2006
HIGH-NOTE HIGHLIGHTS
“The single-greatest highlight of the[Chicago] classical music season was the Chicago premiere of John Adams’s NIXON IN CHINA, which opened at the Harris Theater in May. The 20 year-old opera finally debuted here, and in its meditation on the American psyche—by turns calculating, obtuse, innocent and naive—was a hit with all who saw it. Once word spread after opening night, the remaining performances were sold out and it became the most succesful production in Chicago Opera Theater’s history.
Credit for that must go to Alexander Platt, COT’s resident conductor, whose idiomatic leadership and deep knowledge of the score were simply amazing to behold. The score contains intensely intricate writing, as well as simple-sounding big-band jazz, and Platt betrayed no weakness in either.”
—Marc Geelhoed, TimeOut Chicago, 12/28/06
OperaNews, August 2006
[Benjamin Britten’s Mid Summer Night’s Dream]…The score’s glory lies in the otherworldly aural ambience created for the fairies, a soundscape beautifully realized through COT resident conductor Alexander Platt’s leadership, from the opera’s eerie opening measures through Tytania’s magical coloratura.
TimeOut Chicago | 5/26/— 6/2/06
[Benjamin Britten’s Mid Summer Night’s Dream]…Alexander Platt fastidiously leads this complex score, guiding the young singers through its dense rhythems extraordinarily well.
…It’s another win for Chicago Opera Theater, despite some heavy-handed directing. Nevertheless, Platt’s leadership is worth the price of admission.
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‘Nixon in China’ a sensory feast
Chicago Opera's production is spectacular | By DAVID LEWELLEN
Special to the Journal Sentinel | Posted: 5/22/06
Chicago - Experiencing “Nixon in China” in performance comes close to sensory overload.
Since its premiere in 1987, the opera by composer John Adams has been slowly working its way into the standard repertoire. Chicago Opera Theater’s current production is the first within easy range of Milwaukee.
The performance is spectacular, and it leaves first-time spectators with much to absorb. There is Adams’ rich and deeply textured score; the dense libretto by Alice Goodman, packed with aphorisms and allusions to events receding into history; and not least, this particular production by James Robinson that strikes the right balance between stark and high-tech to let the characters tell their stories.
The seemingly unlikely subject for Adams’ first opera was the landmark visit in 1972 of President Nixon to the People’s Republic of China.
Nixon today is defined by scandal and resignation, but this opera, premiered in 1987, presents him as sympathetic and even a little heroic. The same can be said for his opposite number, Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
The easiest way to pigeonhole Adams’ style is “minimalist,” but “Nixon in China” goes far beyond the constant repetition and static harmony that the term implies. The orchestral writing is fiendishly complex, with tricky rhythms and huge demands on the brass section.
Conductor Alexander Platt, who is also music director of the Waukesha Symphony, brought out both the ferocity and the tenderness of the score, aided by excellent playing in the pit.
Sometimes the wash of sound swamped the singers - although because this piece, like most of Adams’ work, is amplified, credit or blame for balances must also go to the guy at the sound board.
The standout at Sunday’s performance was soprano Maria Kanyova as Pat Nixon. Her voice is large but well-focused, and she brought out the character’s simple but genuine feelings.
The other leading female role, Madame Mao, has the true showstopper aria of the piece. Soprano Kathleen Kim had the right knife-edge vocal quality for the role, and although quite petite, conveyed a true sense of menace and danger.
As Nixon, baritone Robert Orth tried too much for comedy during his opening scene, but he settled down to a solid performance. Tenor Mark Duffin handled the cruelly high part of Chairman Mao, and baritone Chen-Ye Yuan sang soulfully as Premier Chou En-Lai.
I normally detest the lazy practice of using supertitles for an opera written in English, but for “Nixon in China,” they are necessary. The words are important but fleeting, so it was wise to allow the audience the reinforcement of seeing them.
