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Tribune music critic John von Rhein at his home office in Chicago: "My central aim was to give the reading public an informed yardstick of opinion by which they could measure their own reactions to a given performance."
Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune
Tribune music critic John von Rhein at his home office in Chicago: “My central aim was to give the reading public an informed yardstick of opinion by which they could measure their own reactions to a given performance.”
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What’s it been like holding an aisle seat on four decades of classical music in Chicago? Exciting, challenging, illuminating, sobering, surprising, frazzling, humbling. And I’m just getting started.

It was 40 years ago — make that 40 years and nine months — that I moved from Akron to Chicago to become the Tribune classical music critic. In a couple of days I will retire from what has been the most rewarding experience of my career in journalism. To have occupied an important post at the same newspaper in a city known throughout the world as a major cultural center for that amount of time may be unprecedented. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity.

As I sift through memories of my four decades at this newspaper, I am struck by how things come full circle. My first review for the Tribune was of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing Bruckner and Michael Tippett, triumphantly, under Georg Solti. My final local review, last week, was of the CSO playing Rossini and Cherubini, triumphantly, under Riccardo Muti. I couldn’t have wanted a better performance to go out on, even if the prevailing mood was somber.

Those thousands of Thursday subscription concerts were the template of my life, as were the many nights I spent at Lyric Opera. Music directors and general directors and some of the world’s great artists came and went. I worked long hours to keep Tribune readers abreast of the action, along with everything else of importance that was happening in classical music in and around town.

My central aim was to give the reading public an informed yardstick of opinion by which they could measure their own reactions to a given performance. I never regarded my reviews as an excuse to snatch the spotlight from the music and those who create and perform it.

Contrary to what many assume of critics, I took no delight in panning performers. I always tried for balance in my reviews. I appreciated the power of the pen but was often reminded of the limitations of language when it comes to evoking arguably the most word-proof of the arts. When I erred, I usually erred on the side of generosity. My readers came to know me well enough through my carefully worded prose to know where I stood on a given performance, artist or issue. I aimed to dialogue not only with committed classical buffs but also with classical newbies seeking guidance.

I won’t miss working nights and weekends, the colliding deadlines, the endless stream of press releases clogging my computer, or having to interview performers I had just trashed (hello, James Galway). I will miss the adrenaline rush of sending my morning-after musings to the copy desk with the click of a key.

I’ll miss my regular contacts with musicians, composers, presenters, my loyal readers and the audience members I bump into at concerts and operas. I’ll miss traveling around the nation, Europe and Asia, covering musical events for the Tribune. Most of all, I’ll miss covering the CSO on a weekly basis, season upon season; my Thursday nights won’t be the same.

Lest my retirement invite dancing in the streets, bear in mind that I am only leaving the Tribune, not Chicago. I hope to continue to attend and write about performances, just more selectively. I want to take in more theater and dance, read more books, study more scores, maybe start a blog. I hope to delve more deeply through the estimated 20,000 or so recordings I have amassed over decades of compulsive, and really quite insane, collecting.

Meanwhile, I note with sadness the demise of classical music criticism in many quarters of a shrinking newspaper landscape. Meaningful arts coverage has become anathema to many news organizations, and I was fortunate in being able to write for a major newspaper that recognizes the importance of providing a forum for critical expertise in a packed urban arena of arts and entertainment.

As one of my colleagues observed when he gave up the daily newspaper grind a couple of years ago, the best advocacy for the arts is to treat the arts as central to a city’s identity, not as bread and circuses.

The first thing I learned when I began writing for this newspaper in October 1977 was that Chicago music can be as rough and tumble as the politics at City Hall.

For all my moderation in dispensing praise and brickbats, I was upbraided by symphony managers, castigated by CSO players and verbally accosted by the wife of a famous maestro about the content of my review of her husband’s performance — while I was dictating that very review over the phone to a Tribune copy editor.

The odd skirmish aside, I felt privileged to have a ringside seat for all but the first eight of Georg Solti’s remarkable seasons at the CSO. I was lucky to have heard many of the greatest conductors of their generations and review some gifted newcomers. I heard great singers and great instrumentalists in their prime.

I even rather enjoyed the silly promotional circuses orchestrated on behalf of pianist Vladimir Horowitz whenever the legendary Volodya would favor Chicago with a recital in the erratic Indian summer of his career.

I was around when Lyric general director Ardis Krainik fired Luciano Pavarotti for having canceled 26 of 41 scheduled performances with her company. I was also around to hear the megatenor in numerous splendid concerts and recitals and operatic performances.

I was there when composer Elliott Carter marched up the aisle of Orchestra Hall, indignant over the flippant tone of conductor Leonard Slatkin’s introductory remarks about his “Symphony of Three Orchestras.”

The Chicago Symphony is at a different place than it was when Solti (a great conductor for all his ferocity) was parading and recording his blockbuster repertory — a different place, indeed, from when Daniel Barenboim was turning Solti’s precision-tooled music machine into a more flexible, more humanized apparatus. Barenboim wasn’t my first choice to succeed Sir Georg — I much preferred Claudio Abbado — but I came to admire much of what he achieved, as pianist and conductor, in Chicago.

