Music

Music and Poetry – Rush Hour Concert – July 10, 2018

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I went for the music and suffered through the poetry.

I could have just skipped the program altogether, but the scheduled gypsy music sounded promising, if unpronounceable – Hullámzó Balaton, Op. 33 (Jenő Hubay), Dža more (Sylvie Bodorová), Zigeunerweisen, Op. 20 (Pablo de Sarasate), Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G Minor (Johannes Brahms) (okay I can pronounce that one), and, in fact, was beautiful and extremely well-performed by the Civitas Ensemble.

Someone from the Poetry Foundation recited the poetry between the musical selections. The first poem was short. The second was longer and more complex. The third was much longer and dealt with the horrors of World War II, so, not really fun. I would have preferred it if at least one of them would have started with a line like “There once was a man from Nantucket.”

I took a poetry writing course in college. The best part of the class was the experiment the students conducted on the professor. The professor had a habit of wandering around the classroom as he spoke, which led us, pranksters that we were, to attempt to manipulate his behavior. So we selected a corner of the room as the spot to which we wanted to lead him and proceeded, in a noticeable way, to pay a lot more attention to him when he approached that corner than when he went anywhere else in the room. Eventually we got him to curl up like a ball by the window in the selected corner, seemingly without the slightest recognition of what we had done. So, while I may not have learned to appreciate poetry, my psychology class was fruitful.

Tchaikovsky and Bolcom – Grant Park Music Festival – Millennium Park – July 7, 2018

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I claim no expertise when it comes to classical music, but I know what I like. The Chicago Tribune critic, Howard Reich, didn’t like the Grant Park Symphony’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony the night before, but I very much enjoyed the piece.

On the other hand, Reich raved about William Bolcom’s Symphony No. 4. I guess I can’t disagree, because I didn’t stay to hear it after the intermission, originally because I saw the scariest hyphenated word in the English language as part of the piece’s description, that is mezzo-soprano.

I don’t do mezzo-soprano. I’d rather hear the Archies do Sugar, Sugar. Given that a mezzo-soprano would be singing, I probably wouldn’t have been able to understand the lyrics as sung, which, upon reading them in the program, would’ve been a saving grace.

My pre-concert decision to leave at intermission was reinforced by two couples I overheard while riding the bus to the concert. One couple had been to the same performance the night before and said they were coming back only for the Tchaikovsky, as they hadn’t liked the Bolcom. Take that Howard.

Bolcom is a Pulitzer Prize winner, among many other accolades. I don’t care. I didn’t like his piece, Remembered Fathers, when I heard it performed on June 26 at the Rush Hour concert.

And, though I hadn’t remembered at first, it turns out that Bolcom also composed the opera A Wedding, based on the 1978 Robert Altman movie, which was the first and, I hope, last opera I’ve ever attended. I had an amazing seat, in the 12th row, just across the aisle from Altman himself, who may or may not have dozed off once or twice during the performance. I unfortunately, stayed awake the whole time.

The Buddy Holly Story – American Blues Theater at Stage 773 – July 6, 2018

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Spoiler alert – Buddy Holly dies. He does, however, return to play two encores.

Interestingly enough, the big number at the end of this show is a Chuck Berry song, Johnny B. Goode, which is made even more interesting by the fact that the last song Holly actually played at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake Iowa, before his ill-fated decision to fly to the next destination so he could get his laundry done (couldn’t he just turn his underwear inside out?), was a different Berry song, Brown Eyed Handsome Man.

This reminded me of the Chuck Berry Greatest Hits double album I owned in college, from which my roommate, Wasil Pahuchy, Jr., accidentally broke one of the records. Though Wasil could have squashed me like a bug (and could chug a pitcher of beer, for what that’s worth – ah, Friday afternoons at Kam’s), he lived in mortal fear that I would retaliate against him for destroying my most prized possession.

