reviews & features

The Illinois Council of Orchestras knew what it was doing when it recently gave its cultural leadership award to Alan Heatherington. The vigorous music director of three area professional organizations, a dedicated music educator who finds fresh approaches to bringing young children and their parents into the classical experience – he is making a lasting impact on the musical life of northern Illinois.

The program Heatherington conducted with one of his orchestras, the Ars Viva Symphony, as the group's season finale on Sunday at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, was emblematic of what sets him apart. New American music and old European music commingled happily, and a greatly promising young instrumental soloist got an opportunity to astonish the audience with his competition-winning prowess.

Matthew Lipman earned his berth on the solo roster by winning the first Music Institute of Chicago Young Artist Concerto Competition, in collaboration with Ars Viva. The 18-year-old, Juilliard-bound violist from Illinois, who studies with Roland Vamos in the institute's Academy program, was chosen from an initial pool of nearly 30 applicants.

William Walton's Viola Concerto (1929), an ingratiatingly lyrical work that turns up in concert not nearly as often as it deserves, showed off the splendid technique and musical sensitivity that left the competition judges slack-jawed.

Playing this virtuoso piece from memory, Lipman produced a warm, burnished, singing tone on a 1700 Goffriller viola loaned by the Rachel Elizabeth Barton Foundation. His firm command of rhythm gave the score's jazzy syncopations their dancing feet, his exchanges with various instruments keenly judged. He grinned broadly at the end when the audience awarded him a robust ovation. Mark well Matthew Lipman's name: You'll be hearing a lot more of him in the years to come.

Sharing the first half were Copland's rousing "Fanfare for the Common Man" (whose thunderous drums could have been heard as far away as Kankakee) and John Corigliano's "To Music," a 1995 orchestral fantasy based on the Schubert song "An die Musik." The serene consonances that begin the piece are disrupted by strident brass fanfares that eventually are quelled by Schubert's melody, which is quoted in its unadorned state in the final pages.

Heatherington – who can now add solo baritone to his familiar side-roles as Bernstein wannabe and stand-up comedian – ended with an honest, direct and unfussy account of Brahms' Symphony No. 1 in C minor, the same work with which he had concluded Ars Viva's first season in 1987.

Playing this Romantic warhorse with essentially an enlarged chamber orchestra actually benefited the work: Music that often can sound thick and muddy took on a welcome leanness and clarity that made up for the lack of weighty sonority. Observing the exposition repeat in the opening movement, Heatherington kept all four movements moving within judicious tempos, urgently so in the finale. His handling of transitions was especially good, although he needed to rein in the four horns more in the big tutti pages.

The orchestra, which includes personnel from the Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera orchestras, dug into their instruments with much the same finely disciplined energy and commitment their music director displayed on the podium. The various instrumental solos were nicely taken, not least those of concertmaster David Taylor and principal oboe Michael Henoch.

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Matthew Lipman performed Walton's Viola Concerto Sunday with Alan Heatherington and the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra.

Local audiences heard two significant debuts by young string soloists this past week. And, surprisingly, neither were violinists.

One was the Russian cellist Pavel Gomziakov, who made a sensational U.S. debut in Haydn’s C-major concerto last week with Trevor Pinnock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (and can be heard again Tuesday night).

And the other was Matthew Lipman. Just turned 18, the violist is the first winner of the Music Institute of Chicago’s Young Artist Concerto and Aria Competition. The young man turned in his own hugely impressive performance Sunday in Skokie in what was, in essence, his professional debut, with Alan Heatherington and the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra.

As the loquacious conductor noted Sunday, it’s rare for a violist to best out three violinists and two cellists in a juried competition, but in his terrific account of Walton’s Viola Concerto, the young man from Crete-Monee High School showed he is the real thing.

Displaying the relaxed poise of a seasoned professional, Lipman showed himself fully in synch with the work’s shifting moods, encompassing the searching introspection of the opening Andante and tackling the mercurial middle section with fine clarity and rhythmic precision.

The myriad challenges of the central movement were surmounted with ease and technique to spare, Heatherington and the orchestra providing playing of whirlwind vivacity in support. The reflective nostalgia and edgy restlessness of the closing movement were surely and sensitively etched by Lipman as well.

One might quibble that some of the solo work could have used a bit more bite and intensity, but this was an auspicious debut by a young musician who clearly has the potential for a successful career. Matthew Lipman performed on a remarkable 1700 Gofriller instrument made available by the Rachel Elizabeth Barton Foundation.

The afternoon began with a stately yet muscular account of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, which managed to be spacious and gleaming while avoiding rhetorical overkill.

Alan Heatherington

Heatherington’s introduction to John Corigliano’s To Musicmay have been longer than the work itself, yet any attempt to make classical music less forbidding to new and younger audience members should be applauded. Besides it’s hard to fault the conductor’s verbal notes when done with such engaging humor, knowledge, and clear love for the repertoire—including singing, in an admirably even baritone, a stanza of Schubert’sAn die Musik (Max Reger arrangement), which Corigliano utilizes in the coda.

The ensuing performance gave this offbeat miniature first-class advocacy, the Ars Viva strings conveying the pensive Barber-like rumination of the opening theme. The antiphonal brass, placed in the balcony of the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, provided the necessary contrast in the more complex and dissonant middle section, before Schubert’s song appears to bestow consoling solace at the coda.

