Peter Serkin

At a time when the vocal recital has largely vanished from Chicago, and most instrumental programs tend to concentrate on the safe and familiar, it’s heartening to know that there are still some musicians willing to trod the repertorial path less taken.

Peter Serkin returns to Chicago Friday night with a bracingly smart and well balanced program for the University of Chicago Presents series. Beethoven’s epic Diabelli Variations is the main work, prefaced by music of three 20th-century composers Serkin has long championed. The evening will begin with Stefan Wolpe’s Toccata in Three Parts, Toru Takemitsu’s For Away and Charles Wuorinen’s Adagio.

Concert time is 7:30 p.m. at Mandel Hall. 773-702-8068.

Franz Joseph Haydn

There’s plenty of high-profile events to choose from this weekend: Riccardo Muti’s return to the CSO with Orff’s Carmina Burana; the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center Friday at the Harris Theater; and Joshua Bell’s recital Sunday at Symphony Center.

But don’t overlook Music of the Baroque’s program of Haydn and Handel led by Nicholas Kraemer. The ensemble’s principal guest conductor has revealed himself as one of our very finest Haydn conductors, able to put across the wry wit and rhythmic curveballs in especially winning fashion. The program couples Haydn’s Symphony No. 31 (Horn Signal) and No. 98 with Handel’s Concerto a due cori in F Major (Judas Maccabaeus) and Concerto grosso in D Major, Op. 6, No. 5.

Performances are 7:30 p.m. Sunday at First United Methodist Church in Evanston and 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Harris Theater. baroque.org; 312-551-1414.

Manfred Honeck

The Austrian team of conductor Manfred Honeck and pianist Till Fellner is striking considerable sparks at this week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts. Fellner’s take on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 offers an ideal mix of Classical poise and Romantic bravura, and Honeck’s taut Dvořák (Symphony No. 8) delivers bracing virtuosity without neglecting the Czech composer’s rustic charm.

There are two more performances 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. cso.org; 312-294-3000.

Following last week’s exhilarating Berlioz performances, Sir Mark Elder and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra present another Shakespeare-inspired program Thursday night. Readings from Henry IV will be interstitched with Delius’s The Walk to the Paradise Garden, Elgar’s Falstaff, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet.

Performances are 8 p.m. Thursday, 1:30 p.m. Friday, 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. cso.org; 312-294-3000.

The Orion Ensemble presentd a program of Beethoven and Schubert trios Sunday night in Evanston.

The Orion Ensemble offered an intriguing mix of repertoire on its program of trios Sunday evening at the Music Institute of Chicago in Evanston.

Beethoven’s familiar and lavishly dramatic Ghost Trio in D Major, Op. 70, no. 1, closed the program. But the opening two works — Beethoven’s Clarinet Trio, Op. 11, and Schubert’s String Trio in B-flat Major — provided the evening’s unexpected pleasures. In the slow movement of Beethoven’s Op. 11, the main theme had the kind of long, lyrical line we usually associate with Schubert. And Schubert’s trio, in turn, had some of the abrupt, mercurial flights and sharp harmonic shifts more typical of Beethoven.

Performed by pianist Diana Schmuck, clarinetist Kathryne Pirtle and cellist Judy Stone, the Beethoven Clarinet Trio got the evening off to a high-energy start. This is the Orion’s 19th season (Schmuck and Pirtle along with violinist Florentina Ramniceanu founded the group), and the players are entirely comfortable with one another. In the opening movement, they dug into Beethoven’s amiable main theme with gusto, Pirtle’s clarinet sounding mellow yet merry, Schmuck’s piano sending out invigorating, pointillistic sprays.

The sound throughout the piece was elegantly balanced, even when the musical conversation included highly contrasting voices. In the Adagio, the piano’s short phrases glistened above the low, expressive cello line and the clarinet’s lustrous melodies. In the final movement, a theme and variations, the three were responsive listeners, each vivaciously seizing and ceding the spotlight.

The balance was less even in Schubert’s trio, which featured Ramniceanu and guest violist Roger Chase along with Stone. Ramniceanu played with a bright, powerful tone, and she was fleet-fingered and confident in the mercurial first movement. But occasionally her aggressive sound overpowered the other two players.

