Review: Mention Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII” and you get that quizzical look. The play’s rarely done today. The assumption is it’s lesser stuff. Its authorship is ascribed only partly to Shakespeare. But “Henry VIII,” as it is now being done at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, with some roles combined and compressed, makes a good case not only for the play, but also for substantial Shakespearean authorship. Henry’s a fast learner; Katherine’s splendidly regal; Wolsey’s an outrageous villain and Shakespeare’s poetry is amazing no matter which character he serves.★★★★
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Report: TIANJIN – Conductor Lorin Maazel has pretty much peaked out in his appreciation of the Chicago Symphony, even topping music director Riccardo Muti’s proud comparison of the orchestra to a Ferrari. Shortly after he caught up with the CSO to take over its Asia tour conducting duties from Edo de Waart, in Hong Kong, the grey eminence Maazel summed up the impression he drew from his first rehearsal with the orchestra: “About an hour into it, I thought to myself, ‘My God, what a sound!’”
Preview: Singer-actress Alexis Rogers thinks of herself as cut from the same cloth as the great jazz vocalist Billie Holiday – a spunky, lively, laughing spirit, and someone who doesn’t mince words. That’s the briefly resurgent Billie Holiday, heroin-addicted and near the end of her life, embodied by Rogers in Lanie Robertson’s musical bio-drama “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” for Porchlight Music Theatre.
Report: Halfway into the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Asia tour, trombonist Michael Mulcahy was reflecting on a little concert he and four colleagues played for some children back in Taipei. Without hesitating a sixteenth note, Mulcahy declared that encounter with the kids and their parents, no more than 150 people, “the most magnificent thing that has happened to me on this trip.”
Report: As the sweatered and smiling 82-year-old Lorin Maazel climbed to his seat and settled into a high swivel chair atop the double-riser podium at Hong Kong Cultural Centre on Jan. 28, the conductor’s presence seemed to relax the musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. What came next, in this first rehearsal together, was impressive not for what Maazel said, but for what he didn’t.
Review: Like an army advancing from a victorious engagement, a weary Chicago Symphony Orchestra arrived in Hong Kong Sunday after gaining a success against long odds at the Chiang Kai-shek National Concert Hall in Taipei. The CSO closed out the first leg of its Asia tour in Taiwan by doing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) the hard way: playing this indeed “heroic” work in a single late-afternoon rehearsal with conductor Osmo Vänskä, then coming right back to it for an intensely concentrated, razor-sharp performance before a packed concert audience.
Preview: Brent Barrett calls his latest stage fling, as Captain Hook in the national touring company of “Peter Pan,” a 180-degree turn from his most recent starring role in Chicago – the wealthy but world-weary Ben in Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The “Peter Pan” run, with veteran Cathy Rigby in the title role, has been a blast, he says, a Broadway broadside: the furthest thing from walking the plank.
Review: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra presented the first concert in its troubled Asia tour here Jan. 25 with a performance that flew on a wing and a prayer. Make that one rehearsal and the grace of some sterling musicianship. Under the baton of Osmo Vänskä, an 11th-hour replacement for ailing CSO music director Riccardo Muti, the orchestra offered the well-filled Chiang Kai-shek National Concert Hall a generous program that made a big splash even if it didn’t entirely sparkle.
CSO Asia Tour Report:The Liberty Times Taipei headline says “The great Chicago Symphony Orchestra breaks its normal rule and tours with two soloists; Taiwan’s music lovers gain the most.” The optimism is a welcome development for CSO leaders who raced against time to forge a solution when illness forced music director Riccardo Muti to pull out of the orchestra’s imminent Asia tour. Concerts begin Jan. 24 in Taipei and end Feb. 7 in Seoul.
Report: Pressed to find a conductor for concerts in Taiwan on Jan. 25 and 26 that will open its Asia tour, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra late Saturday announced both a maestro and a double bonus for audiences in Taipei. Joining Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä in solo appearances will be the celebrated violin virtuoso Maxim Vengerov and CSO concertmaster Robert Chen, a native of Taiwan.
Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing on sked
Review: ★★★★
Preview: What if Beethoven could speak? Suppose that titanic composer just popped into the room where a young pianist was wrestling with a sonata and offered, on the spot, the ultimate master class. You might have something very like pianist-composer-Beethoven impersonator Bruce Adolphe’s “Leave It to Ludwig” – an entertaining stage show aimed squarely at youngsters but authentic and serious enough, even when it’s very funny, to illuminate the subject of Beethoven for adults as well.
Review: Concerts this weekend and next were supposed to be warm-ups for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Asian tour, launching later this month with music director Riccardo Muti. But with Muti laid low by the flu, the tour preview has a new man on the podium at Orchestra Hall – Edo De Waart, music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. To judge by Thursday night’s opening flourish, an all-Beethoven affair, De Waart will send the CSO on its way to the Far East — and presumably back to Muti’s stewardship – fiddle fit.
Report: Asian tour with Muti stlll a go
Report: Flu sidelines CSO maestro
