Deceptively Simple

New music, vocally speaking

On the upswing. Time Out Chicago, May 31, 2007. Dawn Upshaw sings Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre next Monday with musicians from the Chicago Symphony. Also, since it's the week of TOC's Summer Books issue, we section editors got to write 200 words about notable new books.

Also, take note of Chicago a cappella's 15th Anniversary Commissioning Project. They commissioned Chicago composer Stacy Garrop; Rollo Dilworth, a composer of many fine new spirituals, and Tania Leon for premieres next season. This large program boasts two new works from Garrop and Dilworth, and one from Leon.

Ask what you can do for your country

John F. Kennedy would have been 90 years old today. Over dinner last night with two close friends, we talked of how Kennedy, who became President when he was 43, will always seem young, while other people will appear to be in another station of life. To put Kennedy at 90 in perspective, think of it this way: Kennedy was five years younger than Studs Terkel, who's 95, six years younger than Ronald Reagan, 9 years older than Pierre Boulez, and 15 years older than Donald Rumsfeld. Slate has a picture archive.

I'll play, too

One of Terry Teachout's readers asks a simple question, "Is there any classic Hollywood comedy from the golden age with a great or even near-great musical score?" Adolph Deutsch's score to Some Like It Hot (1959) is in the near-great category, at minimum, but I'll allow that the best music is in the actual musical numbers, which weren't by Deutsch. And a special award should go to Woody Allen, for putting together a hilarious all-Prokofiev score to Love and Death (1975).

Alex Ross goes to bat for Beetlejuice; Lisa Hirsch for Carl Stalling and Looney Tunes.

Sales pitch

"If you're like me, you spend your day in front of a computer, wondering when the madness will end, maybe picking up the phone to figure out if Simon Rattle has a future beyond the Berlin Philharmonic. When it all becomes too much, maybe you decide to go for a run. And when you go for a long run of, say, 15 miles or more, you should do what I do: Pick up the QuickDraw Plus Hydration Carrier by Nathan Human Propulsion Laboratories. It holds 22 fluid ounces of your favorite sports beverage to carry you through the tough times, and has a flexible mesh loop to keep it in your hand with minimal gripping effort. And because this is a 'hydration carrier' and not a 'water bottle,' which are for pansies, you know it's going to be as tough as you are. Nathan Human Propulsion Laboratories QuickDraw Plus Hydration Carrier: Helping you carry hydration."

In all seriousness, I just picked up one of these yesterday ($12.99), and it's the finest hydration carrier I've ever used. Ever.

Gazing west

On a day when the city of Chicago has officially lost its mind, considering raising the cost of riding the El during rush hours to $3.25 and Donald Trump wondering why no one wants to live in his eyesore hotel/apartment building, northern California quickly becomes attractive. I mean, UC Berkeley posts video program notes with pianist Sarah Cahill and composer Paul Dresher, Dresher's opera The Tyrant will open in June, and the San Francisco Symphony begins The Music of Prokofiev, a 10-day Prokofiev festival on June 14. Where else can you hear pianists Yefim Bronfman and Mikhail Rudy within five days? This RadiOM is also pretty darn fantastic, starting with Alan Hovhaness and building from there. (Cahill/Dresher tip via Richard Friedman). On top of the music, they also have nice weather, I'm told, and people tend to smile.

Cahill discusses Frederic Rzewski's North American Ballads and Variations on The People United Will not Be Defeated!, smiling all the while. She still has the envelope containing the manuscript to Snippets 2, too, which Rzewski wrote for her. Of course, everyone's heard the minute-and-a-half podcast eighth blackbird did with Rzewski, right? Dresher's talk is a model of how to talk about music technically without losing 3/4 of the audience. Closer to home, there's some Holst-hatin' going on among eighth blackbird.

B&B&B

Raising the Bard. Time Out Chicago, May 24, 2006. Chicago Opera Theater's, and Berlioz's, Beatrice et Benedict opened last night.

Gaiety reigns supreme at the Harris Theater these days, now that Bluebeard's Castle and Erwartung have been replaced by Shakespeare's sparring lovers. Director Nicola Raab moves the comedy, drawn from Much Ado about Nothing, to World War II-era Sicily, where soldiers are taking a break. (I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be on the Allied side.) The women get sensible frocks and the men dun-colored uniforms, and the set is a raised wooden platform in the middle of the stage. It's all very utilitarian.

Berlioz put together an effervescent opera at the miserable end of his life, something that puts him in a rather different category from other composers. (Slightly more on this in the article above.) He never had a single solution to expressing a dramatic situation, unlike most of his 19th century peers, which makes the text that much more important. This partially explains his open-minded championing of Verdi, Massenet, and Saint-Saens. He had no shorthand effects, no recitative to lean upon whatsoever, so singers and conductors have to be found who can get this across to an audience. Since the audience probably hasn't heard the work, Berlioz having as rough a time getting his operas performed today as he did when he was alive, this becomes doubly important.