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From 98.7 WFMT Chicago Opera Theater NIXON IN CHINA Commentary —5/19/06
Breakthrough
It is one of the many marvels of John Adams’s 1987 opera “Nixon in China” that it is able to fix simultaneously on the past, the present, and the future, all the while developing and extending a compositional idiom that plays with our very idea of musical and physical time. With librettist Alice Goodman and original theatrical collaborator Peter Sellars, Adams was able to look back 15 years to a moment in history that had resonance from its first televised images from the airfield tarmac in Beijing on Washington’s Birthday 1972 and that he and his collaborators saw would continue to resonate for decades after Richard M. Nixon’s visit to China and even decades after the composition of this opera. Somehow they knew that this tectonic political shift would remain as a defining part of the 37th President’s legacy even after his historic disgrace and resignation. And they found a way—within the opera itself—to move the characters from public to private situations, speeches to interior monologues, reflection to, literally, prophecy all the while remaining within a clearly defined structure of a limited number of real-life and well-known characters during a three-day encounter. And they did this too with a genuine passion and genuine creative spirit. In the 19 years since we have seen generic adaptations of classic plays and novels and other biographical episodes come and go from the American opera stage with no real sense that any of these works simply “had” to be there.
But “Nixon” did. Its combination of insight and absurdity, fact and surreality redefined our own history as well as the history of opera and of American music. And much of this is due to Adams’s understanding of how to shape and extend a musical language that had been developed largely by composers just ahead of him chronologically. While for me, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s “Einstein on the Beach” will always be the great triumph of minimalist opera it is a work of such size and complexity that it can rarely be produced. It is a part of Adams’s unique artistic character that he is able to combine a structural and even populist savvy with a genuine technical facility and originality to create works that, as they say, have legs and take on long and busy lives of their own in the concert hall as well as in the opera house. And his particular take on the deceptively simple (emphasis here on deceptively) rhythmic and harmonic loops of the minimalist system finds a certain depth and psychological as well as aesthetic resonance that moves it out of its initial period of composition and première and comes as close as any recent music has to achieving timelessness.
None of this is missed, and much of it is brought into the light, by Chicago Opera Theater’s stunning current production of “Nixon in China”, running through next Saturday the 28th at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park downtown. This production, too, contains an interlocking set of breakthroughs. It is a breakthrough for this company which, after the opening night performance on Wednesday, Adams himself called “small but feisty, committed, and so creative,” in that it is their largest production to date and is playing before the largest houses in its history. It is a breakthrough for Robert Orth, the Chicago-based international baritone whose operatic career began when COT founder Alan Stone plucked him out of schoolteaching and summer stock musicals and cast him as Guglielmo in what was then Chicago Opera Studio’s inaugural production of “Così fan tutte” 32 years ago, in that it allows him to show his hometown audiences for the first time in many years and on an appropriate scale what has made his name synonymous with new American opera all across the country. His Nixon is a total performance at every moment. It is a breakthrough for the young stage director James Robinson and the even younger director of the Chicago production Kevin Newbury in showing how this work—as with any great work of art—can and should live in new interpretations, especially in this one which replaces a stricter narrative and related staging with an absolutely appropriate fantasia. It is a breakthrough for the young women of the company, Lyric Opera Center for American Artists alumna Maria Kanyova as Pat Nixon and first-year LOCAA member Kathleen Kim as Madame Mao. And it is a breakthrough especially for COT resident conductor and music advisor Alexander Platt and the orchestra he has built up for this production. Prior COT triumphs in such varied repertoire as Benjamin Britten’s “Death in Venice” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as well as Robert Kurka’s “The Good Soldier Schweik” showed that there is not an idiom that Platt cannot make his own. With “Nixon” he demonstrates to a large audience—and to the composer himself—that the idea that contemporary music requires a “specialist” conductor is balderdash. It requires rather a conductor of real talent, empathy, seriousness, and communicative skills. (On opening night, a failed lightbulb meant that there were no surtitles. Rather than this causing a problem one instead almost heard the audience listening to and focusing on the music.)
We come back to the question of deception and simplicity. In order to make Adams’s score—and therefore his and his colleagues’ ideas—work, a conductor needs to make this music seem simple when, with its rhythms changing every few bars and its combinations of instruments and overlapping lines shifting on every page, it is anything but. This Alexander Platt does and as Robert Orth said to me on this station last week, with that he lifts up the whole production and makes the work of the singers, actors, and dancers possible. One hesitates to make any analogy involving Richard M. Nixon. But Brian Dickie and his board knew that they were taking a great risk for a small company that deserves much greater civic and financial support than it receives to take on this massive project. But as with Dickie’s COT calling card “Orfeo” of Monteverdi and the Britten “Death in Venice”, this gamble pays off. Richard Nixon fired a massive shot into a dark world that he himself had played a role in creating. It is one of his great legacies and this production of “Nixon”—which you must not miss—is already a great legacy of Chicago Opera Theater.
