Fredda Hyman

Yet, for many years, there was no place in Chicago outside the academy where young, unestablished, classical artists and ensembles could hone their talent and make their mark. This was the large musical void that Fredda Hyman set out to fill 20 years ago. Her mission was audacious but her indomitable determination and unerring musical taste enabled her to make a grand success of Music in the Loft (MITL). Unfortunately, Fredda passed away last December.

This Sunday, May 6th, supporters and many of the artists she discovered and helped launch on successful careers will pay tribute to her inspiring vision with a Champagne Reception and Concert at The Standard Club, starting at 3 p.m. “Fredda would want it to be a celebration rather than a memorial,” says Desiree Ruhstrat, violinist with The Lincoln Trio.

Among the artists who will appear are the Ying Quartet, a then-new group who were featured on MITL’s first season in 1992 and have gone on to enjoy wide success, The Lincoln Trio who have appeared on more than a half-dozen programs, Quartet Ventoso, pianist Adam Neiman, guitarist Goran Ivanovic and singers Patrice Michaels, Jonita Lattimore, Jessye Wright and Robert Sims. All artists Fredda championed.

The Lincoln Trio

The germinating seed that led to MITL was the move Fredda made in 1990 with her husband, Sidney, a best-selling author and historian. The couple moved from Hyde Park and settled in the West Loop when that area was still pioneer territory. They discovered that their loft apartment had superb acoustics which spurred the brainstorm to convert their living room into an impromptu concert space in 1992. I suspect that first concert was mounted as  a lark for friends and that their favorable reaction gave Fredda the idea to turn it into a 5-concert series.

Fredda and Sidney’s presence and involvement at every concert, the intimate setting and  informal reception with the artists afterwards gave a very 19th Century atmosphere to  21st Century performances.

Once launched, Fredda, whose love of music was nurtured and deepened as a former dancer with American Ballet Theater, discovered her life’s new purpose.  “She was able to identify groups who’d be successful before they became successful,” says Ruhstrat. Her roster of discoveries, made by attending concerts and listening to countless CDs, included The Ying Quartet, violinist Rachel Barton Pine, The Pacifica Quartet and The Amelia Trio, who perform with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road troupe.

Fredda Hyman in her music-filled loft

Not only did she aid young musical performers but, starting in 1998, she founded an allied composer-in-residence program and gave composers an equally rare showcase for their work at MITL concerts. Among the composers who benefited from the exposure were Stacy Garrop, Lita Grier, Ricardo Lorenz and a then 16-year old wunderkind, Conrad Tao. “Fredda was just about the most wonderful supporter anyone could hope for,” Grier mentioned on a WFMT tribute, aired the day after Fredda’s death. “She was perpetually looking for opportunities for my works to be performed. She’d find these manuscripts and say let’s give a listen….in this way, a piano sonata that I composed when I was 17 got its world premiere performance at Fredda’s concert.”  Similar stories by other artists confirm Ruhstrat’s verdict that, “she was the consummate matchmaker.”

Fredda’s modus operandi for discovering new talent was simple yet mysterious. “She actually went out and listened for herself and made her own judgments,” says James Ginsburg, founder and president of Cedille Records. “She was an independent person with a very good ear.” And once she made a discovery, she booked them and was not shy about telling many people how great they were.

She once did so with Ginsburg, comparing her latest find with an artist he favored who played the same instrument.  He remembers her telling him, “My artist is better”. When Ginsburg went to hear her artist play, he had to admit she was right.  Ginsburg recalls one wag saying, “Fredda was not one to accept received wisdom.” She blazed her own path and made her own judgments.

You can purchase tickets at MITL’s website, www.musicintheloft.org or by calling 312/919-5030. While tickets are priced at $150 (reserved seating) and $100, students can–and should–take advantage of a special $20 price. Do it for Fredda who did so much for music!

That is not my fantasy. Mine would be to find myself in the Paris apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus on a Saturday evening in 1906. On such a night, starting at 8 p.m., Leo and Gertrude Stein would convene their regular Saturday salon. Leo would hold me spellbound as he spoke about the groundbreaking, avant-garde art he and his family were collecting. I could gaze at now-priceless masterpieces hanging on every inch of wall space. Had I arrived on a good night, I might even share words and a drink with fellow guests, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. I’d be present close to modern art’s creation.

Leo & Gertrude Stein Family

I came close to having that vision last October when I entered the galleries of Paris’ Grand Palais museum and came face to face with many of the iconic paintings that now reside in museums around the world. As I entered the opening galleries, I gasped in astonishment. I had no idea that the Stein family was responsible for acquiring such works, nurturing the careers  of now-heralded artists. Like great explorers, the Steins were the earliest champions of modern art.

Unlike much wealthier collectors of that period, such as the Potter Palmers of Chicago or the H.O. Havemeyers of New York, the Steins were neither particularly wealthy nor had they come to Paris with the intention of collecting paintings. They were well-educated, had some art training (Leo was an artist who had studied with art historian and connoisseur, Bernard Berenson) and exhibited discerning taste for the new.