After the interval Heatherington was presented with the Cultural Leadership Award by James Setapen of the Illinois Council of Orchestras, for his work promoting music to young audiences, as well as his longtime professional associations with Ars Viva , the Lake Forest Symphony, and other organizations.

But despite the many words said Sunday, it was the music that spoke most eloquently. Heatherington’s affinity for Brahms is well known and the afternoon closed with an urgent, tautly dramatic account of his Symphony No. 1. Most chamber orchestras sound thin in this repertoire but with its CSO-heavy string section, Heatherington and the Ars Viva members delivered a fiery and propulsive performance, a fine close to the concert and Ars Viva’s season.

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What could be a better birthday treat for a conductor than a concert program of personal favorites?

For Alan Heatherington, the freshly turned 64-year-old selected works exclusively from Johannes Brahms, his most admired composer, Sunday afternoon in Skokie. The program included his “favorite piece of music in all the world,” the Violin Concerto in D Major. To have a soloist of Ilya Kaler’s caliber at his side, it appeared the veteran maestro was exercising a little birthday self-indulgence.

While the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra concert at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts was certainly lighthearted, the guest solo appearance of the Moscow-born Kaler was serious musical business.

Kaler boasts an enviable line of significant recordings on the Naxos label and he’s also the only violinist on the planet who can hold up gold medals from each of the world’s main concerto competitions: the Tchaikovsky, Paganini and Sibelius. His superb performance Sunday afternoon certainly lived up to all the street cred.

The performance of the Brahms Concerto, a work Kaler has played since he was 16, was surely one of the finest musical solo offerings heard this year. It is hard to think of a single moment where a note was not played without the fiercest intensity or a resounding lyrical touch. His is a magnificent bold tone that comfortably filled a hall with underwhelming acoustics, and he eased into each treacherous transition fearlessly.

His cadenzas, written by Brahms’ dear friend Joseph Joachim, were kinetically charged and crowd-seducing. Even as the house lights dropped for the slow movement, Kaler delivered a refreshingly alert Andante, untarnished by any excess sweetness. The final movement sizzled. A Bach nugget and a swelling rendition of Happy Birthday completed the encores. (That you can catch Mr. Kaler in free concerts at DePaul University, where he currently teaches, is thievery.)

The tuneful Symphony No. 3 was nearly as memorable despite some timing issues and intonation miscues. Yet there was much to love in the tragically sweeping opening bars or the cosmic awakening at the beginning of the Andante. Horn player Michael Buckwalter punctuated the mysterious Poco Allegretto with a fine solo, and the closing Allegro was big and powerful even for Brahms’ most pastoral symphony. Heatherington made a convincing case for admiring this work all over again.

Lesser known but equally absorbing were the Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a. It was almost amusing to hear citations of dainty Classical themes wistfully transmute into Brahms’ unabashedly lush and heavy sound worlds. Glancing across the orchestra you could spot many of the area’s best musicians like timpanist Robert Everson, clarinetist John Bruce Yeh and violinist David Taylor, all of whom made stellar contributions.

Ars Viva concerts feature, for better or worse, mini-lectures delivered on stage between pieces. Heatherington was charming and professorial as he regaled the audience with personal and historical anecdotes, but over thirty minutes of emceeing felt excessive for a symphonic concert. While these talks are built into the orchestra’s mission, it is a mild nuisance not to immediately hear more music after such excellent performances.

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Playing well is only part of presenting a memorable concert. The right notes are important, of course, as are proper tempos and dynamics. But a truly excellent experience of music has much more. Subtlety, grace, charm — those elusive qualities that cannot be quantified, but infuse a performance as certainly and seductively as a fine perfume floats on the air.

Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra opened its season Oct. 25 at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie and in every way demonstrated those lovely intangibles. It didn't hurt that music director Alan Heatherington was conducting an all-Mendelssohn program. That composer's music is nothing if not graceful and charming, as well as strong and vivid.

The afternoon opened with Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1, with Elizabeth Joy Roe as soloist. Roe is a Glenview native, graduate of Glenbrook South High School, who 10 years ago at age 17 played with Ars Viva as the winner of the Steinway Competition. In the ensuing decade she attended The Juilliard School on full scholarship, earning both a bachelor's and master's degree in piano performance. She remained in New York City, concertizing regularly there and throughout the country and is now a Visiting Artist and Professor at Smith College in Massachusetts.

Her bravura technique was evident from the first flurry of notes, but she also had a delightful ease at the piano. At one moment she could have been in a fierce piano competition, but then as the mood softened, her manner suggested that she was in a parlor, playing for music-loving friends.

She watched Heatherington carefully, and their synergy was palpable. He told the audience in advance that this was his favorite piano concerto and he appeared to smile though the whole piece. Roe stretched the tempos in her solo passages, giving a sensitive, heartfelt performance. Of special note was the glowing sound of the Ars Viva brass section, which was in absolutely top form.

It is unusual, almost unheard of, for a program to open with a concerto, but Ars Viva has developed a unique program for young audience members. On Sunday, about 25 children listened to the first piece on the program and then were taken to rooms on the second floor, where they talked about the program with teachers from the Music Institute of Chicago and engaged in activities related to the concerto they have just heard.

