Three Days in November

If you know me or if you read these blogs enough, you know that I love Chicago.  One of the main reasons is the sheer number of cultural events that are offered.  I know of no place that offers as many as Chicago does--outside of New York City.  Three days earlier this month are indicative of at least one reason why I never tire of Chicago.

On Thursday, November 8, my friend Roger and I went to the “Newberry 125” exhibit at the Newberry Library.  This library has more than 1.5 million books, 5 million pages of manuscripts, and 500,000 historic maps.  And for their 125th year anniversary they brought out 125 of their most impressive items for display, many not often seen.  I can hardly list them all here, but some of the ones that most impressed me were a first edition of Montagne's Essais, a first edition of Candide, a Shakespeare First Folio (I had never seen one of these legendary books in person!), a first edition of Don Quixote, a pair of Anna Pavlova's dance slippers, a Mozart manuscript from when he was 9, mostly in his handwriting, the rest by his father, the first Bible in America--written in the Native-American language of Massachusett, a 1700/1715 version of the Popul Vuh, a Thomas Jefferson letter, and a number of beautiful maps, some with very odd versions of how we know the landscape looks.  It was a remarkable chance to see these extraordinary items.  I felt lucky and honored to be in their presence.

On Friday Roger and I went to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  This was my birthday gift to him.  They did three works: Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, William Walton’s Violin Concerto, and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony.  The Walton piece was new to me and I found the music quite beautiful; it didn’t hurt that it was performed by the wonderful Gil Shaham, who was fun to watch: he was all over the front of the stage, playing to the audience, then the concert master, and then practically under the conductor’s nose (Charles Dutoit, by the way).  The CSO is one of the world’s leading orchestras, and this performance made it clear why that is the case.  If those concerts weren’t so darned expensive, I would go to more.

Saturday I doubled up on events.  Starting around noon was the live in HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera of their new production of Thomas Adès’s The Tempest.  These live broadcasts are not quite the same as being in NYC at the Met, but they are as close as I can usually get--and they are very good.  They offer superb visual and sound quality coupled with the excitement of a live performance.  Since I’ve been to the Met I can picture the house.  This is a modern opera, premiered in 2007, and the music was sometimes startling and often beautiful, the staging was daring, and the singing excellent.  And it was conducted by the composer himself.

Then that evening it was off to the DePaul Concert Hall to hear the DePaul Symphony perform Mahler’s 9th Symphony.  This was another work I had not heard before, so that was a treat.  Perhaps the orchestra suffered a bit, in my view, from my having heard the CSO the day before, but it was still a fine evening, especially the last movement, perhaps the most haunting and deeply sad music I have ever heard.  Mahler may have known he was near death when he wrote it (scholars argue about such things), but it was his last completed symphony, and there is little doubt the music aches with a premonition of death.  Herbert von Karajan said this about the 9th:  “It is music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity.”  And after some initial rough moments in the performance, by the fourth movement the DePaul Symphony had a firm grip and there was absolute silence in the hall: no coughing or squirming; and there was a long pause at the end before the applause and standing ovation came.

All my days here aren’t so busy, although they could be.  But there’s enough going on that I never run out of things to do; in fact, I run out of money before I run out of events.