Pritzker, going on to talk up the the ease with which park-goers will be able to get to the museum. (Is it that hard to walk up Michigan Avenue? Never you mind.) "The bridge expresses a desire to reach out to all of Millennium Park," said Pritzker.

Mayor Daley stressed that point, too, saying that "Chicago’s goal is to make decisions to improve the lives of everyone." He leaned in a couple inches into the microphone so that "of everyone" echoed around the tent a couple extra seconds. (Still a tad touchy about that Chicago Children’s Museum debate, Mr. Mayor?) He thanked Chicago’s business community, along with "Renzio Piano."

Walking around the new Modern Wing—decked out in an official Art Institute of Chicago hardhat, of course—it’s hard not to be impressed with the new space. The first floor is dedicated entirely to education, and school buses will now be able to drop the kids off in back and let them enter on Monroe, instead of going through a difficult-to-access back door. The entrance to the museum is set back from the doors opening onto Monroe, so a portion of the museum can be accessed for free. That includes a museum store, classrooms, and the restaurant.

Up on the wing’s third floor, Piano has outfitted the building with floor-to-ceiling windows in the sculpture gallery. Those windows look out onto Millennium Park, and offer up a view that will surely be available on thousands of postcards. There will be shades on the windows to keep the brightness to a reasonable level, and help keep visitors’ attention on the artwork.

That view will also be seen when walking from the museum, down the bridge and into the park. Piano’s thin bridge is the exact opposite of Frank Gehry’s BP Bridge, which snakes over Columbus Drive. Piano’s is closer to a knife, or, as he calls it, a "razor."

"We joke with other, he and I," Piano told me before the tour started. "He is lazy, and likes to take his time going over his bridge, and I just want to get there," he said. In truth, though, Piano uncovers an important split in their aesthetics: A bridge is supposed to convey people somewhere efficiently, so why bother with gratuitous twists that engage the eye but hinder the structure’s purpose? The famous example of this side of Piano’s technique is Paris’s Centre Pompidou, where Piano put the building’s pipes and ventilation system on the outside, for all to see.

"I really do love bridges," Piano said at the ceremony. "They do a good job. They connect the banks of a river, they connect the different parts of a city. They are the exact opposite of walls." He said the Nichols Bridgeway will extend 30 feet above Monroe, and, when walking or driving north, will frame the view of Lake Michigan between the horizon and the bridge. Art starts when you place a frame around an image, and Piano seems to have found ways to frame some of the best features of Chicago.

Playlist

Martinu Complete Violin Music. Bohuslav Matousek, Regis Pasquier, Jennifer Koh, violin; Janne Thomsen, flute; Czech Philharmonic Orchestra; Christopher Hogwood, conductor (Hyperion)

Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin Vivaldi: Double Concertos (harmonia mundi)

Simon Keenlyside Munich Radio Orchestra; Ulf Schirmer, conductor (Sony)

Jonathan Biss Beethoven Piano Sonatas, including "Pathetique" (EMI)

Sarah Chang Vivaldi: The Four Seasons. Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (EMI)

Lucerne + Awesome violin debut

Reviews of the violinst Alina Ibragimova's debut recording on Hyperion of Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Concerto Funebre and a five-DVD collection of Claudio Abbado and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Time Out Chicago, September 20, 2007. Ibragimova is nobody's fool, and has placed a free download of Bach's Second Partita on her website, which is over here. She is, as we say, for real.

Who should they hire then, Mr. Muti?

"There are music directors now with three orchestras," Riccardo Muti observed yesterday evening at the Italian Cultural Institute, with an audience that included Alessandro Motta, the new Consul General of Italy in Chicago. "There are also fathers who have three families," he continued. "At some point, it becomes problematic." He spoke for an hour and a half with Philip Gossett, the Verdi scholar and distinguished University of Chicago professor, covering such issues as the crisis of classical music and the responsibilities of music directors, and frequently made light of his reputation for vanity and arrogance.

Muti spoke passionately about the need for a music director to be a senior figure to the musicians. "Often, my musicians would come to me with problems, 'I have a sick boy at home, maestro,' this sort of thing," and implied that it is somewhat difficult for a less mature conductor. "Of course, it is now fashionable to hire a young music director," he said, then shrugged, in a not-so-subtle gibe at the ascensions of Gustavo Dudamel and Alan Gilbert in Los Angeles and New York.

"People always used to say to me, 'Oh, what is it you do to your hair, to keep it so black?" he said with his wide smile. (This man can work a captive audience like few I have seen.) Now that he has a bit of gray, "They say, 'Oh, you must get up and do this," mimicking painting in the gray, punctuated with a staccato laugh.

But for all the joking, there's a seriousness to what he says, especially when discussing the urgent necessity of cultural education. He took up the metaphor early on, to Gossett's question, of how an orchestral score is 30 or 40 parts working together, and that the orchestra is a metaphor for a democracy. It's a rather hoary cliche that's been reiterated numerous times by Daniel Barenboim, but it's only a cliche among a small group of insiders. The more Mutis and Barenboims running around introducing it, the better.

Gossett asked Muti at one point if a music director should introduce new works, and before he had finished the question, Muti said, "Must. Not should. Must." That was that.

Muti also talked about a music director taking musicians along with him into the schools, and "I don't mean just the, the aristocratic schools, where you have to pay a lot of money to go, but the others." (Nobody's going to argue that, I don't think, so then the question becomes, Why not you, Mr. Muti? Why leave it to these youngsters?)

"Music directors today are expected to be charismatic, and handsome, and good at finding money, and good at conducting the orchestra," he said. "But what if you are good at finding money, but ugly?" It's a good laugh line, but it also shows just how much he prefers to focus on the things he's good at. The music, I mean, not the being handsome and charismatic, which he may play down all he likes, but which I'm also not buying for a second.

—

Someone really should get Muti's impression of the cymbal-player in Bruckner's Seventh Symphony preparing for his one cymbal crash after putting on his tuxedo "frock," kissing his wife and children, going to the hall, sleeping through the first three movements, picking up one cymbal, picking up the other one, making eyes at the front row, looking to the conductor for his cue and finally playing the crash taped and posted to YouTube. This is mime approaching an Eddie Izzardian level.

Playlist

Paul Lewis Beethoven Sonatas #3, including Op. 57 ("Appassionata") and Op. 27, No. 2 ("Moonlight") (harmonia mundi)

Artemis Quartet with Leif Ove Andsnes Brahms and Schumann Piano Quintets (Virgin Classics) (best recordings of these works in a long time, and that's a word I tend to avoid)

Richard Egarr Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. 1 (harmonia mundi)

Les Voix Baroques Buxtehude: Cantatas (Atma)

Sergio and Odair Assad Jardim Abandonado: Jobim, Debussy, more (Nonesuch)

Jean-Guihen Queyras Bach: Complete Cello Suites (harmonia mundi)

Giulio Cesare Andreas Scholl, Inger Dam Jensen (Cleopatra), Lars-Ulrik Mortensen, conductor, Concerto Copenhagen (harmonia mundi DVD)

Value

"Our task as men is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning  once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks men take a long time to accomplish, that's all."—Albert Camus, "The Almond Trees," 1940, collected in Lyrical and Critical Essays.