The balance of the program included the composer's Symphony No. 2, after intermission the Overture from his oratorio “St Paul,” and finally Symphony No. 5 (“Reformantion”). The orchestra included 45 players, just about the size of Mendelssohn's own Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Ars Viva is made up of some heavy-hitters, past and present, from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, such as violinists David Taylor and Nancy Park, Ars Viva concertmaster and principal Violin II respectively, flutist Walfrid Kujala, and timpanist Patricia Dash. In fact, on the stage Sunday, 28 players were CSO members or regular substitutes, the balance being some of the area's top freelance musicians. Under Heatherington's baton they played not only with conviction and skill, but also with grace and charm, giving the audience two hours in an oasis of beauty and order.

The slender, sparkling gown worn by soloist Elizabeth Joy Roe must be mentioned. It began with silver sequins on the bodice, graduating to pale blue and eventually to deep aqua at the bottom of the skirt. It was as dazzling as her work at the keyboard.

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On stage at the start of Sunday’s Ars Viva concert, Alan Heatherington delivered the grim news to the audience. It wasn’t yet halftime and the Bears were already down 28 to 0. “You made the right choice,” said the chamber orchestra’s music director.

It may not have a good night for Chicago football but it was for fans of Mendelssohn, as Ars Viva opened its season with a program marking the composer’s 200th birthday year at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie.

Mendelssohn has not wanted for recognition in this anniversary year—or in non-anniversary years, for that matter—but Heatherington and the Ars Viva musicians served up a notably generous program that largely avoided the usual Felixiana.

Heatherington’s breezy and informed verbal program notes provided witty and interesting insights into various aspects of the composer’s life and career, from the tortuously nonlinear numbering of his symphonies to Mendelssohn’s “packrat” tendencies, including his stowing of 7,000 letters.

But, of course, it was Mendelssohn’s music that was the main course. The thematic leitmotiv for much of the program was Mendelssohn’s journey from Judiasm to Lutheranism. The fact that the composer was a devout converted Lutheran is infrequently commented upon, but his religion is manifest in a great deal of his (largely unperformed) organ and choral music, as well as the fitfully heard Symphony No, 5, Reformation.

His second symphony to be written but unpublished in Mendelssohn’s lifetime, the Reformation is a work the composer came to dislike, yet as the vital and brilliant advocacy of Heatherington and Ars Viva demonstrated, it’s a rich and characteristic work, fully in Mendelssohn’s mature style.

The Reformation is Heatherington’s favorite of all five Mendelssohn symphonies and his affection was apparent in the conductor’s alert yet sensitive direction and myriad of touches. Without neglecting the dramatic element, rhythms had an idiomatic lightness and buoyancy throughout. The conductor drew string playing of great delicacy in the first movement’s Dresden Amen as well as piquant wind contributions in the scherzo. The Andante had the apt somber reflection, and Heatherington and the players provided a finale that was stirring while avoiding bombast, the chorale Ein feste Burg delivered with brassy splendor.

Heatherington’s sure touch in Mendelssohn was also evident in the overture to the oratorio, St. Paul. One of the composer’s most popular works in his lifetime, Paulus has long since been shot out of the canon, though as this rich and eloquent account of the overture showed, this is a work in need of exhumation.

Sunday’s concert looked to be a marathon program on the Ars Viva website, with Mendelssohn’s Second Symphony on tap as well as the Reformation. Actually, Ars Viva presented just the opening Sinfonia, three orchestral movements, of the sprawling Lobgesang symphony (No. 2, but really No. 5—never mind).

Shorn of the choral sections, the three movements don’t really make a satisfying whole, ending with a heart-easing Adagio. Still, the music is well worth hearing, and made a fine, offbeat bonus. Ars Viva played with great polish and verve in the majestic opening and brought glowing lyricism to the Adagio. One couldn’t help noticing the strong thematic similarity of the central Allegretto’s theme to the finale of Schumann’s Second Symphony, composed just a few years later.

The most familiar part of the program was Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto, as spirited and irresistible a burst of youthful musical vivacity as exists in the repertoire.

Elizabeth Joy Roe made her debut with Ars Viva as a teenager a decade ago, and her scintillating rendition of Mendelssohn’s concerto was a highlight of the concert. Roe brought ample bravura to the knuckle-busting outer movements as well as conveying the lyric tenderness, with a musing, Impressionistic quality in the transition to the Andante.

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The Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra is taking measures to deal with the recession. At the group’s season finale Monday at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, music director Alan Heatherington said that for 2009-10 the orchestra will eliminate its Monday-evening concert series for at least one season. The five-concert Sunday-afternoon series will remain as is.

Fortunately, there was no belt-tightening in evidence on Monday. Heatherington knows precisely what he wants and has the leadership skills to bring his musical ideas alive through a solid ensemble that includes numerous Chicago Symphony players in key positions. And he brings his audience repertory they can’t hear anywhere else, certainly not at this level.

One of Ars Viva’s missions is to introduce listeners to promising young competition winners from the Chicago area and Midwest. It did so again Monday with Tracy Wong, the 13-year-old winner of the 2009 Chicago Steinway Piano Concerto Competition, as soloist in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

A junior high school student in her native Cincinnati, Wong is a petite wisp of a girl. Yet she summoned enough power to dispatch this formidable concerto with assurance, barring a few slips of concentration and fingers along the way. There’s musical talent here that bears nurturing.