—I’m Andrew Patner.
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‘Nixon’s’ the one for dramatic, relevant opera | OPERA REVIEW Chicago Sun Times ‘NIXON IN CHINA’ HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
When: 7:30 tonight, May 25 and May 27; 3 p.m. Sunday
Where: Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph | Tickets: $35-$115
Phone: (312) 704-8414
May 19, 2006 | BY WYNNE DELACOMA Classical Music Critic
It wasn’t an ailing diva that brought Brian Dickie, general director of Chicago Opera Theater, onstage for an unscheduled announcement Wednesday night just before the start of Act 2 of John Adams’ “Nixon in China” at the Harris Theater.
The emergency was a projector that blew just before it was to begin beaming English supertitles for the opening scene of Adams’ groundbreaking 1987 opera inspired by President Richard Nixon’s slightly more groundbreaking visit to Communist China in 1972. Looking stricken, Dickie apologized for the “crippling” technological breakdown but expressed certainty that the audience would enjoy the rest of the opera. He was right on both counts. Alice Goodman’s libretto is a magical blend of the banal and the poetic. Like Adams’ beguiling score, it is a heady mix capable of transporting an audience to unexpected realms. Though COT’s superb soloists and chorus enunciated well, and few theaters can match the Harris’ clear acoustics, chunks of Goodman’s libretto turned into mush. An element vital for delivering the opera’s visceral punch was missing.
Nonetheless, it was a rewarding night at the theater. When Adams’ debut opera first appeared, some dismissed “Nixon in China,” with a TV-news plot and a score rooted in minimalism’s repetitious melodies and relentless rhythmic pulse, as terminally trendy. But Adams’ music sounded vibrant and fresh Wednesday night under the attentive ear and strong baton of COT’s resident conductor Alexander Platt. This is thoroughly dramatic, brightly colored minimalism, with occasional, exuberant forays into disparate styles ranging from Latin American dance music and 1940s movie musicals to swooning 19th century ballet. Like a presidential visit to Mao Zedong, “Nixon in China” is a bold gesture.
Peter Sellars, Adams’ frequent artistic partner, staged the world premiere at Houston Grand Opera, and COT’s production—created for Opera Theatre of St. Louis by James Robinson and revived for COT by Kevin Newbury—echoes Sellars’ theatrical flair. In the opera, Nixon is well aware that he is making history, and banks of TVs—sometimes hanging in the air like an artsy video installation, sometimes standing in a row of clunky, 1950s floor consoles—constantly monitored the action. Videos by designer Wendall K. Harrington included actual footage of Nixon’s visit to China, and scenic designer Allen Moyer set the action against a stark, blood-red backdrop. Platoons of Chinese in identical baggy blue suits came and went, drab but vaguely menacing figures.
Several singers in COT’s outstanding cast—Robert Orth, whose Nixon was part huckster, part visionary; Maria Kanyova as a tender Pat Nixon; Chen Ye Yuan as a wary Zhou Enlai, and Mark Duffin's towering but ailing Mao—have sung these roles before and will perform them in future productions in Houston, Cincinnati and elsewhere. They know the characters inside out, and their performances Wednesday night were confident and deft.
With his insincere, toothy smile, cold squint and slight stoop, Orth evoked the real Richard Nixon. His powerful, focused baritone had no difficulty with Adams’ angular, constantly leaping vocal line. While badgering Kyle Albertson’s Henry Kissinger or reminiscing with Pat, his repetitious phrases expressed frustration, nostalgia and resolve.
The Pat Nixon of “Nixon in China” is neither pathetic victim nor robotic political wife. Wearing a tastefully conservative red dress and coat, her handbag dangling at her gloved hand, Kanyova turned the first lady into a sensitive woman of real flesh and blood. Her clear soprano soared through punishing vocal flights with expressive aplomb, whether the first lady was navigating the bewildering protocol of a state visit to a model pig farm or dancing dreamily with her husband under the stars.