The exhibit, “The Steins Collect”, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through June 3, is the culmination of a decade-long commitment by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the French Union of National Museums–Grand Palais and the Met. It is truly the proverbial once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, made possible due to a one-time exception by the heirs of Elise A. Haas, allowing Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” to travel. Viewers owe a debt of gratitude to the three museums and the lead curators (Janet Bishop at SFMOMA, Cecile Debray at the Grand Palais and Rebecca Rabinow at The Met) for bringing the exhibit to fruition with great flair and newly unearthed scholarship. The first examination of the Stein Collection in more than 40 years, it reunites close to 200 works, now scattered to all corners of the globe.

Matisse: Woman with a Hat

Leo was the collection’s driving force in its early years. Deciding to become an artist, he moved to Paris at the end of 1902 from Florence where he had met and been influenced by Berenson. His sister, Gertrude, joined him in the fall of 1903. Their brother and sister-in-law, Michael and Sarah Stein, arrived in January, 1904. Leo’s early aesthetic was more classical in outlook. The artists he called “The Big Four”: Manet, Renoir, Degas and Cezanne informed his aesthetic though the first three artists were beyond his means. He purchased his first Cezanne from legendary dealer, Ambroise Vollard, in 1903.

In Paris, Leo was delighted to learn he could afford contemporary oil paintings. Leo and Gertrude were transfixed by the art on view at the second Salon d’Automne in 1904. Works by Cezanne, Odilon Redon, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec were featured. Two weeks later, they emptied their bank accounts of close to $7,000 and bought two Cezannes, two Gauguins, two Renoirs and a Maurice Denis.

Madame Cézanne with a Fan

Six weeks later, they purchased Cezanne’s “Madame Cezanne with a Fan”. They acquired the centerpieces of their young collection, Matisse’s, “Woman with a Hat” in 1905 and Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude in 1906. During their lifetimes, the Steins owned 180 works by each artist.

Throughout the decade from 1904 until 1913, the Steins were modern art’s most influential tastemakers. Alfred Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, has written: “For the two brief years between 1905 and 1907 he (Leo) was possibly the most discerning connoisseur and collector of 20th-Century painting in the world.”  Years later, Gertrude tried to inflate her role in assembling the collection but Rebecca Rabinow, curator of the exhibition at The Met, told me in an interview, “If Leo hadn’t been around, I don’t think there would have been a collection.”

Apartment - 27 Rue de Fleurus

If one were to have visited the Steins’ small apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus in 1906, one would have seen paintings, hung floor to ceiling, crammed on three walls. There were works by Cezanne (3), Renoir (2), Gauguin, Picasso (3), Matisse, Manguin, Bonnard, Daumier, Delacroix, Denis, Toulouse-Lautrec and several by Leo Stein.  In the mid-1930s, Gertrude reminded her readers that the art they showed was once scorned. “It is very difficult now that everybody is accustomed to everything to give some idea of the uneasiness once felt when one first looked at all these pictures on the walls.”

The exhibit I saw six months ago at the Grand Palais opened with a room devoted to art by “The Big Four” and then devoted subsequent rooms to displaying the art collected by each of the Stein siblings and their companions in turn. Rabinow, however, has taken a different tack toward hanging the collection in New York. Her aim, she said, was to have the collection speak to its specific moment in time. “I arranged the paintings so that the art tells stories.”

Stein Salon

In the entry room, Rabinow hung paintings Leo saw from 1900-1903 that he didn’t buy. Leo and Gertrude had a rule that they would only buy works by artists they were friends with. A showstopper of Rabinow’s design is an exact replica, down to the exact dimensions, of Leo’s small studio (460 sq. ft.) complete with an in-gallery projection of the original artworks onto the studio walls. If you can’t make it to New York, you can view a video of the projection on the Met’s website, www.metmuseum.org. But you should, by all means, hop a plane or train if you want a special thrill.

While the exhibition is a full immersion by itself, I cannot end without praise for the lavish, nearly 500-page catalog, published by Yale University Press. I cannot recommend it too highly. It is a necessary complement to the exhibit that squares the circle, so to speak. The eleven original essays (including those by the three lead curators and a highly incisive profile of Leo Stein by Gary Tinterow, a former senior curator at The Met and now director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts) are an entertaining read and a rich trove of fascinating biographical details about each member of the Stein family, along with new research findings.  The catalog contains 500 plates, many in color, a helpful chronology, pages from Sarah Stein’s Notebook of Matisse’s teachings, photos of the Stein residences illustrating how they displayed their art and, last but not least, an  invaluable inventory of the Stein Collections with dimensions, current ownership and past provenance.

Every aspect of the exhibition and catalog manifests the labor of love this endeavor was for all parties concerned. I offer a bow of deep appreciation for making that moment in time come alive for me. Go treat yourself to the same experience!

Anthony Petullo

At the moment, while the Art Institute treads water, preparing for its upcoming Roy Lichtenstein show, genuine art excitement can be found just up the road at the Milwaukee Art Museum where a stunning collection of 200 paintings, sculpture and objects, part of the Anthony Petullo Collection, is on view. Mere words alone cannot do justice to the show’s visceral power. I only know that, soon after entering the exhibit, I was in the grip of the virtuosity on display in a way I seldom experience at an exhibition, where keeping a critical distance is the norm.