The dryish acoustics didn’t much flatter the robust sonorities Heatherington worked to elicit in Liszt’s “Les Preludes” and Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony, although the sound was clear and immediate enough.

That said, each episode of the Liszt warhorse was vividly characterized.

The evening’s high point was the symphony Hindemith extracted from his 1934 opera. The Ars Viva players dug into the piece’s bustling polyphonic lines and majestic chorales with due vigor and intensity, ever quick on the rhythmic uptake. Passing technical blemishes were of little import.

The first Rachmaninov piano concerto is very much with us this week. Pianist Denis Matsuev will perform the work in Orchestra Hall at 8 p.m. Thursday, when the National Philharmonic of Russia makes its Chicago debut in an all-Russian program under founder and conductor Vladimir Spivakov.
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Type talks; the choice of a typeface gives an immediate indication of what is to be said.  Consider Ars Viva. This symphony orchestra, named Illinois Orchestra of the Year for 2008, consists of many players from the Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera orchestras. And its name is written in an unusual manner. The Ars is rendered in Gothic letters, with curlicues and embellishments. The Viva is printed in clean modern type, followed by an exclamation point. Music director and founder Alan Heatherington was obviously in the Viva mode Sunday night for the first of the orchestra's two back-to-back concerts at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie.

The program was a musical adventure that took us from Milhaud's "La Creation du Monde" (The Creation of the World), to Bizet's Symphony in C, a vast work written when he was but 17 years old. In between was Frank Martin's Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments, a piece conductor Heatherington said few, if any, of the orchestra members had ever played.

Milhaud's Monde:

Imagine a saxophone intoning music depicting the dawn of the earth. Darius Milhaud gave the lion's share of the melodies to that instrument, which was rising in prominence during the jazz age, when he began composing. Milhaud was one of Les Six, an affiliated group of 20th century French composers including Poulenc, Honneger, Durey, Tailleferre, the only woman, and Auric, who among other things composed the film score for "Roman Holiday."

In the spotlight was Peter Brusen, who usually plays bassoon in the orchestra, and the mellow sound of his saxophone gave a warm, pillowy atmosphere to the piece. No wresting life out of chaos here. Instead, the ensemble of just 17 players performed rather like a combo, handling the jazzy, lively elements of the score as if they were playing Gershwin.   The orchestration resembled "Rhapsody in Blue," with lots of emphasis on the wind instruments and brass. Some of the music was eerily identical, though there is no evidence that the two knew each other's music.

Windy city:

Ars Viva didn't have to look far for soloists in Martin's Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments. From its own ranks were flutist Lyon Leifer, trombonist James Gilbertson, French horn player Michael Buchwalter, bassoonist William Buchman, and oboist Michael Henoch, supplemented by clarinetist John Bruce Yeh and trumpeter Chris Martin. All except Leifer and Buckwalter are CSO members.

Melodies flowed between the seven players with tremendous grace. Phrases began as solo lines and were then augmented by additional instruments, until full, fresh harmonies filled the concert hall. At times the piece resembled a film noir score from Hollywood's golden years, when a host of European composers were living, writing and teaching in Southern California.

'Carmen' prefigured:

Symphony in C was written in the first half of Bizet's very short life. Like Mozart and Schubert, he died in his thirties. But this work is pure joy, and Heatherton seemed delighted to be conducting the work. It is straightforward classical music by a master of melody. Think of his operas -- "Carmen" with all it memorable arias, and "The Pearl Fishers," with its sublime duet. Again the wind instruments bewitched us, coupled with significant work by the brass section. The strings also sang out --cellos suddenly sounding almost like bag pipes, and violas played pizzicato. The highlight of the piece had to be the final movement, Allegro vivace, when the violins took off in a mad kind of perpetual motion, with music straight out of the bullfight scene in "Carmen."

Ars Viva can and does do everything. Heatherington and his players happily veer off the beaten track and take their audience to wondrous corners of the classical music world. close

One of the central attractions of concerts by the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra -- which draws roughly half of its players from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra -- is hearing symphonic repertory that doesn't turn up all that often on the CSO's subscription programs.

Such was the case with Ars Viva's season opener conducted by Alan Heatherington on Sunday at Skokie's North Shore Center for the Performing Arts.

The music director gathered works from the first half of the 20th Century by composers with next to nothing in common beyond the fact that their surnames begin with "S." One of Sibelius' first and most enduring successes, the patriotic tone poem "Finlandia," shared the bill with Richard Strauss' touching valedictory, the "Four Last Songs." Dmitri Shostakovich's cheeky Symphony No. 9 completed the bill.

Soprano Talise Trevigne, the soloist in the Strauss songs, was the evening's prime discovery. The San Francisco Bay Area native, 31, has been attracting attention on the West Coast as Rossini's Rosina and Verdi's Violetta and this year sang the title role in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" with the San Francisco Lyric Opera. This month she made her Chicago-area debut with the Chicago Master Singers.