I never saw Buddy Holly in concert (I did see Chuck Berry on three occasions), though I have seen the Gary Busey movie and three different live productions featuring doppelgangers, of which this was my favorite, with the lead at one point playing a guitar while holding it behind behind his neck, which, if you’re interested, you can learn to do on the Guitar Player website.

The Buddy Holly story would be unbelievable if it weren’t true, but the music is the reason to go. I don’t know who had more fun, the performers or the audience.

On the way out, an audience member asked a cast member, who had come back out on stage to put away his guitar, whether the producers of the show had looked for musicians who also were actors, or actors who also were musicians. His answer was “yes.”

Grant Park Music Festival – Millennium Park – June 23-29, 2018

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The weather was perfect on June 23rd. The guest soloist, Natasha Paremski, pounded the piano like she was trying to hurt it (it was, after all, Rachmaninoff), but it sounded great. Her hands were a blur. And she even played an encore, showing another side of her skills on some Chopin.

On June 27th, the weather was perfect again, just like it always is in Chicago. The guest flute soloist, Adam Walker, sported a neatly-trimmed beard, which made me wonder whether it created any playing problems. I couldn’t find anything about floutists, but did find some suggestions about facial hair from a professional trumpet player, who says, for example, that a soul patch pads the bottom of your lip and an untrimmed mustache is going to hurt. I played the trumpet, badly, for about ten minutes when I was a kid who was on the verge of starting to shave. Perhaps there was some incipient stubble that held me back from stardom.

June 29th was yet another perfect day, if you enjoy a heat index over 100 degrees, and who doesn’t? So I wasn’t going to let the unbearable heat stop me from seeing Johannes Moser, the guest cello soloist, perform Dvorak’s cello concerto, some other time, when my eyelids aren’t sweating.

So we instead opted for the air conditioning at Andy’s Jazz Club and sat through two sets before they kicked us out two hours after our two-hour limit at the table had expired, which was just as well as we already had lost some of our hearing thanks to an overeager trumpet player, unencumbered by facial hair.

Fulcrum Point New Music Project – St. James Rush Hour Concert – June 26, 2018

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The last movement the horns-only group of Fulcrum ensemble members played was labeled in the program as moderate swing. That designation didn’t mean a thing. I don’t know what the notes looked like on paper, but there was no swing feeling to the piece at all, which was too bad because I only suffered through the preceding 25 minutes of the concert, the best part of which was the faint sound of the church bells in the distance at the top of the hour, in the hope that I would enjoy the ending.

My mind wandered from the start, wondering why the French Horn player had his hand stuck up his bell. (No, that’s not a colloquialism used by the author of Sex and the City and Us at the Writers Museum last week.) Was he looking for something he dropped in there, like a note? Probably not, as I learned from a website that described the positioning and musical function played by the inserted right hand, which got me to wondering why it said right hand. It turns out that the french horn is “almost totally a left-handed instrument, and furthermore unique in that respect amongst all musical instruments.”

My research into the french horn also led me to frenchhorn.net, which has a joke about C, E-flat, and G going into a bar, which helped alleviate my suffering.

Watching the trombone player reminded me of the Final Jeopardy answer on June 11, which was “In playing this instrument whose early version was called a sackbut (again, not a term from Sex and the City), it’s about 6″ from A to B, about 7″ from C to D.”

I also observed that the tuba player briefly inserted a mute into his instrument, which made me pine for an all-muted concert, where the sounds could be left entirely to my imagination.

Five Venues – Seven Programs – Eleven Days – June 5-15, 2018

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In anticipation of the upcoming Make Music Chicago day on June 21, here’s a recap of the musical performances I’ve seen recently (not counting the Porchlight Revisits 1975 I already wrote about).

On June 5th I got a taste of the Rose Colella Quartet, along with the Cajun shrimp risotto, at Andy’s Jazz Club.

On June 8th I attended the noonday concert at Fourth Presbyterian Church, featuring pianist Mio Nakamura. I hadn’t been there in a while, in part because some recent programs were organ music. Other than people who play the organ, the phantom of the opera, and Johann Sebastian Bach (and he’s dead), who likes organ music?

