The Chicago Sinfonietta, one of America’s most diverse symphony orchestras, is transitioning to a new music director. The CS has made its mark on our culturally rich city with its loyal attention to composers and performers of color. Now, famed founder and current music director Paul Freeman will become music director emeritus, as the 21-year-old institution opens up an international search.
Paul Freeman
“We’ve actually been talking about a transition plan all the way back to 2005,” executive director Jim Hirsch told me by phone Thursday afternoon. He added that several committee members have been assembling names since last May, but would not disclose any potential successors. “As you know, over the last couple of years, maestro Freeman has been dealing with some health challenges that has made it fairly clear we needed to act on this.” Hirsch emphasized that the decision has been 100 percent mutual between Freeman and the organization.
Still, Freeman will remain active as music director for the next two years, and Hirsch says there will always be a role for the 73-year-old with the Sinfonietta as long as he desires. His conducting activity over the next two years, however, will be reduced.
The Sinfonietta plays this Sunday and Monday with Joffrey Ballet music director Leslie Dunner stepping in as guest conductor.
No word on whether there will be a reality-show talent search to discover the new leader, but I’m guessing no.
Tell Chicago Opera Theatre why you deserve free tickets to COT, via YouTube of course, and you might be lucky enough to win two free subscriptions to COT’s 2009 Spring Festival Season. The contest runs from Mar 2–Apr 1, and whatever three videos get “favorited” the most will win. The runners-up get a free viewing of the final dress rehearsal of COT’s first production this year, Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito.
And by all means, don’t be shy when you stick the camera in your face. If you follow the lead of these examples, sexual innuendos can get you a leg up on the competition.
The results are in from the Euro-centric Gramophone magazine: Our beloved Chicago Symphony Orchestra is America’s best symphony orchestra and #5 overall in the world. The mag polled leading critics from around the world including some of Gramophone’s own editorial correspondents throughout the globe. One such editor, James Inverne, notes:
“The celebrated ensembles on our list represent the triumph of ‘character’ in orchestras. Too many bands these days have a uniform, slick but generalized sound, whereas the Concertgebouw (No. 1) is one of the last to really have an immediately identifiable sound, and to arguably (to an extent) plumb the character of composers in the way an actor will with his roles. Others on the list who also have that quality are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (that famous brass sound) at No. 5, the very unsung Budapest Festival Orchestra (No. 9), and the Dresden Staatskapelle (No. 10).”
Other American orchestras of note are the Cleveland Orchestra at #7 and the LA Phil at #8, the latter tirelessly built up by Esa-Pekka Salonen, who will soon be turning it over to the hottest young conductor in the world, Gustavo Dudamel. Boston came in at #11, New York #12, followed by San Fran at #13.
Thank you CSO and deep down we know you’re really the best in the world. Your soul-seizing performance of Mahler’s 2nd last night with maestro Bernard Haitink only confirmed that. The article can be seen in full on November 28th when the US edition hits newsstands.
Eric Cutler as Nadir and Nathan Gunn as Zurga in the Lyric Opera’s The Pearl Fishers
Let’s pretend for a moment you hadn’t heard of Bizet’s famous Carmen, but could only judge the composer from two of his other operas offered locally this year: Djamileh at the Chicago Cultural Center in early August and now The Pearl Fishers at Lyric Opera through early November.
It’d be a safe conclusion to say the Frenchman could compose with the best of ‘em; yet he also collaborated with some pretty lousy librettists. In Djamileh, Narouda the slaveholder, falls for one of his slaves (Djamileh) who, in turn, falls for him. Never at any point is the absurd love affair believable…or desirable. With Fishers, which opened Monday night at the Civic Opera House, two buddies hopelessly agree to "pal around" (today’s political buzz-phrase!) with each other instead of pursuing their common, beautiful love interest, Leila. (Yeah, like that’s going to last.) The contrived conclusion is heroic kitsch at its best. Despite a super-duper famous tenor-baritone duet in Act 1, the NYC Met hasn’t staged this opera in 92 years. But that’s where the Met isn’t with it and the Lyric is.