Trevigne commands a lyric-coloratura soprano of striking freshness and beauty, lighter than that of some singers who take on this music: We heard Sophie, not the Marschallin, delivering Strauss' swan songs. She has the radiant high notes and creamy timbre one expects from a Strauss soprano and the ability to float long, arching phrases over a lush orchestra.

As yet Trevigne hasn't the full measure of the songs' spiritual depth and rapturous inwardness, qualities that registered more in her facial expressions than her voice. But her singing was gorgeous and musically sensitive. She received worthy support from the orchestra, even though it nearly covered her a couple of times.

If Trevigne can resist the temptation to take on too much too soon, she could have a fine career ahead of her. I look forward to hearing her again.

"Finlandia" unfolded in majestic waves of melody, anchored by the dark, solemn sonority of low brasses and double basses.

The Shostakovich was the polar opposite in mood. Some Russian conductors treat this jocular, Haydnesque symphony as an essay in dark, subversive humor, a poke in the eye of the composer's Stalinist oppressors. But Heatherington chose to play it straight, which is to say lightly and briskly, with full but not exaggerated appreciation of its energetic high spirits.

The Ars Viva players gave him everything he asked for, particularly the expert first-chair soloists, including bassoonist William Buchman, piccolo player Walfrid Kujala and trumpeter Barbara Butler.
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Conductor Alan Heatherington is also a violinist, and a special connection is evident when he conducts a violin soloist. Sunday night at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, he conducted his Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra in the opening of its 11th season with the Chicago area orchestral debut of 27-year old Hungarian violinist Kristof Barati.

And what a debut. Barati chose Niccolo Paganini's Concerto No. 1 in D for Violin and Orchestra, which he polished off barely breaking a sweat.

The concerto began with a long orchestral introduction concluding with a series of exclamatory chords. When Barati started to play, the sound was incredibly sweet and rich, but before we could sink into it, the music began to tumble furiously off his bow, emitting sparks.

Barati's fingers flew up and down the strings with amazing dexterity. And the sound was sublime, rippling and darting in every direction.

The final Allegro is the most familiar part of the work, and the violinist vaulted from one bold passage to another, always maintaining an exceptional purity of tone.

The orchestra played in championship mode as well. John Bruce Yeh's clarinet and Lyon Leifer's flute deftly executed sonic gymnastics right along with the soloist.

The night concluded with Brahms Symphony No. 2, a poignant work of pastoral beauty and peace. The wind section was packed with stars, including Yeh and his CSO colleagues oboist Michael Henoch and bassoonist Dennis Michel, as well as the terrific trumpet duo of Barbara Butler and Charles Geyer. Combined with the Ars Viva strings, there was an arresting depth of sound in the hall.

   

By Delia O’Hara
One of these days, 17-year-old Jeremy Jordan of Chicago will have to decide whether he wants to be a musician or an immunologist. But for now, Jordan, a newly minted member of both the National Honor Society and the National Merit Scholars, is one of two young pianists in the spotlight this weekend at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie.

The other pianist is Christine Yoon, 15, of Arlington Heights, a giggly middle-schooler until she sits down at the piano, when she transforms into an assured and focused artist with passion and skills far beyond her years.

Jordan and Yoon will perform this weekend at two concerts as part of Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra's Young Artist Showcase. Playing with this excellent North Shore orchestra -- more than half of the musicians also play with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra -- has for eight years been the cherry on top of the already sweet honors for one young musician among the winners in the Steinway Concerto Competition, sponsored by a local piano retailer, The Beautiful Sound.

This is the first time that two young people have been chosen to share Ars Viva top honors, the first time "it was impossible to choose one contestant over another for first place," says Alan Heatherington, Ars Viva conductor and musical director.

The prestigious Steinway Competition, which is held in the fall, has two contests with subdivisions that feature pianists as young as age 7. One calls for a 10-minute solo piece, the other requires entrants to perform an entire concerto, which may have as many as three movements, according to Howard Chung, director of the Steinway concert and artists program for The Beautiful Sound.

The concerto competition "is so much work," Chung says.

The store awards cash prizes to the winners, Chung says. In addition, all the winners of the solo competition record their performances for WFMT radio; the station broadcast the most recent recordings in February. And the top three concerto finishers get to audition for Heatherington, for the chance to play with Ars Viva.

That is no small thing.

"Ars Viva is one of the best orchestras in Chicago," says Chung. "These are concerts for rising stars."

Heatherington agrees that Yoon and Jordan are in good company with past winners, who have gone on to win other important competitions in the United States and abroad, and to study at the top music schools.

Jordan, a junior at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School, the first Chicago resident to win the Ars Viva competition, was "technically impeccable," Heatherington says. Jordan was the first contestant ever to choose a concerto by a 20th century composer, Prokofiev's Concerto No. 1, says Heatherington, who also praised Jordan's "breadth of musical understanding and command of the music."

Yoon, a student at South Middle School in Arlington Heights, played Saint-Saens' Concerto No. 2, and "displayed levels of intensity and maturity in her playing that are the signs of a brilliant artist in the making," Heatherington says. "There is not a hint of mechanical playing. Rather, there is an uncanny communication of beauty."

Both now happen to take lessons next door to each other at DePaul University's School of Music, where Jordan studies with Regina Syrkin and Yoon has studied with Eteri Andjaparidze since January.

