A program of music of Sofia Gubaidulina in advance of a concert in-celebration of the composer’s 80th birthday to take place at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance on Wednesday, February 15th at 7:30pm.  The concert will feature eighth blackbird and Pacifica Quartet.

Andrew converses with Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer in-Residence Anna Clyne to about the upcoming world premiere performance of her new work Night Ferry.

A program of violin music of the great Ralph Shapey.

Tonight I’ll be doing something a bit different, reading a favorite short story by James Alan McPherson, “A Matter of Vocabulary” from his 1969 collection Hue and Cry. A longtime faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at The University of Iowa, McPherson, born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1943, was in the first class of MacArthur Fellows in 1981, and received the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his second book of stories, Elbow Room.  He turned to writing full time after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1968 at age 24. I first met Jim when I was a boy in 1968 and he and his work have both meant a great deal to me on many levels since then.  Alas, his masterpiece, “A Solo Song: For Doc,” also included in Hue and Cry, can’t be read on the radio due to some of the language.

Andrew reads more selections from James Thurber’s Fables for Our Times.

Andrew reads more selections from James Thurber’s Fables for Our Times.

Although the textile made from the silk of Madagascar’s Golden Orb Spider is no longer on view, you can see it right here:

Tell us what you think!

http://www.wfmt.com/main.taf?p=1,5,1

Andrew speaks about numerous items in the music world.

My guest is author Jay R. Tunney, discussing his new book The Prizefighter and the Playwright: Gene Tunney and Bernard Shaw (Firefly Books, Buffalo and Richmond Hill, Ontario) about the long and deep friendship between his father, the American boxer and bibliophile, and the greatest English-language playwright of the 20th century. (Rebroadcast from 2010)

Tunney (1897-1978) was the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world (who beat Jack Dempsey twice, in 1926 and 1927, the latter in Chicago’s Soldier Field) when he retired from boxing in 1928 at age 31. Shaw (1856-1950) had a lifelong fascination with boxing and had published an early novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession (1886), on an intellectual boxer who prefigured the bookish Tunney.

The two men met in the late 1920s and Tunney and his wife Polly Lauder Tunney spent a month of their honeymoon in 1929 together with Shaw and his wife Charlotte on the Adriatic island of Brioni. Among others they spent time with that month? The German composer Richard Strauss. Tunney and Shaw remained close until Shaw’s death at 94 in 1950.

It’s a beautifully written book on a fascinating and little-known subject.

Andrew reads more selections from James Thurber’s Fables for Our Times.

Alex Ross

Tonight from 11 p.m. to 12 midnight CST on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com — an hour later than usual.

My guest is New Yorker music critic, award-winning and best-selling author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, MacArthur Fellow, and music weblog pioneer with therestisnoise.com, Mr. Alex Ross, discussing his new book of essays and profiles, Listen To This.

From bass lines to Björk, Marian Anderson to Radiohead, Bob Dylan to Brahms, Alex brings together topics from his acclaimed New Yorker pieces, mixes in a new essay and lots of great notes and references, and places them elegantly between two hard covers. We talk about them and even play some music.



Critic’s Choice is a weekly feature in which WFMT’s Critic-at-Large Andrew Patner shares his observations on arts and culture, from performances at Orchestra Hall to happenings in overlooked Chicago neighborhoods to festivals around the world.

Critic’s Choice is a weekly feature in which WFMT’s Critic-at-Large Andrew Patner shares his observations on arts and culture, from performances at Orchestra Hall to happenings in overlooked Chicago neighborhoods to festivals around the world.

Andrew talks with Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Kartemquin Films), Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here), and Cobe Williams (the CeaseFire project) about their new and already acclaimed documentary, The Interrupters.

Made in Chicago, the film looks at the efforts of a remarkable group of those formerly in trouble with the law to work to bring the cycle of violence in the inner city to a halt. The Interrupters starts a two-week run of 26 screenings this Friday August 12 downtown at the Gene Siskel Film Center of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The filmmakers and those whose stories were filmed will be present at a number of the screenings. Details at the Film Center link. Some screenings are already sold out! At least one Chicago commercial run, on the city’s South Side, begins August 26.

Andrew’s guest is Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes in a rebroadcast of a conversation while he was making Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra Hall recital appearances.