Susanna York by David Lloyd

At the entry to the “Accidental Genius” exhibition is artist David Lloyd’s wall-size, blown-up portrait of English actress, Susanna York. Her gaze is captivating but one senses something askew about the likeness. That “off” quality serves as a metaphor for this bold assortment of works and styles by “self-taught” and “outsider” artists, no-name figures lacking academic training or existing outside mainstream culture due to psychological illness or some developmental disability.

The show highlights the artists’ mesmerizing talents as well as Petullo’s loving obsession for these works. Such previously-maligned and marginalized creations are now avidly pursued by collectors and museums. Go and treat yourself to a visual feast. After viewing the artists’ intuitive handling of color, composition, draftsmanship and detail, you may agree with me in finding current art babble surrounding these works too parochial. The current art canon should embrace such creations and label them Art–plain and simple, free of limiting modifiers. After all, many of the artists we now revere, names such as Cezanne, Rousseau, Van Gogh and Gauguin, didn’t go to art school either.

Carlo Zinelli (1916-1974)

I found myself particularly transfixed by the work of Eddie Arning, David Lloyd, Henry Darger, James Dixon, Madge Gill, Carlo Zinelli along with the artists of Art Haus, a mental health facility outside Vienna. The six named artists have wildly contrasting styles that paid no mind to the art world, yet produced creations of stunning originality. When I passed a good number of the works, I instinctively moved within inches of the paper or canvas, drawn by the force of their images, color, hyper-precise line drawing or written text. Margaret Andera, the curator of “Accidental Genius”, deserves praise for her long-standing commitment to the collection that informs her intelligent selection and organization of the exhibition.

Every great collection reflects the eye and personality of its collector. While Petullo assembled his collection over three decades, he noted, in a telephone conversation, that half of the 320 donated works were acquired during an intense three year period, from 1990-93. While the collection contains work by several American masters like Darger and Bill Traylor, its strength lies in the quality and range of European self-taught artists represented, many of whom Petullo collected in depth. His donation to the Milwaukee Art Museum, according to director, Dan Keegan, “is the most extensive grouping of its kind in any American museum or in private hands.”

Minnie Evans (1892–1987)

Petullo’s first collecting foray came in 1974 when he bought a work that caught his eye at the city’s Lakefront Festival of Arts. Over the next decade, he collected what he liked with no plan. He dubs those first purchases “early Dad art”. They now reside with his children and grandchildren. Gradually, this local businessman moved away from folk/naive art and gravitated toward self-taught and outsider art.

Petullo doesn’t like the artificial distinctions placed on this work. What attracts him so much to these artists? “They share an independent spirit, unrestrained by the rules of art training. Also they are inventive, having a free flow of creativity. Essentially, they create for their own enjoyment and fulfillment, with little or no regard for the rest of the art world.”

As Petullo’s eye developed and grew more discriminating, he concentrated on figurative, colorful, uplifting and optimistic work. Abstract or highly polished art didn’t move him. “I’m an imagist,”, he says. The art of Edward Hopper, Egon Schiele, The School of The Eight, and artists of  the Fauve movement holds special appeal.

Madge Gill (English, 1882–1961)

“I never bought art as an investment”, Petullo told me, advice he gives to every aspiring collector. “You have to realize that 98% of art never appreciates. And, as soon as the work leaves the dealer’s shop, it’s immediately worth 50% less than what you paid for it.” I asked if he had gotten some bargains when he began collecting outsider art in the early 1980s. “Well, maybe if you consider $20,000 or 30,000 a low price.”

Though he initially relied on one or two dealers to steer him toward outstanding work, Petullo soon developed firm confidence in his own taste. “You have to believe in yourself to build a great collection. You have to say “No” to them (dealers) if it’s not for you.” He laughingly recalled that Russell Bowman, a former director of the museum (now an art dealer in Chicago) once brought him a list of suggested artists to add to the collection. Petullo says he crossed off all but one or two names. He’d do it his way, thank you.

Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern (1892–1982)

He made it clear years ago that his museum-quality collection was destined for Milwaukee. What criteria, I asked, did he use in deciding where it should go and had he considered a New York museum or The Art Institute (Petullo was born and grew up in Chicago and graduated from the University of Illinois, where he has endowed two named professorships).  He named four factors that governed the winning choice: “They needed to have strong interest in the collection, top curatorial talent, enough wall space and, very important, enough storage space.” He didn’t want the art to languish in an off-site warehouse.

Henry Darger (American, 1892–1973)

New York’s Museum of American Folk Art didn’t have enough wall space and recently shuttered its doors. And the Art Institute was “too damn big”. The collection would be lost there and he thought the museum “not ready”, possibly meaning such art was deemed not yet worthy of admission. At Milwaukee, the Petullo Collection will join the Richard and Erna Flagg Collection of Haitian Art and the Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art. Those three collections, notes gallerist Jane Kallir in the lavish “Accidental Genius” catalog, “make Milwaukee one of America’s preeminent centers for the study of work by untrained creators.”

At a time when auction houses and one’s checkbook rule as the new arbiters of artistic value and social celebrity, it is heartening to see an older model of a generous collector motivated purely by his passion for art and his community. For more information on the artists and exhibition visit the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Michael Tilson Thomas

Michael Tilson Thomas has always had a special affinity for the music of American composers. The Los Angeles-born  music director of the San Francisco Symphony since 1995, he has championed those pioneers  who, according to an SFO website, “created a new American musical voice for the 20th Century.” In 2000, Thomas organized the first “American Mavericks” festival devoted to such seminal figures as Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, John Cage and Charles Ives. This month, he is touring the next iteration of “American Mavericks” in Chicago, Ann Arbor and New York City.