The warm and rosy mezzo of Sandra Piques Eddy seems ideal to the role, to my way of thinking, making Beatrice a thoughtful cynic instead of an unstable neurotic. She brought great ardor to her Act II "Dieu! Que viens-je d'entendre?" and rode the following scales of "Il m'en souvient" with sparkling ablomb. (Why Raab had her begin singing this passionate music while seated and in a forest of suspended light bulbs will remain a mystery, though.)

Tenor Joseph Kaiser  moves across the stage with winning agility, surveilling Beatrice with a few moves he picked up in basic training. (Crawling through the mud comes to mind.) He has a lip-smackingly good time reveling in his character's ne'er-do-well-ness, and sings with a fine mix of pinging top notes and sensitivity. (Corporate interest disclosure: Kaiser's sister Charlotte Kaiser Weinberg is a food critic and contributes to Time Out New York.)

Following Berlioz's original knitting together of scenes, English dialogue taken from Shakespeare is interpolated into the action. Being no expert in these sorts of things, I though they handled it fine and projected their spoken voices into the cavernous hall with ease. Diction posed no problems, and neither did switching back and forth from French singing to English speaking for the audience. Raab cutesily adds another layer of linguistic fun, with characters spelling out their intents in English with oversized foam letters.

The one weak spot is soprano Rinnat Moriah, who struggles with intonation and projection as Hero. Jan Latham-Koenig conducts a brightly lit and fast-paced performance that stays remarkably on track.

Production photo library here.

Swing (laid) low (Updated)

Alan Cubbage, Northwestern's VP for Public Relations, writes in an email that the jazz program "has NOT been cancelled." It has been "suspended.")

I get paid twice when I publish something here that originated at the Time Out Chicago blog:

Northwestern’s School of Music announced last week that incoming students could no longer enroll as Jazz Studies majors, or, less politely, that the Jazz program is being axed. Citing declining enrollment, dean Toni-Marie Montgomery said in a statement that “Most years, only two or three new students have enrolled.” The major was among the youngest on campus, having only been instituted in 1999.

Predictably, this has raised the ire of those who did study jazz at Northwestern, and who don’t like seeing their program slapped around. They set up Friends of NU Jazz to defend the program and to organize letters to Dr. Montgomery. With letters of support from Jamey Aebersold, who basically founded the entire notion of jazz education through his jazz play-a-long recordings and summer jazz camps, to historians like Ted Gioia and musicians such as saxophonist Dave Liebman, it’s an impressive list.

Chicago-based jazz pianist Dan Cray graduated from NU in ‘99, and made up his own jazz studies major while he was there, he wrote in an email. “[T]he program was rising—there were 2 big bands, and enough cats for 6-7 combos,” he continued. Cray plays regularly around here, holding down a Tuesday slot at the new Pops for Champagne downtown.

Too bad—for musicians, for listeners, for Northwestern’s own students—it wasn’t rising fast enough.

Addendum: The scholars of Destination Out have opened up their space to their Best Jazz of the '90s poll, to breathtaking results. The first three parts are up, with two more to come.

Agenda

Mania continues in the Windy City, so blogging will hold down its No. 2 seat for another few days (which is probably appropriate). To play catch up...the Chicago Symphony, conductor Alan Gilbert and pianist Olli Mustonen went flying off the rails in John Adams's Century Rolls last Thursday, hot on the heels of a drippy, unfocused performance of the brief Tromba Lontana. "Disaster," remarked my concertgoing friend after Century Rolls, and the lack of coordination between the sections of the orchestra showed he wasn't wrong. Tromba Lontana was its own sort of mini-fiasco, with Gilbert failing to bring any sense of transparency to the orchestra behind the solo trumpets; it all vanished into a mushy haze. For the sake of all involved, I was gladdened that Adams wasn't present.

Tonight, Gilbert conducts the Civic Orchestra in Pictures at an Exhibition and Ravel's Rapsodie Espagnole; Beatrice et Benedict closes Chicago Opera Theater's season beginning Wednesday (more on that soon);  more from Gilbert and the CSO Friday with Copland's Third Symphony; DePaul University's Contemporary Ensemble plays Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians a week from Tuesday. Those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

Did you hear?

Overheard conversation at the Chicago Symphony last night between two CSO administrators:

"I just talked to Osvaldo [Golijov], and he said the IU Jacobs School of Music commissioned a violin concerto from him. It's for their new violin prof."

"Really? Something for Josh Bell?"

"No, the other one, I think."

"Alexander Kerr?"

"No, no. They asked him to 'reflect the soloist's biography,' he said, something like that. I think he said it's going to be called Streets of Jaime Laredo."

Chilly thrills

Bluebeard's Castle—Erwartung. Time Out Chicago, May 17, 2007. Chicago Opera Theater's double-bill wows 'em.

The magazine is short-staffed this week, so yours truly is stepping up and staring at his computer's monitor even more than usual. That's my excuse for not posting more lately. Be back soon, I hope.