Issues in the Arts

PERSPECTIVE – Julia Wolfe's fierce and exultant oratorio Her Story, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lorelei Ensemble led by Marin Alsop, capped CSO weeks that have defined the concert hall ascendancy of women.

PERSPECTIVE – Conductor Marin Alsop, who will lead a Chicago Symphony presentation of Julia Wolfe's Her Story, a multimedia work dealing with the generations-long struggle, reflects on the concert drama's import in politically frayed times. 

PERSPECTIVE – Jeremy Denk’s book Every Good Boy Does Fine is a coming-of-age story: how a gifted child living in a dysfunctional family discovers music and a love of the piano and advances through his youth to a career in music.

PERSPECTIVE – Henry Kennedy, a Shropshire lad and graduate of London's Royal Academy of Music, exemplifies a promising new wave of conductors who are acquiring music's great traditions – and wisdom – from the old guard.

PERSPECTIVE – The season's final operas at Buenos Aires’ Teatro Colón and Santiago’s Teatro Municipal offered a chance to assess how two iconic houses are emerging from the pandemic and to hear the widely banished Anna Netrebko.

PERSPECTIVE – The Metropolitan Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago have revived one of Verdi's greatest operas. While New Yorkers got the work in its traditional Italian version (photo), Chicago heard the French libretto for the first time.

PERSPECTIVE – It was heartening to see three recitals in Southern California by pianists from three generations: Stewart Goodyear, 44, András Schiff, 68, and Stephen Kovacevich, 82. The fare was iconic; when they were done, they were done.

PERSPECTIVE – Two productions of Strauss' lurid opera, in Basel directed by Herbert Fritsch and in Paris directed by Lydia Steier, contrasted Alice-in-Wonderland airiness with a heavy dose of ghoulish dystopianism, bloody and grim.

PERSPECTIVE – Esa-Pekka Salonen likens the difference between composing and conducting to "running a marathon and a 100-meter race." Concerts in San Francisco and Seattle offered a glimpse of the Finnish artist in both capacities.

PERSPECTIVE – Opera orchestras, whose players are possibly the hardest-working instrumentalists in show biz, don't often enjoy prestige among Beethoven and Brahms audiences, but wide listening experience brings surprising rewards.

PERSPECTIVE – After two years of canceled or severely curtailed performances, summer music festivals in the Southeast are roaring back at 100 percent capacity. Offerings include the opera Stinney: An American Execution in Greenville, S.C.

PREVIEW – After decades when women were all but absent from concert podiums, the American orchestral world is racing to bring some gender equilibrium to its choices of conductors. Marin Alsop will preside as music director at Ravinia.

EVANSTON, Ill. – Bernstein, Kondrashin, and Oistrakh all factored in the remarkable life of conductor Victor Yampolsky, but his hundreds of former students at Northwestern University will tell you he made his biggest impact leading them.

PERSPECTIVE – Pianist Vyacheslav Gryaznov has built a formidable reputation for both his technical and creative abilities. Besides concertizing all over the world, he carries on the transcription legacy of Liszt and Rachmaninoff.

PORTLAND – The composer's rigorous work ranges all over the musical map, but Schiff, who has two world premieres pending, remains a guy with whom you can sit down and chat about everything except sports. His favorite sport: piano.

BOOK REVIEW – The pioneers of minimalism are getting on in years, and memoirs have been flowing. John Adams wrote one. Philip Glass wrote one. Now Steve Reich has added another, but as is his habit for music, he did it his own way.

PERSPECTIVE – There was a time in my life when I thought I would be happy to have all the commercial Toscanini records. Then I dreamed of hearing all the conductor's broadcasts (and rehearsals!) at the New York Public Library'.

BOOK REVIEW – Montreal-born pianist Janina Fialkowska's memoir A Note in Time is a skillfully drawn portrait that will appeal not only to music lovers and industry insiders but also to anyone who responds to a story well told.

PERSPECTIVE – Every concert I’ve heard since the Ukraine invasion has been about the war, no matter what was being played. We all know Ukrainians and will come to know many more as refugees arrive. Rarely has war been so personal.

PERSPECTIVE – Hungarian conductor Henrik Nánási will lead the premiere in Fort Worth of a Shakespeare sonnet set by his wife, Veronika Ágnes Fáncsik. It's for two characters: a bass singer as lover and, as the beloved, a clarinet.