Charles Ives

I was in the Orchestra Hall audience ten days ago for several reasons. Foremost was to hear the orchestra in its first Chicago appearance in 10 years. I heard them once before under the leadership of Herbert Blomstedt but wanted to hear their playing  under Thomas’ direction. They performed brilliantly, playing with total commitment and keen attack, signs of an improved ensemble relishing the chance to play such challenging fare. Another reason was to hear the works on the program (Cowell, John Adams & Ives). Apart from Adams, the other mavericks are rarely heard inside Symphony Center. Finally, I wanted to see if my musical ears had grown more accustomed to Ives’ spiky, contrapuntal tonal palette. Thomas is widely viewed as the premier interpreter of Ives.

The program opened with a haunting, soaring trumpet solo from Cowell’s “Synchrony.” I hadn’t expected such a lovely melody at the start and found the rhythmic and melodic tonal clusters that followed pleasantly accessible. Cowell also taught and reportedly influenced the work of other mavericks, particularly Cage and Lou Harrison.

John Adams

Adams’ newest work, “Absolute Jest” followed. It is the fourth commission he has composed for San Francisco beginning with “Harmonium” in 1981. It is hard to believe that Adams was ever a musical maverick. However, he is credited with steering music away from the dry 12-tone exercises of academic modernism and back to a more expressive and humanistic realm. His 1986 opera, “Nixon in China” broke new ground and, ever since his 2002 tribute to the victims of 9/11, “On the Transmigration of Souls”, Adams has become the default composer for orchestra programmers, a contemporary composer audiences will tolerate.

As I listened to the buoyant, yet fractured rhythms, the work had a pastiche quality that, while enjoyable in performance, did not leave a lasting impression. Afterward, reading the program notes, Adams called the piece’s short bursts “quotations”.  While my ear caught, what I thought were snippets of Copland, I later learned that he was borrowing freely from Beethoven’s late quartets and even the Ninth Symphony.  The inclusion of the St. Lawrence String Quartet was an interesting touch. As stand-ins for Beethoven’s quartets, they played with fierce engagement, often in attacking juxtaposition to the orchestra. It was a novel but not entirely successful experiment.

I still don’t “get” Ives but I realize that he has changed modern music’s vocabulary and earned his “American Maverick” stripes. However, Henry Brant’s rich orchestration of Ives’ “A Concord Symphony” (originally a sonata solely for piano) softened many of the piece’s rough edges and made Ives’ ideas more pronounced and palatable, particularly the sweetly melodic third movement, The Alcotts.  His tribute to three other transcendental New England writers–Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau–remain a musical puzzle to my ears.

Tilson Thomas has lived with the music of these composers for many years. I left Symphony Center convinced that no other orchestra could interpret these works as convincingly and idiomatically. That opinion was evidently shared by many younger members of the audience who whooped and applauded heartily for each work on the program. The audience skewed much younger than the usual CSO audience. At least 1/3 of the crowd in the lower balcony were high school and college students. While the CSO offered heavily discounted pricing for students on their website and on Groupon, many also came because of Thomas and the orchestra’s reputation for contemporary fare. For a list of concerts in April and May with special $10 seats for students, go to www.cso.org.

Though it was satisfying to hear the SFO at all, I wonder why Chicago audiences were treated to only one program from the festival while Ann Arbor presented three full programs  immediately after Chicago and New York’s Carnegie Hall is presenting all four festival programs. Tilson Thomas is a definite draw when he plays with our orchestra and a broad audience exists in Chicago for more adventuresome repertoire beyond the iconic three B’s. Was it not worth the risk of a less than full house to showcase rarely-performed works by such game-changing composers?  We missed out on hearing soprano Jesse Norman and Meredith Monk perform John Cage’s “Songbooks”, early Aaron Copland and Mason Bates’ recent commission for the SFO, “Mass Transmission.” Is Chicago still too provincial in its musical tastes? I’d like to think not.

Tilson Thomas was asked when he began his tenure in San Francisco 15 years ago what he hoped people would think about the orchestra in years to come. His response: “America’s most fearless, most dangerous and most generous orchestra.” As it celebrates its 100th Anniversary, I’d say the SFO has embraced that mission splendidly!

So, for all music lovers who live on Chicago’s north side, the suburbs or even southside outposts, like Hyde Park, let me say it LOUD and clear: GET THEE NORTH. Over the next two weekends, something better than NCAA March Madness   is taking place in our town.

I’m referring to “Soundings”, a themed series of seven concerts featuring top-notch classical and renowned world music soloists. The series’ 11 headliners will offer unusually imaginative concerts featuring not just the standard European classical repertoire but works drawn from Indian, South American, Celtic, Zydeco and Jazz traditions.

Richard Van Kleeck, Director of Concert Activities at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, has programmed the Spring Festival since its founding in 2004.  His modus operandi is to forgo simply filling open dates with a motley crew of musical artists and arrange the concerts around a central musical theme.