(Left to Right) Cobe Williams, Eddie Bocanegra, and Tio Hardiman of CeaseFire Illinois (Courtesy of Kartemquin Films)

Andrew previews the important new Chicago documentary film opening this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

Also, listen to Andrew’s interview with producer/director Steve James, author-turned-producer Alex Kotlowitz and violence interrupter Cobe Williams.

Ameena Matthews in a scene from The Interrupters (Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz, 2011)

Andrew talks with Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Kartemquin Films), Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here), and Cobe Williams (the CeaseFire project) about their new and already acclaimed documentary, The Interrupters.

Made in Chicago, the film looks at the efforts of a remarkable group of those formerly in trouble with the law to work to bring the cycle of violence in the inner city to a halt. The Interrupters starts a two-week run of 26 screenings this Friday August 12 downtown at the Gene Siskel Film Center of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The filmmakers and those whose stories were filmed will be present at a number of the screenings. Details at the Film Center link. Some screenings are already sold out! At least one Chicago commercial run, on the city’s South Side, begins August 26.

Andrew reads Arthur Rimbaud’s “Morning of Drunkenness” (translated by John Ashbery, in Poetry magazine, April 2011). To read more of the translator’s notes or see additional information about this poem, visit Poetry magazine’s website.

A program of music of the great Ralph Shapey.

Andrew discusses happenings at Ravinia and the Grant Park Music Festival.

Bill Cunningham photographing in the street, in BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK. A film by Richard Press. A Zeitgeist Films release. Photo credit: First Thought Films / Zeitgeist Films

Andrew encourages you to hurry out to see the award-winning documentary Bill Cunningham New York at the Music Box Theatre. The film provides a look at the life and work of New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham whose photographic chronicles of fashion trends have inspired readers of the Sunday Style section for decades.

Incoming Lyric general director Anthony Freud inherits a balanced budget

Aided by reserve fund, Lyric Opera in the black

Raises fundraising goals for 2011-12

BY ANDREW PATNER

Lyric Opera of Chicago, internationally renowned among arts organizations for its fiscal solvency, reported a balanced budget for its 2010-11 season at its annual meeting Monday night. It marks the 23rd time in the last 24 years that Lyric has ended its season in the black.

To balance its operating expenses of $53.7 million, Lyric trimmed the number of performances — although not the number of operas produced — at the Civic Opera House last season by about 10 percent and dipped into a rainy-day reserve fund for $4.4 million for the second time since the non-renewable fund was established six years ago.

But the company also exceeded its annual fund-raising goal of $17.2 million and sold 91 percent capacity — a 5-point uptick — for its 68 regular performances, two student matinées, and a subscriber appreciation concert. Subscription and individual ticket sales brought in $23.8 million on 229,775 tickets sold, an attendance drop of only 3.6 percent against last season’s greater number of 77 performances.

Lyric remains wary of societal changes and ticket-buying patterns that have seen its traditional base of full-season subscription sales slip, retiring general director William Mason told attendees at the company’s annual meeting and dinner at the Four Seasons hotel. But it is boosting targeted marketing efforts, and its confidence in the generosity and loyalty of its supporters remains so strong that Lyric is upping its fund-raising goal for 2011-12 to $20.6 million, an increase of almost 20 percent to match all but $300,000 of an anticipated $3.7 million increase in expenses, most of it production-related.

Although no information was offered Monday on Lyric’s endowment, forthcoming reports were said to show an increase in invested funds. Lyric is also one of the few major U.S. opera companies that does not carry an accumulated deficit. Audited statements are to be released in August.

Lyric’s president and CEO, investment banker Richard P. Kiphart, who has played an unusually strong role in his five-year term as donor, fund-raiser, and recruiter of soprano Renée Fleming to the company’s artistic leadership as creative consultant, passed the top post to investor Kenneth G. Pigott. A longtime Lyric board member and production sponsor, Pigott previously had been elevated to executive vice president and chaired the eight-month international search that led to the hiring this spring of Houston Grand Opera chief Anthony Freud as Mason’s successor. Kiphart will succeed attorney Allan B. Muchin as chairman of the Lyric board.

At the dinner, also a fundraiser, Freud — who takes up his Chicago job October 1, opening night of the new opera season — saluted his predecessors, Mason and the late Ardis Krainik, for their artistic and fiscal leadership. He underscored his belief that these goals must be augmented by greater civic and community engagement.

Fleming presented Muchin with the Carol Fox Award, named for Lyric’s co-founder. Pigott announced that backstage space at the opera house would be named the William Mason Rehearsal Hall in honor of Mason’s literal lifetime of service to the company.

