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Chicago Tribune
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
CSO hires a new chorus director; cancels next season's MusicNOW series
This week, Symphony Center saw a one-two punch of good news and bad news. On Tuesday, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced that Donald Palumbo, the former chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera, would lead its award-winning chorus on an initial three-year contract — a cheering development for an ensemble that has been without a director since 2022. That was followed on Thursday by word that MusicNOW, the CSO's contemporary music series, would be 'paused' next season. A statement from Cristina Rocca, the orchestra's vice president for artistic planning, said the organization intended to 'imagine new possibilities for connecting Chicago audiences with new music.' Once the domain of the CSO's composer-in-residence, MusicNOW programming is typically unveiled after the bulk of season programming has been announced. Instead, series subscribers were notified of the cancellation via a mailer. Palumbo will prepare the 2025-26 season's previously announced Chicago Symphony Chorus programs: Mozart's Requiem (Nov. 20-23), an Italian operatic potpourri conducted by music director emeritus Riccardo Muti (March 19-21, 2026) and Poulenc's 'Gloria' (May 14-16, 2026). He will also work with the chorus for 'Merry, Merry Chicago!', a CSO holiday tradition (Dec. 19-23). Palumbo spoke with the Tribune by phone between sessions with young singers at Lyric Opera's Ryan Opera Center. Rehearsals were well underway with the Chicago Symphony Chorus for Verdi's Requiem (June 19-24), his debut as chorus director designate. 'The rehearsals of the Verdi have gone really, really well so far,' Palumbo says. 'If I sound like a kid in a candy store, well, I kind of am.' Palumbo is only the third director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus in its nearly 70-year history. At 76, his tenure will doubtlessly be shorter than predecessors Duain Wolfe and founding director Margaret Hillis, the latter leading the chorus for a whopping 37 seasons. But Palumbo — whose remarkable career trajectory saw him ascend from being a primarily self-taught hobbyist musician to the most in-demand choral director in the country — says he's approaching the job like any other. 'I'm going to do my job, and it's going to go on as long as I'm doing a good job, I want to do it, and they want me,' he says. Palumbo's résumé made him a contender to watch after Wolfe's mid-season departure from the chorus in 2022. Prior to his appointment at the Met, the country's most storied opera house, Palumbo directed the Lyric Opera chorus from 1991 to 2007. He is still a known quantity to scores of local singers, including some who sang under him during his Lyric tenure. 'He prepares you in such a way that you feel so understanding of the piece of music that you're doing,' says Chicago Symphony Chorus alto Emily Price, whom Palumbo also hired to the Lyric Opera Chorus in his final season there. 'The language is so important, and the intensity of each line has to be so specific.' Palumbo's preparation of the chorus for two Muti-led programs in 2022 and 2023 — an unstaged 'Un ballo in maschera' and Beethoven's 'Missa solemnis,' respectively — sealed the deal. Muti made his affinity for Palumbo known when, after 'Missa solemnis,' the outgoing CSO music director implored Palumbo to consider leading the chorus 'permanently' in onstage remarks. 'That was very unexpected,' he recalls, laughing. But in time, the prospect began to make natural sense. Palumbo feels he'd done his time in the opera world, where margins are getting ever tighter. At this stage in his career, he prefers to focus on the music — a stated position of Muti, once again his collaborator in the forthcoming Verdi Requiem concerts. The CSO post, Palumbo says, allows him to get down to fundamentals. 'I was just in Japan for a month doing a 'Traviata' production with a chorus of young singers. … I told them, 'For better or for worse, this could be my very last 'Traviata,' and it's your first,'' he says. 'It's a progression.' The appointment comes at a time when the CSO is in need of steady leadership. Klaus Mäkelä, the CSO's music director designate, does not begin his term at the organization until 2027. While he continues to spearhead orchestral hires, Mäkelä did not participate in Palumbo's search committee, owing to the timing of his own appointment, in 2024. 'When we engaged Klaus, we informed him of any number of things artistically that were going on here, including the search for a new chorus director. Knowing that he wouldn't be working with the full chorus for quite a while, he agreed that we should just move ahead and have the committee make the selection,' says CSO president Jeff Alexander. Mäkelä will, however, be part of Palumbo's renewal talks in 2028, which were intentionally timed to the end of Mäkelä's first season. Though Mäkelä and Palumbo are not working together next season, Alexander confirmed they would begin working together on programs beginning in the 2026-27 season. The CSO has pointed to the same contractual awkwardness in its curtailing of MusicNOW, its contemporary music series. Last year, the CSO did not appoint a composer-in-residence, citing the interregnum between music directors Muti and Mäkelä, who have hiring power over the position. (Despite this, the CSO filled a similar gap between Muti and former music director Daniel Barenboim 20 years ago with a twin appointment of composers Osvaldo Golijov and Mark-Anthony Turnage.) Alexander reaffirmed the CSO's commitment to hiring a new composer-in-residence, 'probably' during Mäkelä's first season in 2027-28. But he acknowledged that MusicNOW, or anything like it, may not be under that person's aegis. 