For the inaugural festival eight years ago, Van Kleeck’s theme was the piano. Leon Fleisher and Menahem Pressler were among the participants. For the closing concert, 33 pianists gathered on stage and played 10 Steinway Grands. Another year was devoted to string quartets, titled “Quadromania” and featured The Juilliard Quartet and Turtle Island Quartet. This Spring Festival theme this year, which opens on March 28th and runs through April 7th, is “Soundings: Celebrating Singular Voices in Music.”

Anoushka Shankar

The opening artist is two-time Grammy nominee, Anouska Shankar, daughter of famed sitarist, Ravi Shankar, who will play hybrid works that incorporate elements of flamenco, tango and fandango with ancient Indian musical forms. She will be followed by acclaimed pianist, Gabriela Montero, who will play “visionary interpretations” of Chopin and Liszt and devote the second half to improvisations on themes suggested by the audience.

Three noted clarinetists, all members of the Bienen School, will perform a program titled “Clarinetissimo” followed on Saturday, March 31, by famed guitarist, Sharon Isbin, joined by Brazilian percussionist, Thiago de Mello. The festival’s second week begins with violinist Jennifer Koh. For her program, “Bach and Beyond, Part I”  Ms. Koh will guide audiences on a historical journey of solo violin masterpieces based on works by Bach.

Sharon Isbin

On Friday, April 6th, the weekend kicks off with what promises to be a sonic showdown featuring master accordionists and bandoneon virtuosos from France, Russia, Chicago and New Orleans titled “The Big Squeeze.”  The festival will conclude on April 7th as acclaimed Cuban trumpet star and four-time Grammy winner, Arturo Sandoval, performs with the Chicago Jazz Orchestra.  All these “soundings” should rank as among  2012’s musical highpoints.

Arturo Sandoval

Van Kleeck deserves an award for such inspired programming. Why are themed programs so rare in the Chicago area? His example deserves to be copied by his peers at  Harris Theater, Symphony Center, Grant Park and possibly Ravinia. Instead, we are fed an repetitious diet of  one-off star turns, however noteworthy. Why not feature four or five outstanding violinists or other instrumentalists over 3 or 4 concerts around a common theme (like Koh’s “Bach and Beyond” idea) at any one or combination of the above venues?  With the right marketing, it could be a crowd-pleaser that draws music regulars and new audiences locally and from out-of-town, like opera’s Ring cycle or the CSO’s Beethoven Festival in 2010. Why is such a concept being championed by a university rather than our downtown music presenters ? Classical and world music programming could stand a good jolt out of its well-worn rut.

An added feature making the festival such an attractive entertainment option is the reasonable pricing for such stellar talent. Tickets range from $14 to 26 (for Shankar and Isbin) with student seats at $10. There’s no better place or better bargain for musical enjoyment over the next 10 days than at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. To see the complete lineup and order tickets, go to www.pickstaiger.org. To buy tickets with a credit card, call 847/467-4000.

"Enchanted Island"

The new opera was Jeremy Sams’ pastiche at The Met, “The Enchanted Island” versus perhaps Giuseppe Verdi’s most popular score, “Aida”, at Lyric. I knew nothing about “Island” but assumed that a cast featuring counter-tenor David Daniels, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and soprano Danielle de Niese was not chopped liver and worth hearing. I was not disappointed.

Danielle de Niese

Sams’ winning achievement was to combine two of Shakespeare’s plots, “The Tempest” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with lovely arias plucked from a variety of Baroque operas by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau and other composers. The blending of story and song was so seamless and charming that the plot played like Shakespeare’s true version and not a newly-made creation.

In Sams’ take on “The Tempest”, Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, lives on a remote island with his daughter Miranda. He is a sorcerer, surrounded by his books and magic potions. While Prospero initially seduced the sorceress, Sycorex, ruler of the island, he left her, stealing her sprite servant, Ariel, and enslaving her son, Caliban. And she wants revenge.

Joyce DiDonato

All hell begins breaking loose when Prospero, wanting to insure Miranda’s happiness, commands Ariel to cause a passing ship that contains the King of Naples and Prince Ferdinand to go aground. Caliban overhears the plan and informs his mother who devises a spell of her own that causes Ariel’s spell to go awry. What ensues is a riot of unintended consequences centered around hopelessly mismatched lovers. But all turns out for the best in the end: the rightful lovers find one another, Prospero is pardoned and apologizes to Sycorex.

Not only were the lovers under Ariel’s spell but so was the theater audience. The production sets and costumes looked like a million bucks. And in the pit, conductor William Christie, a renowned Baroque expert, had the Met’s orchestra playing crisply, in true to period style.

Neptune’s (Placido Domingo) grand entrance was a special effects show-stopper, complete with mermaids suspended in mid-air. While all the main characters deserve praise, Danielle de Niese’s prancing performance deserves special mention. She had my full attention throughout and owned whatever scene she appeared in.

(Great news Lyric Opera recently announced that it has engaged de Niese for the lead in its newly-commissioned opera, “Bel Canto”, that will debut December, 2015.)

At the end, the theater audience gave the Met HDLive presentation an ovation, something usually reserved for movie blockbusters. As I walked out, I saw most other patrons smiling and commenting on the triumph we had just witnessed.