Yuan’s Zhou Enlai was a gripping portrait. In introspective moments, his baritone became a mesmerizing whisper, heavy with regret and resolve. As the frail Mao, Duffin deployed his tenor to create a still wily leader struggling to remain alert to the present. With his heavy glasses and ever-present attache case, bass-baritone Albertson was a watchful Henry Kissinger.
The evening’s revelation was soprano Kathleen Kim as the iron-willed Madame Mao. A first-year member of Lyric Opera’s Center for American Artists, she was a tiny dynamo. Her Act 2 aria, “I am the wife of Mao Zedong,” was as fiercely brittle and stratospheric as the Queen of the Night’s virtuoso tirade in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” Barely reaching Mao’s chest as they danced, clad in Communist China’s requisite dreary suit and clunky glasses, she was nevertheless formidable.
COT’s chorus was intensely involved in the action, whether massed onstage for slow, silent tai chi exercises before the opera begins or poking play pigs in Pat Nixon’s face during a state visit.
Choreographed by Sean Curran, the agitprop ballet, “The Red Detachment of Women,” was beautifully danced, offering just the right balance of kitsch and sincerity. It was impossible not to smile at the glee with which Adams poured everything he knew about late 19th century romanticism into its final, sweeping pas de deux. No helpless swan queen was ever rescued by a more extravagantly heroic cavalier.
Doubtless COT’s difficulties with its projector will have been solved for remaining performances of “Nixon in China.” If you want to see why opera is still a vital, living art form, capable of illuminating the era we live in, buy a ticket. Nixon may not have been your favorite president, but you won’t regret supporting “Nixon in China.”
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‘Nixon’ is one production all opera fans should see
By John von Rhein | Tribune music critic
The U.S. president staged a grand photo op in Chicago on Wednesday night.
No, not the guy you think. Nearly 20 years after its premiere in Houston, John Adams’ “Nixon in China” had its first complete staged performance in Chicago, courtesy of Chicago Opera Theater.
Raise a toast to COT for bringing to the city’s attention one of the great operas of recent years and doing it so brilliantly. Not even a malfunctioning surtitle board that remained dark all evening, making it hard to understand the singers despite amplification, could dim the success of the performance.
The greatness of “Nixon in China” lies in its timelessness, the ingenious way it transforms the banal pageant of world politics into modern myth. Richard Nixon’s breakthrough trip to China in 1972, during which he met Mao Tse-tung and launched relations between the superpowers, becomes a psychological mosaic about the collision of East and West, exposing the inner lives of small, tragic figures helpless before history.
If Adams’ minimalist musical language has evolved in all sorts of maximal ways since “Nixon” was new, the score has held up beautifully. The brassy orchestra chugs, pulses, burbles and flickers like the actual home movies that burst across the multiple TV consoles of James Robinson’s cleverly theatrical production, revived by Kevin Newbury. Atop the swaying syncopations and licks of big-band swing, ravishing vocal lines soar in ways Handel and Wagner never imagined, their ghosts hovering close by.
It would help if COT resident conductor Alexander Platt kept the orchestra down a bit more, although the shimmering sounds he got from Adams’ formidable if outwardly simple score seemed to gladden the composer, who attended Wednesday’s opening. Bravos to him and his hard-working orchestra, chorus and dancers.
From the landing of the “Spirit of ‘76,” the first-night banquet laden with toasts, Pat Nixon’s tour of a Beijing glass factory and the revolutionary ballet devised by Madame Mao, Allen Moyer’s scenic design, James Schuette’s costumes, Wendall K. Harrington’s video projections, Paul Palazzo’s lighting and Sean Curran’s choreography made for a striking series of stage pictures.
No complaints about the high quality of the singing.
The sturdy baritone Robert Orth, a COT veteran, brought human dimension to Nixon, whom the opera treats with sympathy and even affection. Orth’s diction was better than anyone’s save for that of the luminous soprano Maria Kanyova, who made Pat Nixon the work’s most touching and complex figure.
Chen-Ye Yuan as the weary Cold Warrior Zhou Enlai, Mark Duffin as the slogan-spouting Mao and Kyle Albertson as the befuddled Henry Kissinger were effective enough but were outshone by Kathleen Kim’s fearsome Madame Mao, who nailed her stratospheric coloratura aria with a precise, penetrating soprano.
In the final act we see the five major figures mulling their broken dreams, preparing for sleep atop the TV consoles that serve as their beds. Adams’ music becomes wondrously still, trailing away to almost nothing as it sends them to their date with destiny. “Nixon” is one of the most memorable music theater experiences you will have all year.