"When I entered the competition, the thought of winning didn't enter my head," Jordan says. As for the choice of Prokofiev, he says, "My teacher suggested this piece. I had never heard it." He liked it, though, because it is difficult. "It was a challenge. I thought it would make me better."

Seeing Jordan and Yoon perform in concert this weekend offers audiences the chance to see a couple of dedicated and talented pianists near the beginning of their careers. In addition to showcasing these two remarkable young musicians, Ars Viva will take its own star turn with Sibelius' Symphony No. 5 in E-flat, Op. 82. close

With an embarrassment of orchestral riches downtown, it is easy to overlook the many fine ensembles that dot the suburban expanse. With solid programming and polished performances, Alan Heatherington's Ars Viva is perhaps the best of that bunch.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the orchestra draws most of its musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. These busy players' willingness to moonlight for Heatherington is a testament to their respect for the maestro.

Sunday's fare for the group's season debut at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts strayed from the beaten path, but the faithful fans were unfazed, responding with gusto to the three works presented as well as Heatherington's spoken commentary. There were a fair number of vacant seats, almost certainly because of the addition this season of Monday night concerts to Ars Viva's traditional format.

Vaughan Williams' "Five Variants on 'Dives and Lazurus,'" the first of two English works from 1939, reflects the composer's preoccupation with English folk song. Breaking new ground was never his aim, yet he had an admirable flair for string choirs, a talent Heatherington brought to the fore in a performance that glowed with nostalgic warmth.

The meat of the program was Britten's "Les Illuminations," a vocal setting of poems by Arthur Rimbaud, sung with sensitivity by soprano Michelle Areyzaga. The French text seems to have inspired the composer to dip into his palette of Gallic hues, and Heatherington's strings expertly negotiated the piece's quicksilver mood changes.

It is hard to believe these two British works were composed the same year, so different are their respective sound worlds. Areyzaga proved a fine interpreter of the work. If her French vowels were not the last word in authenticity, her burnished tone and nimble athleticism carried the day.

Local music lovers have reveled of late in Lyric Opera's superb "Carmen," and Heatherington gave them a chance to hear a fresh take on Bizet's evergreen tunes with Rodion Shchedrin's "Carmen Suite" from 1967. Much more than a pops concert medley, the work exploits the contrasting colors of lyrical strings and a busy percussion section.

The melodies are adorned and fragmented imaginatively, but at times the cleverness is undone by froth and flash. Still, one could not imagine a more persuasive performance, with a fine balance struck between milking the gags and respecting the source material.