In Beethoven’s Ghost Trio, however, that assertiveness served the music well. The slow second movement sounded appropriately haunted. Each player seemed absorbed in a separate vision — the violin halting and breathless as if transfixed by an unnerving force, the cello searching, while the piano maintained a strong but unsettled presence. When the robust finale arrived to break the tension, we sighed with relief.

The program will be repeated 7 p.m. Nov. 27 at Fox Valley Presbyterian Church in Geneva and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 30 at Roosevelt University’s Ganz Hall in Chicago. orionensemble.org; 630-628-9591.

Arvo Part's "Berliner Messe" was performed Saturday by the Chicago Arts Orchestra and City Voices.

One of Chicago’s lesser-known small musical organizations, the Chicago Arts Orchestra has been performing since 2005 under musical director and conductor Javier Jose Mendoza. The ensemble has been especially active in unearthing and premiering sacred and secular 18th-Century musical gems from Latin America and Spain.

Chicago Arts Orchestra also performs standard classical repertoire during their brief season, and Saturday evening’s concert at the Athenaeum Theatre contained mostly well-known works of fairly recent vintage. For the major piece on the program, Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe, they were joined by William Chin’s choral group, City Voices.

Mendoza opened their program with the Barber Adagio for Strings and comparisons were inevitable. With persistent intonation issues in the upper strings, the performance emerged as static.  The long lines of the piece as well as the theater’s dry sonics exposed the string orchestra unkindly.  One mitigation here as throughout the evening was the solid contribution of the two cellists, Rebecca Zimmerman and Thomas Ems.

Eric Ewazen is a contemporary American composer noted for his brass music especially, but for this concert the Chicago Arts Orchestra took on his three-movement Sinfonia for String Orchestra (2001). The music was by turns ebullient, lyrical and fairly complex, but uneventful and conventional.

The orchestra had warmed up enough for a performance of the youthful yet more interesting Simple Symphony of Britten. This always fresh-sounding (1934) work poses challenges, especially in the “Playful Pizzicato” second movement and in the dynamic “Frolicsome Finale.” Mendoza and his instrumentalists brought some humor and swagger to these parts and the third movement “Sentimental Sarabande” showed off the lower strings nicely.

The music of Arvo Pärt formed the second half of the program with his Berliner Messe the highlight of the evening.

The bell-haunted Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977) received a performance that could have used more atmosphere but in the context of the program was thoughtfully chosen. At the beginning of this piece Mendoza gave the second of only two brief comments from the stage, a refreshing departure from performance conventions lately, allowing the music speak for itself.

The Cantus was an excellent lead-in to Pärt’s Berliner Messe, a masterpiece of the composer’s tintinnabulation technique. Written originally for organ and chorus for the 1990 “German Catholic Day,” this version pits the small chorus against a string ensemble. The piece is short but liturgically complete and is particularly rich in Medieval and early Renaissance vocal textures which abound throughout but especially in the fourth movement  Veni Sancte Spiritus is the heart of the piece where the vocal lines dip, rise and hover around a simpler chordal, almost foreboding  string drone.  A more dynamic Credo precedes a long stretched-out Sanctus followed by an unearthly but brief Agnus Dei, which concludes the Mass on a note of expectancy.

The City Voices attacked the music with energy, but seemed hampered by the unreverberant space. The ensemble was still  able to deliver a solid performance of a major 20th-century choral work that merits repeated hearings.

The Chicago Arts Orchestra returns to their specialty, 18th Century Latin American and Spanish music, for their next concert on February 25th at a venue to be announced.

Imogen Cooper will perform Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor and Beethoven's "Choral Fantasy" to open Music of the Baroque's season.

The opening concert of Music of the Baroque’s 41st season marks the return after a three-year hiatus of an irregular but always eagerly anticipated visitor, when pianist Imogen Cooper joins her English compatriot Jane Glover on stage for a program that charts the progression from the Classical era of Mozart into the very different nascent Romanticism of Beethoven.

One of the most elegant and imaginative pianists of her generation, Cooper comes to the First United Methodist Church in Evanston, and the Harris Theater at the start of a fall schedule that will see her touring throughout her native England and further afield in Japan. She returns to Chicago to renew her relationship with an orchestra she describes as “a fine group of people who love working – which is not always a given with some orchestras – which is testimony not only to them but to Jane [Glover] and the enthusiasm with which she approaches everything.”