My admiration for Pierre Boulez was unbounded. The most significant achievement of Barenboim’s tenure, in my view, was his formalizing the CSO’s relationship with the late, great composer-conductor. I miss his bracing forays into the landmarks of 20th century music, his unique way of elucidating everything through his conducting and his lectures, his remarkable way of opening ears and minds to the music of our time.

I hope the Boulez legacy at the CSO won’t be sacrificed to dutiful premieres of “new music” that isn’t really new, amid endless recycling of standard repertory. Fortunately the orchestra remains in superior form under Muti, and the musical bond between maestro, players and public remains strong.

One of my chief regrets is that the $120 million makeover of Orchestra Hall, as part of the newly rechristened Symphony Center (as of 1997), did not bring an improvement of the acoustics in auditorium once considered an acoustical wonder. Despite several studies undertaken by acousticians brought in from the outside, nothing significant has been done to address problems Muti, the musicians and the press all acknowledge.

My sense of the present CSO administration is that it is caught in a kind of stasis between narrow board agendas and Muti’s dictates. What I wrote in 2015 remains, in essence, still true today:

“A new regime at the CSO has yet to articulate, at least in public, clear goals and bold strategies for building audiences, freshening the presentation of standard symphonic repertory and positioning a hidebound institution to confront the challenges faced by classical music in the early 21st century.”

For all that, I have no doubt that Chicago’s great orchestra will continue to remain among the world’s elite ensembles.

Nothing that happened at Lyric Opera during my Tribune tenure was bigger than Krainik’s rescuing the company from bankruptcy and setting it on a course of fiscal responsibility and artistic integrity that remained a model for her successors William Mason and Anthony Freud. I have qualms about impending cutbacks in the number of Lyric performances and next season’s ratio of warhorses to more unusual fare, but I don’t see any diminishing of star power at the house Carol Fox built.

People ask me which Lyric performances of the last four decades stick in my mind. More than I have room to cite in this space, that’s for sure. But here are some of them:

There was Andrew Davis’ company debut in 1987-88, when he conducted an elegant “Marriage of Figaro.” There was director Peter Sellars’ provocative “Tannhauser” in 1988-89. There was the company’s first integral “Ring” cycle in 1995-96. “Mourning Becomes Electra” stands out among the relatively few American operas Lyric produced during my time.

Some of my happiest nights at Lyric involved Handel operas — “Alcina,” “Partenope,” “Giulio Cesare,” “Hercules,” “Rinaldo.” I won’t soon forget hearing Ben Heppner and Jane Eaglen as Tristan and Isolde, or Natalie Dessay as Massenet’s Manon. More recent seasons brought memorable productions of “Elektra,” “Wozzeck,” “The Passenger,” “Les Troyens” and “Orphee et Eurydice.”

Bricks-and-mortar projects large and small helped to shape much of what I heard and saw over the last several decades.

The long-awaited, $52.7 million, 1,500-seat Harris Theater for Music and Dance, which opened in November 2003, proved a tremendous boon for Chicago Opera Theater, Music of the Baroque and other companies that base their well-being, at least in part, on maintaining a solid audience base in downtown Chicago.

The more recent renovation of the historic Studebaker Theater in the Fine Arts Building also is proving to be an intimate, attractive, cost-effective alternative downtown venue for COT, Haymarket Opera and other groups.

The opening of the spectacular, state-of-the-art Jay Pritzker Pavilion at the $475 million Millennium Park in July 2004 proved a game-changer for the resident Grant Park Music Festival. At long last, the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus had a home worthy of their music. That music has been thriving under the partnership of artistic director Carlos Kalmar and chorus master Christopher Bell.

During my watch, the Grant Park festival appropriated the frisson of classical music excitement I once found on a regular basis at my other off-season hangout, Ravinia. I was lucky to have covered much of what made the James Levine years so special at the summer home of the CSO, before more commercial attractions became the dominant force. Classical music hasn’t gone away at Ravinia, of course; the CSO and classical fare still have a presence in the mix. Even so, those of us with long memories must shed a furtive tear for what was and what probably will never be again.

I made it my business from the start to cover not only the big musical institutions and the major artists passing through town, but also the smaller ensembles that make an impact in their own right, that lend richness and depth to our musical life.

I like to think that regular attention from the Tribune helped spur the growth and proliferation of choral ensembles like Bella Voce, early music groups like Haymarket Opera, chamber music adventurers like the Spektral Quartet, new music movers and shakers like Ensemble Dal Niente, Eighth Blackbird and Third Coast Percussion, and so many others.

I have seen a historic rise to local, national and international prominence of women composers, conductors, musicians and arts administrators. Their time has come. Too bad it took so long to arrive.

Let me repeat, in closing, that I am tremendously grateful for the support shown me by the Tribune, its readers and the musical community as a whole during my time at the newspaper. I look forward to reading the reports of my longtime colleague, Howard Reich, now that he has added classical music to his duties as the Tribune’s jazz critic.

If I have contributed something of value to the cultural conversation, if I have succeeded, on occasion, to achieve what the French poet Charles Baudelaire said was his aim — to transform pleasure into recognition — then I retire a contented man.

To everyone who helped make the long ride so rewarding, I say: Thank you, and thanks for the memories.

John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.

jvonrhein@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @jvonrhein