True to its artistic mission, and indeed its name, the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra on Sunday at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie, presented a concert that combined music old, new and rarely heard. It's a program formula music director Alan Heatherington has explored for some years… The new work was "Lisel Mueller Songs," a world premiere by the Chicago composer Max Raimi, who also happens to play viola with the CSO and Ars Viva… From Mueller's wonderful Pulitzer-winning collection, "Alive Together," Raimi chose four poems to be sung by mezzo-soprano and orchestra… His music is as accessible as Mueller's poetry is accessible… The vocal writing [was] so well crafted that Julia Bentley, the admirable soloist, had no trouble making each word register clearly… The "old" on the Ars Viva bill was represented by Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony. It was refreshing to hear this war horse done with Classical-style forces such as one might find under authentic-performance auspices… The seamless solos by Ars Viva's principal woodwinds proved a further asset… Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 3 ended the program in a full blooded reading that included a wistful waltz, a sprightly scherzo and a high-stepping polonaise. Concertmaster David Taylor dispatched the bravura violin solo with debonair panache. This was Ars Viva at its crackling best.
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Alan Heatherington's efforts to inject new vitality into the all-too-predictable concert experience have proved a great success from the viewpoint of the players as well as his growing North Shore public. The Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra's season finale Sunday at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie found the music director in his element. Once again he proved a loquacious program host as well as a compelling conductor, and his ensemble—made up of some of the finest players from the Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera orchestras—outdid itself for him. He began with Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Concerto Grosso (1985), which he aptly called "a 20th Century response to the spirit of Handel…" From the Zwilich, the conductor leapt backward some 60 years to Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3. The pianist was another in a series of outstanding young local soloists whom Ars Viva showcases each spring—17-year-old Deborah Hong of Northbrook, winner of the Steinway Society of Chicago Concerto Competition … Ars Viva really came into its own with Schubert's "Great" C Major Symphony. Working from an authentic new edition of the score, Heatherington opted for much the same size of forces Schubert had in mind… This amounted to a refreshing, clear-eyed re-examination of an old favorite. How good to hear this music without the ponderous heaviness big symphony orchestras almost invariably bring to it. With such able conducting and resilient playing, Schubert's "heavenly length" did not seem at all protracted, even with every repeat observed.
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In its season opener under music director Alan Heatherington, the orchestra and soloist David Taylor polished reputations already high with their performances of the "Coriolan" Overture, the Violin Concerto in D Major, and the so-called "Dance" Symphony, No. 7 in A Major… This was a pared-down orchestra of only 34 players, about the normal size in Beethoven's time. Given the professionalism of these players, the result was a transparency and buoyancy of sound rarely heard from the jumbo orchestras of our time…[David Taylor's] technique of course was superb, most notably in the Heifetz cadenzas… Here that added up to splendid music. In the 7th Symphony -- like the concerto, a storehouse of irresistible tunes -- Heatherington made the most of his orchestra's athletic leanness. Its playing was live and alert. In the melancholy second movement, which is often done like a dirge, he took Beethoven's allegretto marking literally; the grief was there, but had the steady pulse of underlying health. The Scherzo skipped along like a champion jumping rope. The finale seemed a combination dance and march, a triumph with no losers.
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Soprano Elizabeth Kainz and baritone Lauri Vasar are singers who belong together, musically if not otherwise. Sharing the stage Sunday with the Ars Viva! Symphony Orchestra under Alan Heatherington, they showed wonderfully matched voices, personalities and musicianship. Beyond that, the all-Mozart program was tailored to their special talents. Both clearly reveled in the 12 arias and duets they sang (13 with the encore the audience demanded). All those elements in combination turned "An Evening of Mozart" into a glittering festival. What distinguished it most was a feeling of effortless enjoyment on the part of all the performers. Kainz and Vasar have big, free-riding voices and notable skill as actors. The orchestra played with its usual polished elegance. And the music, Mozart in top form, was the sound of perfection.The program, at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, was neatly packaged. Vocal selections were from "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," "Cosi fan tutte," and "The Magic Flute." The orchestra provided an overture for each group, the first three with their own overtures, the "Flute" group paired with music for "La Clemenza di Tito." This was an ideal showcase for Kainz and Vasar. It's hard to say whether they were more delightful alone or in combination... Heatherington and his fine orchestra gave the "Prague" symphony the buoyant, eager sound of musicians who love what they're doing.
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Striking a balance between playing music that an audience wants to hear and playing music an audience needs to hear is ever a delicate business for orchestras, particularly when the overall level of listener sophistication may not be especially high. But Alan Heatherington has perfected that art to a fine science with his Ars Viva ensemble, as witness the group's season-opening program Sunday at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie. Of course, it helps that he is one of Chicago's most able conductors, with some of the area's best instrumentalists at his disposal. Musicians enjoy the challenges he presents them and so, apparently, do his audiences. Subscriptions have more than doubled over last year, a clear sign that the public appreciates his imaginatively conceived concerts and trusts him to execute everything at a high level... Many contemporary composers seem to have forgotten that the violin is essentially a lyrical instrument; Polifrone is not one of them. The soloist sings almost without interruption in the three movements of the new concerto... I would recommend the Polifrone to violinists who complain that nobody is writing any late 20th Century concertos that are grateful to perform or that audiences will enjoy at first hearing. Certainly Sharon Polifrone argued its musical merits with absolute skill and dedication, while her Ars Viva colleagues supported her to the fullest... [Heatherington] transformed his chamber orchestra into an elegant sonic facsimile of a Gallic ensemble for Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin but reserved the evening's best performance for Schumann's wonderful if rarely heard Overture, Scherzo and Finale.
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Conceptually nonlinear though it may have been, the season-closing program of Ars Viva... once again demonstrated the easy camaraderie and close musical rapport between Alan Heatherington and his all-star chamber orchestra. Made up largely of Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera Orchestra members, Ars Viva under Heatherington's direction showed why they have quickly earned a reputation as one of the area's finest musical ensembles. Heatherington could also have success in stand-up comedy judging by his wryly witty extemporized introduction to Smetana's "Vltava" (or "Die Moldau"). The popular excerpt from "Ma Vlast" received a wonderfully fresh and unhackneyed performance... In Rachmaninoff's beloved war-horse [Piano Concerto No. 2], the young pianist certainly demonstrated a world-class technique and brilliance to burn... Rex Martin... proved a capable soloist [in the Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto] projecting this characteristic blend of English pastoralism and bumptious good fun with flair... [In the] Symphony No. 7 of Sibelius... the Ars Viva musicians' playing was superb. Heatherington ensured that the climaxes had the proper austere majesty and he elicited especially fine string playing, with the violins having a sheen and richness no longer extant at the post-renovation Symphony Center.
