With last season`s bloody labor dispute relegated to history, and a new Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director safely installed, a sense of cautious conservatism has settled over Orchestra Hall as a new symphonic year beckons.
CSO officials, still grappling with a deficit well in excess of $1.5 million, privately admit they are looking at 1992-93 as a season of keeping costs in line while making it easier for more people to count themselves among the ”cultural elite” (sorry, Dan Quayle) that regularly supports one of the world`s great orchestras.
What gives this strategy particular urgency is subscriber worries over the troubled economy. Such worries, which are creating serious pains in
the pocketbooks of nearly every arts organization these days, have kept CSO season renewals running about three percent below 1991-92 (86 percent, compared to 89 the previous season). So our orchestra has placed all available tickets on the market early in the season and facilitated the exchanging of tickets, in hopes of improving its cash flow.
Of course, should this create a groundswell at the box office that would give Daniel Barenboim the victory parade he was largely denied during his strike-ravaged first year as music director, management wouldn`t mind.
Barenboim will get the 102nd season underway Wednesday night at Orchestra Hall with a would-be gala performance of Johann Strauss waltzes and polkas, a kind of Windy City gloss on your typical Viennese New Year`s concert. Special guest for this musicians` pension fund benefit will be violinist Isaac Stern. The subscription season officially begins Thursday with the first of four performances of Brahms` ”A German Requiem.” Joining Barenboim, the orchestra and CSO Chorus (prepared by its retiring founder/director, Margaret Hillis)
will be vocal soloists Edith Wiens and Thomas Hampson.
Even so, the really prestigious weeks of the CSO autumn season should be those devoted to living composers and composer-performers. The eminent Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski`s 80th birthday will be saluted Oct. 1-3 with concerts and the recording of his Symphony No. 3 (a CSO commission Georg Solti had premiered here in 1983) and the local premiere of his recent Piano Concerto, with Ursula Oppens as soloist and Erich Leinsdorf conducting, Oct. 30.
The Pulitzer-Prize-winning American composer William Bolcom, whose opera
”McTeague” will have its world premiere at Lyric Opera in late October and November, also will come in for his share of attention at the CSO. Our orchestra has scheduled the local premiere of his Symphony No. 5 Oct. 8-10, and resident composer Shulamit Ran is planning a two-program survey of chamber works that in various ways exemplify a Bolcomesque blurring of stylistic distinctions between ”serious” and popular music, Nov. 8 and 10.
Music director laureate Georg Solti, en route to 80th birthday celebrations his European friends are preparing in his honor, will stop in Chicago long enough to conduct two CSO weeks of standard-repertory programs in November. Following these will be a month of concerts under Pierre Boulez devoted to some of the composer-conductor`s 20th Century specialties, including works of Stravinsky, Bartok, Ravel, Prokofiev, Messiaen and Elliott Carter (Nov. 25-Dec. 19).
Boulez will also take the time to lead the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the city`s premier training orchestra, in an open rehearsal of Bartok`s Concerto for Orchestra Nov. 22. If these Boulez programs prove even half as stimulating as last season`s, listeners are in for quite an aural adventure.
In what promises to be a mini-invasion of Russian artists at Orchestra Hall, the renowned pianist Tatiana Nikolaeva will perform the complete set of Shostakovich preludes and fugues in two Allied Arts Piano Series recitals Oct. 18 and 25. In a more popular vein, the 130-member Red Star Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble will present traditional Russian music and dance to open the Great Performers Series Oct. 5. Also arriving from Russia will be the Kirov Orchestra of St. Petersburg, playing music by native sons Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff under principal conductor Valery Gergiev Nov. 2.
Other notables lending excitement to Orchestra Hall this fall and winter will be violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, Oct. 13; cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Dec. 2;
oboist Heinz Holliger with the Camerata Bern, Oct. 11; and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony under Dmitri Kitaenko, Oct. 26. Also on the visiting orchestras front: London`s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Ashkenazy, Nov. 15 at Orchestra Hall, a benefit concert for the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago.
The disgraceful absence of any vocal recitals on this year`s Orchestra Hall series will be partly atoned for by the delectable soprano Dawn Upshaw, who shares a recital with pianist Richard Goode as the season opener for Chamber Music Chicago Oct. 15 in Evanston`s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. Pianist Mitsuko Uchida will give a recital, Dec. 6 at Orchestra Hall. Also on the series: Britain`s Lindsay Quartet, playing the U.S. premiere of Michael Tippett`s Fifth Quartet, Oct. 26 at the Blackstone Theatre.
CMC`s parent organization, Performing Arts Chicago, is unveiling what could be autumn`s wildest event, a multimedia performance titled ”The Mysteries and What`s So Funny?” Oct. 23-25 at the Blackstone. A collaboration between composer Philip Glass, writer-director David Gordon and visual designer Red Grooms, the music-dance-theater event will mark the Chicago return of Glass, whose new opera about Columbus, ”The Voyage,” premieres at New York`s Metropolitan Opera Oct. 12.
So much for contemporary music; what about old music? Lots of that is in the offing from Music of the Baroque and the Early Music from the Newberry Library series.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach`s rarely heard Magnificat will share a choral and instrumental program with Bach and Handel works, Thomas Wikman leading his Music of the Baroque forces Nov. 5-11. Wikman will appear organist and conductor to open MOB`s 22d season Oct. 24-25 and preside over the annual holiday brass and choral concerts Dec. 18-23 (various churches).
The estimable Mary Springfels and her Newberry Consort will celebrate their 10th season by adding a new venue, Holt Memorial Chapel at Lake Forest College, and returning their Chicago concerts to the Newberry Library`s East Hall. Fall concert dates are Oct. 2-3 (Italian Renaissance masters) and Nov. 13-14 (English vocal and instrumental music from the Commonwealth and Restoration).
Four small orchestras-The Chicago Chamber Orchestra, Concertante di Chicago, the Chicago Sinfonietta and Chicago String Ensemble-will lay some of their most tempting wares before listeners this fall and winter.
Chicago Chamber Orchestra, the most venerable of the bunch, will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a free concert at Grant Park`s Petrillo Music Shell at 3 p.m. Sunday. Founder Dieter Kober will share the podium with five other conductors and there will be various official presentations and premieres.
Actor-director Sam Wanamaker will narrate Sibelius` incidental music to
”The Tempest” as part of the Sinfonietta`s season opener Sept. 20 (Rosary College) and Sept. 21 (Orchestra Hall). Music director Paul Freeman conducts. Concertante di Chicago will offer an afternoon of music theater works-Stravinsky`s ”The Soldier`s Tale” and Mozart`s opera ”The Impresario”-
in the first of three programs for 1992-93 Dec. 13 in the De Paul University Concert Hall and Dec. 17 at Cove School Auditorium, Winnetka. Hilel Kagan is music director and sometime conductor.
Chicago String Ensemble under Alan Heatherington is the only major local group thus far to acknowledge the Darius Milhaud centennial in its season opener Oct. 2-4, also offering a world premiere by former Evanstonian Irwin Bazelon Nov. 6-8 (various locations).
The downbeat, maestro, if you please.