Cooper and Glover go back, the soloist recalls, “a very long time, perhaps even too long to think about!” The pair struck up a particularly fruitful partnership during Glover’s tenure as music director of the London Mozart Players in the late 1980s.

Especially appealing in the prospect of her return to Chicago, she says, is the lack of doctrinaire music-making in both her baton-wielding colleague and the Music of the Baroque orchestra towards repertoire that is all too often mired in rigid period-instrument orthodoxies. The sensibility appeals to a pianist who herself eschews any hint of dogma in her own performances.

“Like the best orchestras, they’ve taken the most important elements of phrasing, articulation and, particularly, vibrato, from the period but don’t overdo it. And they don’t go the whole hog: they don’t play completely without vibrato. My own tempi have become a lot more fluid than they used to be, and it’s a pleasure to play with an orchestra that can respond to that while retaining their own character.”

The partnership could hardly have chosen two more dramatic and contrasting works to usher in the new season than Mozart’s stormy but perennially popular Piano Concerto No. 20 and Beethoven’s rumbustious and less often heard Choral Fantasy.

“The piano concerto is a Don Giovanni-inspired piece, and one of only two that Mozart composed in a minor key,” says Cooper. “He wrote nothing else like it in the concerto form and it is extraordinary. I played it a lot in my younger years but have only come back to it in the last three years, and I absolutely adore it.”

From the very first bar, it is a piece that presents a series of robust challenges to both orchestra and soloist.

“It’s a passionate, direct, questing, rather dark work,” says Cooper. “As soon as it starts, the orchestra plunge us into Don Giovanni-like Hell, but when the piano makes its first appearance, it is making a completely different comment. It’s only a couple of pages later that I join in the whole tempest, almost as if I’m trying to find a bridge into it.”

The maelstrom of the first movement gives way, she adds, to the tumult of the second, “where, after a plangent opening you are thrown into that central section where you realize that all Hell is being let loose again, or at the very least, some major questioning and storms.”

While the second movement is typical of Mozart’s pitting of piano and orchestra in his concertos, the D minor is all but unique in its combustibly expressive working out of the relationship. “It’s rare you get sections that are so completely contrasted as here. But in the last movement, after the large cadenza – which is itself something relatively rare in Mozart’s last movements – you suddenly switch into D major, and suddenly you find yourself in the last act of an opera.”

Although refusing to be drawn on detail, Cooper says that concertgoers can expect “something a little bit special with it, if we can pull it off!” Which is not, she quickly adds, to give undue prominence to what is being planned. “With this piece, you need to leave the music relatively unadorned. With all the sturm und drang elsewhere, you don’t need to clutter things up too much.”

Some of Mozart’s explosive energy, albeit in a markedly different guise, finds an echo in the post-intermission piece, the rarely heard Choral Fantasy by Beethoven, described by Cooper as “a wonderfully joyous work with some incredibly simple writing and a certain amount of virtuosity that should be great fun.”

With one Beethovenian flourish after another, the work is a virtual high-wire act for the pianist, a prospect eagerly being looked forward to.

“I love it. I’m a real performer! I don’t think I’m the biggest show off there is, but actually communicating with hi-octane energy is one of the most life-giving things one can do. It’s great for me, and hopefully great for the musicians around me and the audience too.”

It’s a piece, the soloist says, “that can only make you smile.” But if the idea of Beethoven smiling sounds slightly startling, Cooper has no doubts about the famously scowling composer’s intentions.

“It’s C major. It’s sometimes melodically quite simple, and harmonically too. People sometimes misunderstand Beethoven. He’s more enthusiastic – in the sense of the word in it’s original Greek meaning: “possessed by a God” – and life-giving than is often recognized, as this piece proves. Anyone in Chicago who will be hearing it for the first time is going to be very pleasantly surprised by it.”

Imogen Cooper performs with Music of the Baroque 7:30 p.m. Sunday at First United Methodist Church, Evanston and 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Harris Theater. baroque.org 
; 312-551-1414.