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We are constantly told the importance of getting American music assimilated into the concert repertory, yet how many American conductors are willing to use the power of their positions to make it happen? Alan Heatherington is one conductor who takes that objective seriously, not in any didactic sense but simply because he loves this music and wants his audience to love it, too. He proved as much with the program "Music of America" performed by his ever-enterprising chamber orchestra, Ars Viva... Neither Copland score turns up with any regularity at the Chicago Symphony, so one was doubly grateful to encounter them both here. Heatherington played the familiar suite from "Appalachian Spring" in its unfamiliar original version for 13 instruments. The lean, transparent scoring lets you hear how each piece of the musical jigsaw puzzle fits into place; it also makes every player, in effect, a soloist. The Ars Viva musicians were equal to the task, responding with luminous sound in the opening pages, wending their way alertly through the tricky dancing meters of the fast music... Tucker's open-hearted lyricism made a nice foil to the drypoint neo-classicism of Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto... Both scores were appreciatively played.
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Very few orchestras have their own choruses, but Ars Viva... music director Alan Heatherington also conducts the New Oratorio Singers, and... the two groups combined to pack a powerful punch. The presentation was the Bruckner "Requiem," a vast work which is rarely heard... It is a wonder this lovely work is not done more often... Music director Heatherington gave program notes from the stage. He was particularly eloquent when speaking about Richard Strauss's "Metamorphosen" for 23 solo strings, written when the composer was 80... The performance by the Ars Viva's strings was sublime and beautiful.
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Alan Heatherington returned to his former musical haunts for the first concert of Ars Viva's new season Sunday at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie. The opening program found the music director exploring that area of the repertoire with which local audiences have long associated him--music for string orchestra... Heatherington likes to engage his audience in fresh discovery as much as he likes to stretch his players. He began with one of Gould's final works, his 1993 "Stringmusic," which won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1995. Composed for Mstislav Rostropovich, the five movements include a heavy Slavic "Tango," a somber and enigmatic "Dirge," a Mahlerian "Ballad" and a jubilant hoedown, titled "Strum," complete with strenuous fugato ending with a loud pizzicato snap. A good foil was Elegy, a concert piece Gould wrote as "a personal comment" to the score he composed for the 1976 NBC television movie "Holocaust." The composer never lost his popular touch, even in his serious works, and this brief, simple blues for strings (encored at the end of the program) has the sweet accessibility one associates with his best music. Heatherington's strings, a bit scrappy sounding early on, really distinguished themselves in the program's neo-classical works, Ben-Haim's Concerto for String Orchestra (1947) and Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1925). The German-born Ben-Haim, who died in 1984, was the leading Israeli composer of his generation. His string-orchestra concerto, written on the eve of the creation of the new Israeli state, is an appealing, expertly crafted fusion of Western classical and Middle Eastern vernacular styles. At times the music echoes the rhythmic angularity and harmonic astringency of Bartok. At other times it veers off into stylized Sephardic chant. Bloch's First Concerto Grosso is much better known, one of the key masterpieces of the early 20th Century's rush to pay homage to J.S. Bach. With David Schrader presiding decisively and dexterously at the piano, Heatherington wrung every last ounce of sonority, fervor and polyphonic drama from this invigorating score. The performance was Ars Viva at its best.
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Ars Viva began its season with concerts for wind and string ensembles, later progressing to chamber-orchestra dimensions. So, it's fitting that Alan Heatherington's supremely flexible, moveable musical feast ended its second season in full symphony orchestra guise Sunday night at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. It's heartening that Heatherington and his superb core of the area's best musicians seem to be gathering a loyal audience... The 18-year-old Ching-wen Hsiao was protagonist in Tchaikovsky's not unfamiliar Piano Concerto No. 1. The young musician brought a piquant delicacy to the Andante and pounced on the barnstorming passages like an uncaged panther... Heatherington's reading of Dvorak's Symphony No. 8 blended bucolic charm and fiery energy in near-ideal fashion... The contrasting expression of this evocative music was skillfully brought out, and the Ars Viva brass whipped up plenty of excitement in the finale. The concert led off with a lively and incisive rendering of Mozart's concise Symphony No. 32.
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Alan Heatherington's Ars Viva Orchestra demonstrated its bona fides once again Sunday night in Skokie as one of Chicagoland's very finest chamber orchestras. Forming a sharp contrast with the lighter string Serenades of Elgar and Dvorak was Robert Lombardo's "Threnody" for octet, performed in a newly revised version. Lombardo's angular string lines rove widely and venture into dark tonal regions, yet, directed and played with great sensitivity as here, this music achieves a spare yet moving and transcendent eloquence. Elgar's nostalgic Serenade was well-turned by the Ars Viva string players, Heatherington drawing out the composer's uniquely English brand of wistful yearning in the Larghetto, with a knowing, idiomatic hand. In Dvorak's more broadly spun Serenade in E Major, Heatherington and his players provided one of the most outstanding renderings of this much-performed work heard in years. Faultlessly paced by the conductor, the Ars Viva musicians' seamless ensemble and richly committed playing evoked all the bucolic charm and pastoral lyricism of this music with consummate skill. The famous Waltz was elegantly turned, and in the long-breathed Larghetto, Heatherington's finely judged, hairpin rubato drew out the deeper vein of feeling in Dvorak's long arching lines. A terrific performance.
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It's one thing to gather 48 of the area's best orchestral musicians on one stage, quite another to get them to play Beethoven and Brahms like the big boys downtown. But that is pretty much what the conductor achieved in a concert that framed Beethoven's Emperor Concerto with Brahms' Tragic Overture and Symphony No. 1... Having a hand-picked orchestra with splendid players such as David Taylor, Robert Morgan and Lyon Leifer manning first-chair positions helps, of course. But the C-Minor Symphony also demands a conductor who can keep a firm hand on matters architectural while fleshing out Brahms' heroic sprawl with subtle details of phrasing, accent and rubato. A few wrong entrances did nothing to lessen the impact of a performance that put the Chicago Symphony's current brand of thick, shapeless Brahms well in the shade.
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Chicago's musical life has a new kid on the block, and he'll be able to take care of himself just fine. Ars Viva, an orchestra and chorus made up of superb and seasoned local musicians, gave its inaugural concert in Evanston Sunday and met a challenge set by its own director: to bring audiences in each concert "something old and something new," a musical treasure of the past paired with a new work by a living composer. Alan Heatherington, artistic director and conductor, hoisted these colors proudly.
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