###

Four days later, I went to “Aida” with high expectations. It was the first opera I went to as a teenager at the old Metropolitan Opera home on West 39^th Street in New York. Nothing much of the production sticks in my mind except the sight of an elephant and horses arriving on stage during the famous triumphal entrance scene.

“Aida” is the Verdi work that defines the term “Grand Opera”. Verdi spins an epic tale of illicit love between Radames, a newly-returned Egyptian war hero, and an Ethiopian princess (Aida) who is the enslaved attendant to Amneris, the Pharoah’s daughter. When Radames spurns marrying Amneris, she discovers his secret love and plots her deadly revenge.

Giordani and Radanovsky in "Aida"

Lyric trotted out its successful Nicholas Joel production for the fifth time and enlisted  top-flight Verdi performers–tenor Marcello Giordani, lyric soprano Sondra Radvanovsky and mezzo Jill Grove. Conductor, Renato Palumbo drew rich,dramatic, Verdi-style playing from the Lyric orchestra.

However, besides the singers and the score, what keeps faithful operagoers and neophytes alike coming back is the spectacle. While Lyric tried hard and packed the stage with at least 125 palace guards, priests, dancers and members of the court, the spectacle, surprisingly, fell flat. Pharoah was carried in on what appeared to be a wooden throne consisting of several stacked chairs rather than a golden one befitting his rank. And the costumes for the large contingent of priests/courtiers were topped by what one critic termed “funky domed hats” that proved distracting and inappropriate.

Coming so soon after seeing “Enchanted Island,” I never engaged with the story.  While Giordani and Radvanovsky delivered perfectly-sung, affecting arias—“Celeste Aida” and the ravishing “O Patria Mia” respectively—their onstage chemistry never really clicked. This fatally undercut believability in their portrayal as lovers in the throes of passion, robbing the opera of its power to move listeners.

I must differ from John von Rhein’s comment that “Shakespeare would have been proud to have penned such a libretto.”  The Bard, I believe, would have written more plot twists and injected more dramatic tension into the script to keep the action flowing. Instead, the die is cast in the first half-hour. It then takes three hours to reach the inevitable denouement.

Lyric’s production succeeds as a star turn for two fine Verdi interpreters but it just isn’t storytelling that appeals to a 21^st Century listener. Perhaps it is time for Lyric to retire this production and find singers and staging that can invest this 140-year-old warhorse with more vigor.

(There are four remaining performance of “Aida” with a second cast, headed by acclaimed Chinese soprano, Hui He, on March 15, 19, 22, 25. For tickets, go to www.lyricopera.org).

Chicago Chorale

I last wrote about the virtues of the fine, Hyde Park-based, Chicago Chorale two years ago. Since then, I have had the pleasure of hearing them in concert several times and on two CD recordings, Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers” and their 10^th Anniversary release, “And Give Us Peace”. What I find so appealing about this all-volunteer ensemble of 60 trained singers, beyond their stellar musicianship, is their drive to take on ever-greater challenges.

Their upcoming concert, next Monday evening at Symphony Center, is a perfect example of this choral group’s chutzpah. Conductor Bruce Tammen’s forces will join with the Oak Park-River Forest Symphony and Chorus under Jay Friedman’s direction to perform Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis”.

Everything about the production is big. Instead of performing the work in their usual church setting, the Chorale is moving downtown to the home of the Chicago Symphony, which has scheduled the same work for next October. The Chorale, for this performance, has augmented its ranks with 26 additional singers and will be joined by 42 choristers from Oak Park for a massing of 128 voices filling the hall.

Due to the difficulty of the scoring, the Missa is usually performed strictly by professional symphony orchestras with easier access to choral forces, and even then, not often. Thus, one can only admire the artistic challenge Tammen and Friedman have assumed.

Beethoven

Beethoven drew inspiration for his Mass from the examples of Handel and Bach. The audience will hear distinct Handel-like sonorities in the score as well as what Tammen calls two “fiendishly difficult” fugues and contrapuntal scoring modeled on Bach’s “B Minor Mass.”  Along with Bach’s Mass, the Missa is a supreme musical example of a Mass setting.

Beethoven composed the Missa between 1819-23, during the time he was working on his monumental Ninth Symphony. It began as a commission for the Archduke Rudolph of Austria’s inauguration but was not completed by the 1820 date.

Tammen believes the composer needed to write a mass to top other masses. “One can’t overstate the ego-gratification needs of Beethoven.” Beethoven even set the Ninth aside to work on the score he called his greatest work.

Tammen feels that, were the Missa Solemnis better known, it would be an audience favorite and a Beethoven masterwork, equal to the symphonies. I will be in the audience hearing the work for the first time and listening for the great fugues at the end of the Gloria and Credo as well as the Agnus Dei.

Bruce Tammen

When asked for personal highpoints of his leadership, Tammen cites the Chorale’s performances at the acoustically-stunning Monastery of the Holy Cross in Bridgeport, their appearances at the Ravinia Festival and a highly successful tour of France and Spain last summer.

Besides buying tickets to what, based on my past experience, should be a glorious musical evening, I urge you to visit the Chorale’s attractive, content-rich website at www.chicagochorale.org where you can download a study guide for the concert, watch a video about the upcoming performance and click on an Missa audio guide, “Top Ten Moments to Listen For”.