Poet and translator David Ferry (Source: poetryfoundation.org)

In a new program, Andrew’s guest is the esteemed poet and translator David Ferry, 87, winner of this year’s $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, publishers of Poetry magazine.

Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner David Ferry

Tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com my guest will be the esteemed poet and translator David Ferry, 87, this year’s winner of the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, publishers of Poetry magazine (founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912).

Ferry grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, attended Amherst College and served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II. He began writing poems as a graduate student at Harvard and soon began doing translations — “taking assignments,” as he put it to me — as well. A teacher at Wellesley College from 1952, he continues to teach regularly at Boston and Suffolk universities and continues his busy schedule of writing and translating. Having tackled the Odes and Epistles of Horace, and the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, he is now in the midst of a new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. As a critic he authored major contributions on Wordsworth and his own poems are deeply conscious of the American language and poetic tradition. They are published by The University of Chicago Press. He was married for almost 50 years to the late Anne Ferry, a distinguished literary critic and teacher.

The program will then be posted at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast, download, streaming indefinitely.

See you on the radio!

Christopher Martin

Morlot’s an idiomatic hand and Martin’s a trumpet marvel in CSO’s mixed 20th-century French program

Solo playing better than the pieces themselves

BY ANDREW PATNER

Although there’s only one printed program and onstage sequence at Orchestra Hall this week, there are essentially two Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts going on in parallel time and space.

One consists of two brief concertos performed with finesse, daring, and imagination by the CSO’s nonpareil principal trumpet, Christopher Martin. These are just about unmissable events.

The other is more problematic — a survey of thirty years of 20th century French music by composers who ignored or rejected Modernism, all led with knowledgeable skill by guest conductor Ludovic Morlot, the young, French, music-director-designate of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and a reliable visitor to Chicago since fall of 2006.

The two concertos, each composed in 1948, are the weakest compositions of the four works which range from 1930 to 1959. André Jolivet (1905-74) started off as an experimentalist but later came to advocate music “for evasion and relaxation.” His nine-minute one-movement Concertino for Trumpet, String Orchestra, and Piano is a lively ride in this genre and Martin, wrapping up his seventh year with the CSO, handles every mute swap, seemingly impossible high note, and lightning-fast passage as if he need never breathe and has five tongues. Amy Briggs offered expert contributions in her similarly athletic keyboard part.

Henri Tomasi (1901-71) was not even on this level as a serious composer, and certainly not in his 16-minute concerto. “Jazz” riffs all but lifted from Gershwin tunes and orchestral works — 20 years after An American in Paris and 10 years after the death of that genius — with a cheap orchestration that must have been heard by the creators of driver’s ed films a decade or so later. If Pierre Boulez grinds his teeth, this was the perfect soundtrack for that activity. Martin’s expert and truly musical contributions to both mellow and animated sections made you want to hear him blow some real jazz soon.

The Second Symphony (“Le double”) of Henri Dutilleux (b. 1916) from 1958-59 stands among the best works of French composers who went their own way despite modern tides. A half-hour piece, it interweaves a 12-member ensemble as “soloist” with the full orchestra “doubling” over three unusual and unpredictable movements filled with French “color.” As in the bumptious 1936 Second Suite from the 1930 ballet Bacchus et Ariane, Op. 43 of Albert Roussel (1869-1937), assistant principal viola Li-Kuo Chang set the high standard for all solo lines and Morlot made each work sound as its composer would have wanted.

Carlos Kalmar -- by Bruce Foster -- The Oregonian

Tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com my guests will be Carlos Kalmar, principal conductor, and Leigh Levine, interim executive director, of Chicago’s annual, free, municipally-supported Grant Park Music Festival.

Fresh off of a triumph as music director of the Oregon Symphony leading that ensemble’s Carnegie Hall début last week, Carlos has just renewed his contract with Grant Park for five years (through 2016) and taken up the title and duties of artistic director as well as of today. Leigh continues her work while the ongoing search for a new executive director, who now will concentrate on non-artistic matters, continues.

The Festival starts this year on Wednesday evening June 15 with an all-French program conducted by Carlos Kalmar and continues for 10 weeks of 32 concerts at the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, with some indoor choral and other concerts (also free) at the Harris Theater, just behind the Pavilion.

The program will then be posted Tuesday at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast, download, streaming indefinitely.

See you on the radio!