COT’s “Nixon in China” repeats at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Sunday, also at 7:30 p.m. May 25 and 27, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph St.; 312-704-8414.
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Marc Geelhoed: Deceptively Simple
A blog by a Chicago music journalist | May 19, 2006
He wasn’t a crook, yet
At the beginning of Nixon in China, Chinese peasants sing in flowery, ornate language of the power of the peasantry. After listing a series of rules for masters to follow (“Do not mistreat the captive foe/Respect women, it is their due”), they suddenly turn fierce, accompanied by a dramatic modulation. “The people are the heroes now/Behemoth pulls the peasant’s plow,” is their new refrain. In Chicago Opera Theater’s production, which opened Wednesday at the Harris Theater, the peasants move closer and closer to the edge of the stage, defiantly shaking their fists.
The crisp direction that lays that scene out, the clear diction of the chorus and the imaginative conducting of Alexander Platt that accompanies it are a perfect microcosm of the production as a whole. Even without the stars of the show, the forces involved show why the intelligent and plucky company willingly uses the word “opera” as an adjective and not a noun in its name.
Now 20 years old, Nixon in China lives in a world in which roughly a generation and a half of the population has no memory of the Nixon years. What those of us in this group know of Richard Nixon we have gleaned from biographies, from Stephen Ambrose's to those by more muckraking authors, Oliver Stone’s film Nixon, or TV doc.
OperaNews Online | CHICAGO—Nixon in China, Chicago Opera Theater, 5/17/06
…Conductor Alexander Platt piloted a thrilling orchestral performance, exciting in the splashy climaxes of the first two acts and delicately sensitive in the more internal writing of the final episode as the characters, shielded from public examination, allow themselves a moment of private introspection. …
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Palm Beach Post, 2/13/06 | Review: Boca Symphonia Sparkles
The new Boca Raton Philharmonic Symphonia, giving only the fourth concert of its inaugural season (fifth if you count November’s appearance with the Master Chorale of South Florida in Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem), showed Sunday afternoon that it already has become quite a good chamber orchestra.
Under the guest direction of Alexander Platt, who leads the Waukesha Symphony in southeastern Wisconsin, the Symphonia gave fine readings of symphonies by Haydn and Mozart, and an excellent traversal of the First Piano Concerto of Dmitri Shostakovich.
Pianist William Wolfram, who played from the score for his performance of this early (1933) wiseacre work of a young and confident Shostakovich, demonstrated a large and impressive technique as well as taste and intelligence. The opening pages were slightly muddy, as was the last jazzy outburst in the finale, which detracted a little from the crisp wit and nervous energy of the concerto, but overall Wolfram's performance was sparkling.
He was matched every step of the way by the orchestra, which was absolutely committed to this piece, unified with its soloist and fully in synch with its conductor. This was a performance that clicked on every level, from the passion the violins dug out of a long passage on their G-strings, to trumpet soloist Jeffrey Kaye’s big, round tone making the most of a bluesy solo in the second movement.
The best thing about this rendition of the Shostakovich concerto is that it showed its audience what a marvelous work this is. There's nothing quite like it in the repertoire, and without the right approach, listeners won’t get the sense of joy that is so rare in later works by this composer (whose centenary is being celebrated this year). But this was a nearly ideal rendition, full of life and heat.
Platt also programmed two symphonies nicknamed Paris from the Viennese classical tradition: The No. 86 of Haydn, in D major, and the No. 31 of Mozart, K. 297, also in D. In good, useful remarks to the audience before the concert, Platt made a case for Haydn as every bit the “towering genius” Mozart was, if of a slightly different type.
The Haydn performance that opened the concert was distinguished by scrupulous attention to dynamics, good ensemble throughout the orchestra, and an overall sense of restraint that was quite attractive. Platt made much of the slow movement's Capriccio marking; the simple broken chord that rises like lazy bubbles in the opening bars got steadily slower as the piece progressed, bringing the energy level perilously close to collapse. Still, it was an imaginative choice, and it worked well.
There were more fireworks in the Paris symphony of Mozart that closed the afternoon. The ensemble, good as it was in the Haydn, was even better in the Mozart; clearly, the strings did a lot of section work in rehearsal. All those scalar runs so beloved of the younger Mozart were right on the money, and the profusion of skittering thirds throughout were beautifully in tune.