'It may still include some curation of some kind regarding our contemporary music offerings, and the rest will probably remain pretty much the same: writing a new piece for the orchestra each year, et cetera,' Alexander says. Above all, economic factors prevailed. Alexander noted that MusicNOW — essentially a chamber series featuring members of the CSO — tended to follow the ticket-sale trends of those programs, filling just a fraction of Orchestra Hall's capacity. That's despite having costs not usually associated with those programs, like music licensing fees or guest artist expenses. (Featured composers and, occasionally, soloists and conductors were typically flown out for the series.) Instead, Alexander signaled that a short-term strategy may be to program more contemporary music on the CSO's mainstage. Though the CSO's 2025-26 season includes just one premiere (Matthew Aucoin's 'Song of the Reappeared' in December), subscription concerts feature works by 16 living composers: Camille Pépin, Carlos Simon, Thea Musgrave, Unsuk Chin, Jörg Widmann, Paquito d'Rivera, Gabriella Smith, Kevin Puts, Joel Thompson, Jennifer Higdon, Erkki-Sven Tüür, John Adams, Wynton Marsalis, Joe Hisaishi and former CSO composer-in-residence Jessie Montgomery. 'The word we're using is 'pause,' because, as we thought about it, we're a symphonic organization first of all,' Alexander says. 'If we put a contemporary piece on a CSO subscription program and it's performed three times, on a good week, 6,000 people are hearing it. If we put it on a MusicNOW concert, maybe 300 people were hearing it. … Part of our thinking is, let's beef up the contemporary offerings on the CSO main (series). Cautiously, of course. But more than normal.' Rocca's written statement went on to say that 'conversations with the artistic planning team' and Mäkelä 'are underway to guide future plans' for contemporary music programming at the CSO.
Chicago Tribune
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: Instrument families get the spotlight at CSO's MusicNOW
Chicago Symphony clarinetist John Bruce Yeh was about to perform when a draft swept the sheet music off one of his eight — yes, eight — music stands. Yeh smiled, his bow to the audience now doubling as a page-recovery crouch. 'That was Pierre,' he told them. 'Pierre' is Pierre Boulez, the composer and former CSO conductor emeritus who died in 2016. Boulez would have been 100 on March 26, an anniversary the orchestra has recognized with a thorough web feature but scant season programming. Sunday's MusicNOW concert, titled 'Inner Dialogues,' was one of the few exceptions. As López told the audience during a pre-concert panel, the 'Inner Dialogues' title riffed on 'Dialogue de l'ombre double' (1985), a signature Boulez work for clarinet and its prerecorded, disembodied double. It also referenced the afternoon's theme. Each of the five pieces featured a single instrument family in the orchestra — hence the reference to dialogues within, rather than between, sections. The staging hit this point home, illuminating musicians in their usual spots onstage with colored lights. López's string works 'La Caresse du Couteau' and 'Guardian of the Horizon' were both sheathed in green on the main floor, Adam Schoenberg's 'Reflecting Light,' for brass, gathered upstage left in baubles of gold and white, and Quinn Mason's 'Weapon Wheel,' for three bass drums, convened upstage right, glowing blood-red. Yeh, representing the woodwinds, played Boulez's 'Domaines' (1968) — 'Dialogue's' predecessor piece — at the front of the stage against a moody blue. In a full performance of 'Domaines,' the soloist plays six short movements (Boulez calls them cahiers, or 'notebooks') in any order. Then, their 'mirrors' are played — the same music, just in reverse. Because of time constraints, Yeh played all six of Boulez's cahiers but only the miroirs of Cahier A and D, making his way across all eight music stands as the piece went on. Yeh's years of close collaboration with Boulez came to the fore in a fleet, poetic, even sorcerous performance. In Cahier B, the soloist must overlap two phrases — a lower-pitched phrase and a higher-pitched one beginning above it — through multiphonics (a technique producing more than one pitch). Yeh's handling of this moment was as clear and articulated as if he'd plunked out both voices on organ. He shapeshifted further throughout, from the piercing whistles of Cahier D to glass-harp transparency in Cahier C. While a ghostly Boulez turned 100, Mason, the youngest composer on Sunday's program, turned 29 the day of the concert. His 'Weapon Wheel' (2018, revised 2019) might have been composed while he was still an undergrad, but it's the work of a mature composer, embedding drama and intrigue into an unusual three-bass-drum instrumentation. Each player uses a mix of mallets, drumsticks and their own fingers to expand the drum's palette, with some extras — like a rat-a-tat against the mallet tray, or clacking together drum sticks like a rock-n'-roll countoff. The piece leans on the performers' immediate reflexes, lines seamlessly