The next evening I stopped by Millennium Park to check out the Chicago Blues Festival. The sound of a harmonica lured me, like a sailor to the Sirens, to the Wrigley Square stage to watch Chicago Wind, featuring Deitra Farr and Matthew Skoller. I wasn’t injured, but I thought there was a faint smell in the air that suggested that others around me may have [been] wrecked.

The next afternoon I went to see a Crossing Borders Music program Honoring Refugee Composers at St. James Cathedral, featuring music of composers from Syria, Armenia, Iran, Croatia, Germany, and Uruguay, the number of whom, unfortunately, about equaled the attendees.

Two days later I went to the Rush Hour Concert at St. James, where John Macfarlane (violin), Anthony Devroye (viola), Brant Taylor (cello), and Kenneth Olsen (cello) performed Anton Arensky’s String Quartet in A Minor. Wonderful music, but I longed for the folding chairs they used to add in the back, which I find more comfortable than the pews.

Afterward I went to Jazz on the Terrace at the Museum of Contemporary Art, getting there during the break between sets. Sadly, I liked the recorded music they played during the break better than the live band, so my stay was short.

Finally, on June 15th, I enjoyed the Grant Park Music Festival at Millennium Park, featuring music of Gluck, Mozart, von Weber, and Elgar. This year’s new security measures were painless, as I didn’t bring any laser pointers, drones, or firearms with me.

Marianne Parker (piano) – Symphony Center (Club 8) – May 3, 2018

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This concert was entitled Treasures of Haitian Piano Music. Marianne has been part of the effort to preserve Haitian music that was lost for many years. As she has said: “Sometimes notes are faded, instructions are faded, things are erased, and it’s not clear what the composer’s final intent was.” But fear not, the music was wonderful and Marianne was terrific. (Full disclosure, I took piano lessons from Marianne for a year.)

The program, sponsored by the African American Network of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, went a few minutes long to allow a woman from the Haitian American Museum of Chicago to give a five minute history of Haiti between pieces. She unfortunately spent half her limited time telling us how little time she had. In college I wrote a history of the world in two pages and got a B+. The instructor thought I should have written three pages to do the topic justice. (It took Mel Brooks one hour and 32 minutes just to tell Part I of the History of the World – he never has told Part 2.)

A friend of Marianne’s, whom I met prior to the start of the concert, is a bass player with the CSO. He stayed for the entire performance, dressed in blue jeans, even though it went a little long because of the Haitian speaker. He seemed totally calm, despite having to get to his dressing room, change clothes, do whatever else one does before a concert (yes, that), and get to the main stage on time, which I thought was less than 25 minutes later. I didn’t know if that was supreme confidence or supreme indifference.

So I looked up that night’s CSO performance and found that the opening piece, the Bruch Concerto for Two Pianos, which is 25 minutes long, does not have a bass listed as one of the orchestral instruments accompanying the pianos. I guess he knew that.

Our Great Tchaikovsky – Steppenwolf Theater – May 5, 2018

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Hershey Felder has made a career out of doing one-man shows about famous composers – Gershwin, Berlin, Chopin, Liszt, Beethoven, Bernstein, and Tchaikovsky. Always informative, always entertaining, as actor and musician, he immerses himself in the character’s story.

For me, the most revelatory fact that Felder imparted was Tchaikovsky’s supposed disdain for two of his most popular pieces, the 1812 Overture and the Nutcracker Suite, both of which were clear favorites of the audience. Afterward, I wished I had asked Felder whether he shared Tchaikovsky’s opinion.

Felder played portions of almost all Tchaikovsky’s best known pieces. He didn’t play Marche Slav (a childhood favorite of mine – it was a dark time). He also didn’t play anything from Eugene Onegin (not to be confused with Eugene, Oregon), though he did vocalize a short passage (vocalize is the best description I could find for something that’s not singing, scatting, humming, or mumbling).