By the finale, the orchestra was at the top of its game, bending to swift dynamic changes as one, and providing every punch and shock Platt asked for. It was bracing Mozart, and like the Shostakovich, it presented listeners with an exciting picture of a young composer of immense promise in the process of flexing his muscles and finding out just how good they were.
One other work was featured: Lyric for Strings, written in 1941 by George Walker, the current dean of African-American classical composers. Platt and the orchestra played this modest, Barber-inspired piece with surpassing tenderness, rarely rising above a breathy confidence.
A word about the venue: The Symphonia played for the first time in the Roberts Theater on the campus of St. Andrew's School in Boca Raton. It's something of an improvement over the dryness of Florida Atlantic University's University Theatre, but it's still a little bit barn-like, and the orchestra’s musicians no doubt needed the baffle at the back to help them hear each other.
The orchestra will be giving all its concerts for the coming season at the Roberts, orchestra President Martin Coyne announced Sunday, and also said the new group would finish the season with a surplus. “The bad news is that the surplus is $1.45,” Coyne said to much laughter before making a pitch for donors to be generous.
The Roberts is a very attractive venue for an afternoon of music, but it has a serious problem in its serious shortage of restrooms. Orchestra organizers are going to have to figure out a way for concertgoers to have more places to visit at intermission.
—Posted by Greg Stepanich at February 13, 2006 08:36 PM
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2005 & Earlier
“Alexander Platt’s 1990 reconstruction of Erwin Stein's 1921 chamber orchestra reduction of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony transports the listener to a fantastical Viennese cafe. Mahler’s folk melodies assume an urbane, sexually ambivalent persona: throwing the innocent ecstasies of “Das himmlische Leben”....into extraordinary relief, and lending the “Ruhevoll” the smoky, regretful air of an affair at its close.”
—Anna Picard, THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, London, August 7, 2005
98.7wfmt
…And it is a breakthrough especially for COT resident conductor and music advisor Alexander Platt and the orchestra he has built up for this production. Prior COT triumphs in such varied repertoire as Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as Robert Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik showed that there is not an idiom that Platt cannot make his own. With Nixon he demonstrates to a large audience—and to the composer himself—that the idea that contemporary music requires a “specialist” conductor is balderdash. It requires rather a conductor of real talent, empathy, seriousness, and communicative skills.
www.operanews.com
Britten’s haunting score, with its eerie, quivering eroticism for Tadzio’s music and its later interludes so disquietingly suggestive of the cholera’s advancing putrefaction, was beautifully illuminated by COT resident conductor (Alexander) Platt. Platt led his players, many of them members of the Lyric Opera of Chicago orchestra, with sensitivity and rhythmic precision, and the crucially important percussion interludes were most incisively handled.
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Financial Times | Death in Venice | Harris Theater, Chicago —Andrew Patner
…But remarkable and faithful as these readings are, the evening belongs to veteran British tenor Robin Leggate and young American conductor Alexander Platt. As a singing actor, Leggate must be the finest Aschenback the work has known—the right age, vocally spellbinding and knowing that it is cholera, not camp, that infects the German writer. The conductor of this sparsely scored work must be, as it were, trilingual, moving between and braiding together moments of orchestral longing, piano-only accompanied recitives, and Tadzio’s gamelan-inspired percussion music. With his achievement here, at once passionate and transparent, Platt moves to the front ranks of Britten conductors. This Venice is an exquisite marriage of style and idea, music and libretto, establishing once and for all that the work is one of Britten’s masterpieces.
Chicago Tribune | 5/20/05 | Britten’s ‘Midsummer’ a dream
Chicago Opera Theater’s cast and edgy staging do Shakespeare proud
By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic
…The large gallery of charactors is rife with opportunities for the kind of young, attractive, up-and-coming singers COT general director Brian Dickie is celebrated for casting. Each member of this splendid ensemble leaps into the action with amazing energy under resident conductor Alexander Platt, who tends to Britten’s luminous orchestra as if he were conjuring those wondrous sounds anew.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | 4/11/05 | Tchaikovsky’s Mozart piece showcased
By Tom Strini/Journal Sentinel music critic
Alexander Platt has improved the Waukesha Symphony in every way, including programming, during his tenure. He has a knack for showcasing repertoire that’s right under your nose, but unnoticed. Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 4 (“Mozartiana”) is typical. It’s a novelty, yet vaguely familiar.
