Add The Listening Sessions to your list of anonymous Chicago music blogs, which already includes Tonic Blotter and…um, yeah, the list kind of ends there, so far as I know. In the course of writing about the Saturday Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, Mr. or Mrs. Listening Sessions (who goes by the nom de bloge The Big Funk) manages to reference both Eddie Izzard and Woody Allen, thus earning him-/herself a spot in the (vaunted) Geelhoed Hall of Totally Awesome People. Apparently, someone booed Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony, thus giving the lie to the notion that Chicago is friendly to innovation.
Granted, I’m not a walking CSO archive, but I thought this had largely died out among Orchestra Hall denizens following the premiere in 1991 of Ralph Shapey’s Concerto Fantastique, which Shapey conducted. The archival tape makes the boos completely audible, and you can hear some irate steps up the aisle and doors slamming, to boot.
That piece was awarded the Pulitzer Prize before it was taken away, and the CSO premiered the Lutoslawski in 1983 under Sir Georg Solti, so maybe the boo-er was trying to suggest some common cause between Shapey and Lutoslawski? Or, no no, I’ve got it, eight years spanned the Lutoslawski-to-Shapey period, and seventeen years fell between Shapey and the repeat of Lutoslawski, and if you add the digits of seventeen you get eight, so our man is protesting against the Severely Numerological School of Orchestral Programming. (Perhaps…) Beats me, but I kind of wish I hadn’t gone home for the holidays, now.