handed off between percussionists Ian Ding, Patricia Dash and Douglas Waddell. The improvised cadenza shortly before the end, however, sounded more half-hearted than 'insane,' per Mason's note in the score. More musical unevenness followed. As López wrote in a foreword to the program notes, the 'Inner Dialogues' concept allowed him to 'show the diversity and variety of instrumental forces within the CSO.' That only works if said forces show up: No rostered brass players joined the concert for Schoenberg's 'Reflecting Light,' originally written in 2006 for the American Brass Quintet. An already-formed brass quintet from the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the CSO's training ensemble, played in their stead. In this case, a rugged performance of Schoenberg's otherwise appealing piece showed, rather than belied, the young musicians' greenness. The section of the piece that came off best was the very part Schoenberg mentioned in the preconcert panel: a hocketed descending line in the trumpets over cycling trombones. López's own 'Guardian of the Horizon,' a 2017 concerto grosso for string orchestra and solo violin and cello, followed the same formula: good piece, undercooked performance. While grieving the death of his father, López turned to ancient Egyptian cosmology — a wink at the piece's commissioner, the Sphinx Organization — for inspiration. The responsorial 'Riddle' movement nods to Oedipus's famous encounter with the Sphinx, 'Crossing the Threshold' features an elegiac, tuneful dialogue between soloists, and 'Into the Effulgent Light' ends the work on a lively, irrepressible note. Associate concertmaster Stephanie Jeong and section cellist Karen Basrak played adroitly and sensitively in their starring roles. The string ensemble behind them, however, could be scattershot. Conductor Nicholas Koo led them with the same controlled elegance as his mentor, CSO music director emeritus Riccardo Muti, but more energized impulses might have better guided the orchestra through a rough-and-tumble final movement. López's earlier contribution, his 2004 string quartet 'La Caresse du Couteau,' was more solidly executed. CSO violinists Jesús Linárez (in the orchestra's fellowship program) and Gabriela Lara were joined by violist Pédro Mendez and cellist Tahirah Whittington for a rich and tensile performance. A restless introduction eventually lofts the strings into their upper register, tinkling there before getting yanked back to earth into a slip-and-slide of glissandoes. The slides get 'stuck' in the following section, parking on queasy dissonances. The music frees itself into more busy polyphony before evaporating again in a solitary, searching line in the first violin. 'The work, we could say, does not end, but stops at a certain moment in time,' López wrote in the program notes for the piece. So, too, does Boulez's memory.
Chicago Tribune
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
CSO's principal flute departs for the Berlin Philharmonic
Musician Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson, the principal flute of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is taking a one-year leave of absence from the orchestra after winning the same post at the Berlin Philharmonic. Höskuldsson was hired to his post by then-music director Riccardo Muti in 2015 and began playing with the orchestra the following year. His departure was confirmed by the CSO on Thursday. 'Stefan has requested a leave of absence so that he can play with the Berlin Philharmonic next season,' CSOA president Jeff Alexander said in an emailed statement to the Tribune. Originally from Iceland, Höskuldsson was principal flute of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra prior to joining the CSO. During his tenure with the orchestra, he performed solo with the orchestra on three occasions, most recently in the premiere of Lowell Liebermann's Flute Concerto No. 2 last year, and was a regular performer in its MusicNOW series. Writing about Höskuldsson's solo debut with the orchestra, former Tribune critic Howard Reich praised Höskuldsson for 'the fastidiousness of his melodic ornaments, the relatively chaste quality of his vibrato and the crystalline articulation of his every note.' Principal musicians hold crucial leadership roles in symphony orchestras: they take important orchestral solos, are tasked with leading their respective sections and are the highest-compensated members of the ensemble. (Höskuldsson had a notable solo in last season's Liebermann Flute Concerto No. 2.) At the same time, jobs in the Berlin Philharmonic are considered the most coveted in the orchestra world. Höskuldsson's predecessor Mathieu Dufour left Chicago for the same position in 2014. (He left the Philharmonic in 2018.) Höskuldsson will still hold his CSO position, the orchestra said, while he plays a trial year in Berlin. Occasionally, albeit rarely, departing musicians return to their old orchestras. CSO principal trumpet Esteban Batallán returns to his post in the fall after a season away playing principal with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Höskuldsson's departure leaves the CSO flute section essentially leaderless, since the section's assistant principal position is also currently vacant. In addition to seeking two new flutes, the orchestra is seeking a principal trombone, principal harp, second oboe, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, assistant principal viola and various section strings.