…Platt and company strode purposefully through Tchaikovsky’s hall of mirrors. They gave each of the three movements and each variation in the finale a distinct character. …
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Chicago Sun-Times | 5/7/04 | “Death in Venice” | by Wynne Delacoma, Opera Critic
…Platt, COT’s resident conductor, describes “Death in Venice” as a summation of everything Britten knew about writing for the opera stage. He is quite right, and Wednesday’s performance laid out every detail of the spare but highly expressive orchestral score in glorious color.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | 10/9/02 | Almond, Waukesha Symphony’s Platt share vision
By Tom Strini/Journal Sentinel music critic
…Everyone phrases responsively—even avidly—with Platt, an aggressive and daring interpreter. He did well with the concerto and brought out the vibrant rhythmic life in Mozart’s Symphony No. 32 (“Overture in the Italian Style”).
He was at his very best with the Dvorak. The combination of warm sound, dancey rhythmic drive and dynamics left no doubt about Platt’s deep understanding of and empathy with this music.
The Wall Street Journal | 8/13/02 | A Bevy of Bel Canto | By Barrymore Laurence Scherer
…Based on Jaroslav Haaceksek’s anti-war satire, Robert Kurka’s 1958 opera, “The Good Soldier Schweik” is hardly a bel canto score. It has finally been commercially recorded by the plucky American independent label, Cedille. The recording is based on the April 2001 production by the Chicago Opera Theater, and if the cast contains no household names, the performances by Jason Collins (as Schweik) and his colleagues crackle with life and bitter laughter. Conductor Alexander Platt brings out every ironic nuance of the score. Make room on your shelves for this one.
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The New York Times | Sunday, June 16, 2002 | A Laggard Goes to the Opera By a Circuitous Route —By Michael Beckerman
(Kurka’s “Good Soldier Schweik”)…Reviews of the Chicago production last year were outstanding, and the performance in this recording (Cedille CDR 90000 062; two CD’s), with Alexander Platt conducting, Jason Collins as Schweik and Marc Embree in various roles, proves convincing.
Badische Zeitung | Wednesday, April 24, 2002 | Postcards From Rome | The Freiburg Philharmonic’s Respighi Double-Header
…It is a supreme feat of philharmonic mastery to control such a substantive, delicate array of percussive mechanisms, and to be thanked above all was the meticulous preparation of the guest conductor, Alexander Platt.
Review in the Paper: Nordjyske Stifstidende | June 10, 2001
Brilliant Chamber concert in exquisite settings.
…Compared with the first summer concert 14 days ago, here the conductor was the difference, the old friend and young American, Alexander Platt, with great musical identification and a living gesture he formed and directed (controlled) the small changing chamber ensembles and created the music into small pearls of light.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | 5/2/01 | Flutist Dufour, Waukesha Symphony shine
By Tom Strini/Journal Sentinel music critic
…This stirring performance is a sign of just how far the Waukesha Symphony, not so long ago the dullest band in the four-county area, has come under Platt. The WSO has become a good orchestra by any standard.
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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | 3/16/00 | Shostakovich gets his due from orchestra
By Tom Strini/Journal Sentinel music critic
Early in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, the first violins play a high, halting theme that extends itself bar after bar. Yearning and hopelessness, ache and resignation reside in this halting and reaching, at least as performed by conductor Alexander Platt and the Waukesha Symphony at Shattuck Auditorium at Carroll College.
Not that Platt wore Shostakovich’s heart on his sleeve Tuesday night; on the contrary, the conductor’s restraint made the passage profound. He kept it steady and let small changes in dynamics, keyed to rising or falling harmonic tension, lend urgency to this subtle drama.
Restraint in such passages also saved space for the big climaxes and the mad, roaring dances that occur later. Platt saw the big picture and knew that holding the orchestra back was as important as whipping it into a frenzy. He did both, as needed, to convey the sense of Shostakovich’s epic symphony, which in the wrong hands can turn to empty bombast.
The orchestra read Platt’s telling gestures and body language avidly and responded with fine detail, furious energy and unflagging concentration—not to mention excellent balance, ensemble and intonation.