On the company’s 12^th season schedule are performances of Bach’s “St. John Passion” and a concert at the Monastery.  Off in the future lies Haydn’s “Creation,” Brahms’ “German Requiem” and a possible return to Ravinia.  That’s Tammen and the Chorale dreaming bigger dreams.

The Missa Solemnis performance is at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, March 5 with a pre-concert introduction by WFMT’s Carl Grapentine at 6:30 p.m. Ticket sales are being handled by Symphony Center’s box office at 312/294-3000 or www.cso.org.

DePaul Art Museum

There’s a new museum in town. Yet I’m not sure how many Chicagoans know the good news. The DePaul Art Museum opened last September in a new, three-story structure adjoining the Fullerton CTA stop.

The museum is only new in a technical sense. Since 1998, it has been housed in two large rooms within Richardson Library, unknown to outside passersby. Louise Lincoln, its highly capable director since 1997, has mounted numerous noteworthy exhibitions under serious limitations.

Though art has been present on campus from 1985, it was hidden in the literal sense. What the striking red brick building achieves is a freestanding space for the museum’s art collection (2,000 objects with extensive holdings of Chicago art) with the size (15,000 sq. ft.) and facilities (a new collection study room) befitting a true museum. It also signifies the university’s growing commitment to the arts.

A tip of the hat is warranted for the contextually-rich design by Antunovich Associates, their first museum project.

My earlier post focused on Chicago’s formerly feisty publication, The New Art Examiner, and its dedicated focus on Chicago and the greater Midwest art community. Lincoln and assistant director, Laura Fatemi, opted for an equally strong local focus and provocative theme for their opening show

Re: Chicago opens with a wall text that states, “Chicago rivals—and surpasses—other cities in music, architecture and theater; yet in the visual arts, it has too frequently been seen as a ‘second city’.”  Though many prominent artists, past and present, sport Chicago connections, many left and made their reputations elsewhere.

The exhibit seeks to reframe Chicago as a true artistic center vis-a-vis other centers such as Paris, New York and even Los Angeles. Alongside the Chicago theme, Lincoln chose a novel way to showcase the chosen works: a group-curated show. She polled 43 curators, collectors, critics and scholars to name a favorite Chicago artist. The result is an alternate canon of the famous, the no longer famous and the ought to be famous.

Ivan Albright

The show is both a delight to walk through and an entertaining guessing game. New discoveries loom at each hang while one wonders what did James Elkins, Neil Harris, Lew Manilow and James Rondeau choose? For every known artist like Ivan Albright, Karl Wirsum, Dawoud Bey and Richard Hunt, there was the thrill of discovering Manierre Dawson, Art Shay, Macena Barton, Irving Petlin and many more. Most surprising was Franz Schulze’s backward reach into the mid-19^th Century for now-forgotten portraitist, George Healy, along with the absence of Ed Paschke, Roger Brown or Jim Nutt.

Manierre Dawson

You’ll want to take home the show’s colorful, attractively-designed catalog to reread not only each curator’s supporting statement but for the scholarly essays buttressing Chicago’s claim for its rightful place in the art world.

Wendy Greenhouse skillfully argues that Chicago’s art tradition has run counter to the prevailing canon throughout history. Its artists have long favored representational or surreal (“cartoonish”) work over an East Coast canon dominated by abstract, expressionistic art.

Karl Wirsum

Lynne Warren champions Chicago’s “extraordinary photographic legacy” and bemoans the near-criminal neglect of such masters as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind and other renowned figures.

If you are an art lover, you owe it to yourself to get to the DePaul Art Museum by March 4 to catch this appealing yet ultimately serious show. The museum’s next exhibition will feature African photographer, Malick Sidibe. It opens March 29.

DePaul Art Museum is located at 935 West Fullerton Avenue. For information on public events and hours, call 773/325-7506 or visit www.depaul.edu/museum.

Derek Guthrie

It has been 10 years since The New Art Examiner published its final issue. The monthly magazine, which called itself “Chicago’s Independent Voice of the Visual Arts,” enjoyed a rough but highly-respected run from 1973 to 2002. It was born in controversy by founding editors, Jane Addams Allen and Derek Guthrie. Besides coverage of local and regional exhibits, the publication adopted a reportorial, contrarian stance toward the value systems and practices of the art world that raised a lot of critical dust.

Under the helm of successive editors, it gained a large following among artists, a national readership and critical influence beyond the Midwest. It was disheartening to hear at a panel discussion last November that the history and contribution of Chicago’s only successful art magazine was virtually unknown among younger critics and art students.

Authors Terri Griffith, Kathryn Born and Janet Koplos have now stepped into the breach and assembled an enlightening anthology of articles in “The Essential New Art Examiner,” newly-published by Northern Illinois University Press. In so doing, they have resurrected this ever-lively publication and shown what was lost with its passing.

Griffith, at an all-day symposium (“Re-Examining the New Art Examiner”) last Saturday at Northern Illinois’ campus, called the Examiner “a newspaper for artists” to which each editor, over its 30-year run, brought their own views and interests. These new voices, who shared the founding editors’ commitment to an independent local outlet, not only kept the Examiner alive once Allen and Guthrie relocated to Washington, D. C. but also helped establish Chicago’s growing national recognition as a true art center.