Read more »
TOC commander/editor-in-chief Frank Sennett nicely captured the lavishly indulgent pre-concert and intermission festivities that adorned Lyric’s opening gala for Manon on Saturday evening. Nowhere except a Lyric gala can you feel underdressed—as I did—wearing your best slacks, shiniest shoes and silkiest button-up and tie (shoulda gone for the damn tuxedo). Fashion anxiety aside, I can’t think of a production in recent memory more deserving of the glitz and red carpet than Scotsman David McVicar’s vividly raw production of Jules Massenet’s Manon. (An opera last seen at Lyric in 1983!)
But the singers stole the show, especially the seductive soprano Natalie Dessay as Manon and exquisite tenor Jonas Kaufmann as the betrayed Chevalier Des Grieux. My date and I both agreed that Act 3 was the evening’s money shot: a remorseful Manon pouting in front a ballet troupe led by Joffrey dancer Michael Levine masterfully conflated all the performing arts at once. In scene 2, at the chapel where Des Grieux’s pledges his life to God, we really learn that Kaufmann’s powerfully but not abrasive pipes are as good as advertised. Once Manon enters the church and pleads Des Grieux back, the anguish and fireworks really explode. Even the snowy, tragic finale in Act 5 doesn’t quite match its intensity. Local Lyric tenor David Cangelosi even brought a previously unseen depth to the auxiliary role of the lecherous Guillot, a character often portrayed as a punching bag. And if Manon requires idiomatically French treatment from its musicians, conductor Emmanuel Villaume and the Lyric Opera Orchestra delivered without a hitch.
Alex Ross, classical music critic for the New Yorker since 1996, author of The Rest is Noise and tireless champion of Otto Preminger’s Laura and HBO’s The Wire, just received an eye-bulging $500K gift from the MacArthur Foundation in the form of "genius" awards given to 25 brilliant individuals. (Another notable recipient is violinist Leila Josefowicz, 30, who played at the Grant Park Music Festival earlier this summer, and soloed in John Adams’ Dharma at Big Sur). Speaking for myself, Ross was the single writer who got this upstart critic interested in writing about music in the first place, and it all started with hours spent rummaging through his blog.
Ross says he’ll use the money to buy time so that he can travel and begin writing his next book: an admission that should be total red meat for his minions in the days to come. His next work could easily explore today’s curious intersections of classical and popular music, or even the profound influences kitties have on writers. Who knows?
But the real reason I’m bringing all this to your attention is that you, pop culture maven, ought to try to him out for yourself. Start by buying his excellent book which was one of the New York Times’ ten best books of 2007. As the author once said, "Check out classical music sometime. Not only is classical music the repository of the most transcendently sublime utterances of the last thousand years, classical music kicks it hardcore."
A storm of TV cameras, tape recorders, and mics seems an unlikely setting for matters classical, but the welcome press conference of the new CSO music director, Riccardo Muti, is no small deal in this town. Even Bill Osborn, CSO Chairman, read a letter in its entirety from Mayor Daley who congratulated the sun-kissed Italian conductor on the hire. Press releases for this event were a tad—if not intentionally–ambiguous, so to see the maestro in person was a relief. (What with the maestro’s busy international career, I thought a teleconference might be in the cards and thank God it wasn’t.) In the Grainger ballroom on the second floor of Symphony Center, CSO President Deborah Card brought along speakers that included Osborn and bassist Steve Lester, who’s also the chairman of the CSO Members’ Committee.
Read more »
This morning, I didn’t think I’d be reading that the legendary 66-year-old conductor Riccardo Muti would be named as the CSO’s 10th music director (back in the fall, we put the odds of his picking up the baton at 8 to 1 though rumors of his ascension to the post have been floating around since 2005). This is extremely big news for our local band. The last interview I read with Muti was last fall in the Chicago Sun-Times with WFMT’s Andrew Patner, and the maestro seemed awfully comfortable kicking around in his Italian villa.
So why would he want to take on a permanent, big-time post like the CSO? Keep in mind he supposedly turned down the CSO position in ‘05 just before Barenboim’s departure in ‘06.The concerts I saw him conduct last fall were outstanding, and there was definitely a uniquely charged connection between him and the orchestra. Things got even more electric when he took the orchestra to Europe.
Read more »