Jacques Offenbach

The Lyric Opera of Chicago kicks off its 57th season with Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann Saturday night. Matthew Polenzani stars as the romantic title poet with Anna Christy, Erin Wall and Alyson Cambridge as the three heroines and James Morris as the four villains. Hoffmann opens 6:30 p.m. Saturday and runs through Oct. 29. lyricopera.org; 312-332-2244.

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Music of the Baroque also launches its season with a first-ever venture into music of Beethoven. Jane Glover conducts the orchestra in the Coriolan Overture, Choral Fantasy and Symphony No. 1. Pianist Imogen Cooper makes a rare Chicago appearance as soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor and the Choral Fantasy. Performances are 7:30 p.m. Sunday at First United Methodist Church in Evanston and 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Harris Theater. baroque.org; 312-551-1414.

Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra mark the Liszt bicentennial year with the composer’s Faust Symphony and the Piano Concerto No. 1 with Michele Campanella as soloist. Performances are 8 p.m. Friday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. cso.org; 312-294-3000.

The newly formed Chroma Chamber Orchestra presents its debut concert 4 p.m. Sunday at the Music Institute of Chicago. Conductor David Crane leads the ensemble in Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite, Vaughn Williams’ The Lark Ascending with CSO violinist Baird Dodge, and Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with soprano Elizabeth Futral. chromaorchestra.org; 847-905-1500.

Finally, the Chicago Philharmonic launches its season with a Spanish program led by guest conductor Lucia Matos featuring Villa-Lobos’ Sinfonietta No. 1 and De Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat with guitarist Fareed Haque as soloist in Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and Villa-Lobos’ Guitar Concerto. chicagophilharmonic.org; 847-866-6888.

Riccardo Muti leads off his second season as CSO music director with Verdi, Ibert and Tchaikovsky.

The music season begins in earnest this week with the Chicago Symphony Orchestrakicking off its season as well as a dizzying array of competing events.

Back from what was by all accounts a highly successful European tour, Riccardo Muti will launch his second season with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, not at Orchestra Hall, but with a free concert 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Apostolic Church of God on the South Side, part of the music director’s outreach beyond the CSO’s traditional audiences. The program is designed to please with Verdi’s Overture to Giovanna d’Arco, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and the Ibert Flute Concerto with Mathieu Dufour as soloist. The program will be repeated at Symphony Center Friday afternoon and Tuesday night with a suite from Nino Rota’s film score for The Leopard replacing the Verdi. On Saturday night the CSO’s gala ball will take place with Yefim Bronfman performing Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, along with Muti leading the CSO in the aforementioned Verdi overture and the Four Seasons from Verdi’s I vespri siciliani.

Alan Heatherington and the Ars Viva Orchestra launch their season with an offbeat program of excerpts from Copland’s Rodeo, Hershey Felder as soloist in the Chicago premiere of his Piano Concerto, Aliyah, and the U.S. premiere of Stanley Black’s Music of a People, featuring orchestrations of favorite Jewish melodies. Concert time is 3 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Monday at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts.

The Chicago Chamber Musicians kick off their 25th anniversary season with a brass program joined by the American Brass Quintet 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Pick-Staiger Hall in Evanston and 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Harris Theater. The Orion Ensemble opens its season with a diverting semi-Spanish program 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the Music Institute of Chicago in Evanston. Chicago a cappella leads off with “Days of Awe and Rejoicing,” a wide-ranging program of Jewish sacred music 4 p.m. Sunday at K.A.M. Isaiah Israel Congregation in Hyde Park. And Mei-Ann Chen begins her reign as music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta with a program of Beethoven, John Williams and William Grant Still featuring harpist Ann Hobson Pilot as soloist 7:30 p.m. Monday at Symphony Center.

Marco Berti

The Lyric Opera of Chicago announced cast changes Wednesday for the upcoming 2011-12 season.

Italian tenor Marco Berti, who made a largely impressive showing as Calaf in Puccini’s Turandot this month in San Francisco, will sing the role of Radames in the March performances of Aida, replacing Salvatore Licitra, who died two weeks ago after an accident.

Gabriele Viviani has withdrawn from the role of Enrico in this fall’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor due to family illness. He will be replaced by American baritones Brian Mulligan and Quinn Kelsey who will alternate in the role.