The New Art Examiner published my first forays in art reportage. A cover story on an infamous trial of the 1980s involving the George F. Harding Museum earned me my first Examiner byline. Following that scandal, I next investigated the nationwide lack of defined ethical guidelines at major art museums.

While most institutions now have written guidelines governing staff, trustee and curatorial conduct, ethical issues around collection management still arouse controversy 30 years later.

While I hung around the Examiner’s office mainly from 1980-82, Guthrie’s introduction to the book, along with his and Jane Allen’s opening essay and Frank Pannier passionate rant opened my eyes to Chicago’s art world circa 1973.

Essential New Art Examiner

Besides giving young art writers their first exposure in print, the book contains many thoughtful essays that still resonate by prominent critics and curators: Peter Schjeldahl (now at The New Yorker), Hilton Kramer (The New Criterion), Janet Koplos (Art in America), Alice Thorsen (now at Kansas City Star), Lynne Warren (MCA) and Hamza Walker (Renaissance Society). Schjeldahl’s 1985 “Chicagoization” article is a classic. The historical recaps by five former editors are a nice personal touch. Only a handful of the 27 selections were duds.

While the book does not pretend to be a complete history, which remains to be written, it is an essential primer to a colorful and contentious period in Chicago art lost to generations who came after. (NIU art historian, Barbara Jaffee, has written a highly perceptive analysis of the Examiner’s origins and history. For a copy of her catalog essay that accompanied NIU Museum’s exhibition on the New Art Examiner, write bjaffee@niu.edu.)

Unfortunately, the New Art Examiner was never supported with advertising by most dealers or, especially, the city’s two major museums. Book artist, Buzz Spector, called the New Art Examiner “the chronic outsider of the art world.” An early director at the Museum of Contemporary Art banned the magazine from the museum’s gift shop.

Guthrie writes that he and Jane Allen “learned by bitter experience that there is no freedom for criticism or criticality.” Dealers at the time failed to see any reason to support a publication with an independent voice that could not be controlled.

Former NY Times reporter, Judith Dobrzynski, in her recent blog on ArtsJournal confirms that Guthrie’s complaint lives on today. She asked, “Does the visual arts world need sharper criticism? Yes….When was the last time you read a learned, thoughtful, well-argued critique of a museum or gallery exhibition that was negative?”

One would like to think that Chicago’s frosty reception toward the Examiner is a thing of the past. However, the more recent demise of Chicago Artist News in 2010 is a fresh reminder bespeaking a pattern of poor institutional support.

While blogs proliferate online, none carry the critical authority and agenda-setting power of a print publication like ArtNews or Artforum. So long as Chicago’s art community fails to support its own artists with its own editorial outlet, New York will monopolize the national art dialogue. Chicago will continue to make do with periodic scraps and its art community will remain a provincial center.

The Essential New Art Examiner is now in bookstores or from the publisher at www.niupress.niu.edu

Savvy theatergoers know Next Theatre in Evanston offers provocative and artistically adventurous work without fail. Next, which celebrated its 30^th anniversary last season, is a company that, along with Steppenwolf, Wisdom Bridge and a host of small, storefront troupes, put Chicago Theater on the national map in the 1980s.

Though housed in modest quarters at the Noyes Cultural Center, Next has always had outsize ambitions, choosing works by gifted playwrights and mounting top-flight productions.  Its latest, “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” is a smart, erotically-charged drama in which language fuels intense interactions between an English tutor and her French-Congolese student.

Celia is an Englishwoman in her 20s, living in Paris and offering English lessons, we assume, to help cover expenses. When we learn her family is quite wealthy, her motives become more mysterious.  Pierre is a handsome black man who says he wants to master English because it “is the language of the world,” a place that seems foreign and closed to him.

Carrie Coon & Austin Talley

So far, all seems quite innocent and reasonable. But, as the one-act drama unfolds, this initial facade falls away and the audience is plunged into the realm of psychodrama. By the second scene, Pierre begins his seduction of Celia who, at first, uses the rules of English grammar for self-protection and to keep him at bay.

She keeps quizzing Pierre on English’s convoluted verb constructions like the conditional and subjunctive tenses. The lessons, however, are a mere pretext for verbal foreplay.  As they trade life stories, Celia and Pierre strive to make a human connection but differences of race, class and gender intrude.

South African playwright, Craig Higginson, has written an intelligent and lively drama full of revealing twists and turns. “Girl” was a praised and much-talked-about entry at the 2010 Edinburgh Festival.

The two-person cast delivers convincing performances. While Austin Talley moves capably from hesitant student to silky seducer, it is Carrie Coon who captures Celia’s complex personality most convincingly. Director Joanie Schultz ably finds the wit amid the tension in Higginson’s script and keeps the action taut and gripping.

A special tip of the hat goes to scenic designers Jacqueline and Richard Penrod whose Paris flat looks like a million bucks and is the perfect bachelorette pad.  Next’s second play of the season is a winner. If sharp dialogue and intriguing characters are your preferred theater fare, rest assured that “The Girl in the Yellow Dress” delivers.

The play runs through February 26^th. Tickets can be ordered at www.nexttheatre.org or by calling the theater office at 847/475-1875, ext. 2.