In regard to Tchaikovsky’s youth, I remember Victor Borge saying that “Pete” was born in Votkinsk, May 7 1840, but never played out in the streets of Votkinsk like the other little children of Votkinsk because when he was one month old his parents moved to St. Petersburg (it’s funnier when you hear Borge say it, but I couldn’t find an online recording). Actually, as Felder noted, Tchaikovsky was eight years old when his family moved (thereby crushing my adoration of Borge).

Felder joked during the Q and A session at the end of the show that the average audience members were in their 20’s. Maybe 120’s. Okay, not really, as the oldest person alive today is said to be only 117. The audience probably didn’t average a day over 85, the new 84. As the youngsters in the audience, we took the stairs down from the third floor theater after the show, as most of the others circled the two small elevators like piranha.

Marianna Prjevalskaya (piano) and Tomer Gewirtzman (piano) – Chicago Cultural Center – April 11 and 25, 2018

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As usual, the performances at the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts were excellent. For Prjevalskaya’s performance I was seated behind her and paid particular attention to her movements, partly because I forgot my glasses and therefore couldn’t sit there reading the program or the news alerts on my phone (on silent) while she was playing. In any event, the way she swayed her body and bent her elbows to get her hands into the best position at all times was instructive.

In regard to reading the program, three things jumped out at me at Gewirtzman’s performance (for which I had my glasses). First, there were no program notes. They were replaced by an upcoming concerts page. I like having program notes in front of me during the performance (even when I make fun of them – see my April 4 blog), though I admit I don’t know what’s involved in producing them. Are there canned notes available somewhere for oft-played pieces (that weren’t available for Gewirtzman’s)? Or does someone write them up anew each time (and was that person on vacation)? I can live without a description of the music, but like having information about the composer and the time frame of and backdrop for the composition. Such a reduced note would be easier to produce (I presume) and would still leave room for an upcoming concerts schedule.

The second thing I noticed was that Gewirtzman served in the Israeli Defense Forces “Outstanding Musician” Program. That led me to finding an article about that program (https://www.israel21c.org/making-music-in-the-military/). Interesting stuff.

The third thing had to do with descriptions of movements. One that Gewirtzman played was shown as andante con espressione (at a walking pace, with feeling – why would you ever play without feeling?). There are apparently at least 20 basic tempos, and an greater number of mood markings (https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Tempo.html). It makes my head spin, allegrissimo.

Amplified Chicago Blues – Chicago History Museum – April 24, 2018

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In the 1970s I went to hear the blues fairly often, at places like Kingston Mines and The Checkerboard Lounge, where I accompanied a friend who was “dating” blues guitarist Lefty Dizz at the time. Neither Lefty (who wasn’t a big enough name) nor the Checkerboard (which didn’t open until 1972) made it into the Chicago History Museum Exhibit, which is more about earlier years; places like Pepper’s Lounge, Delmark Records, and The Fickle Pickle (you have to love that name); and more well-known musicians like Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf.

The exhibit features a lot more pictures than music but there are three musical parts of the exhibit.

There is a karaoke room, where you can sing Sweet Home Chicago. No one tried it while I was there, including me, for which I’m sure everyone wandering around the museum was grateful. There were school children in the building who could have been scarred for life.

Another part of the exhibit gives you the opportunity to learn how to play blues on an electric guitar. The sounds coming from the guitar when I tried to follow the instructions sounded nothing like blues, or music for that matter. The exhibit will be there until August 10, 2019. I’ll go back and try again.

There also is a sound panel where you can learn how to mix music, I think, because it wasn’t working. I would have been better at that. I made a lot of party tapes in college. I’ll go back when it’s fixed.

From the gallery outside the museum’s theater, it sounded like there was a blues movie playing, but the theater was closed for a private event. One more reason to go back.  Good thing it was a Tuesday afternoon, when the museum is free for Illinois residents, or I might have been miffed.

As a result of these issues, I only spent 45 minutes at the museum. Of course I only spent 45 minutes at the Louvre when I was there. Mostly pictures there too (some sculptures), no music.