At 80, Witold Lutoslawski is the grand old man and the conscience of Eastern European music. Though apolitical by nature–so he claims–he’s seen his life and career shaped by five decades of upheaval in his native Poland. After his father was executed by Russians for advocating nationalism, Lutoslawski was imprisoned by Nazis and later wrote resistance songs for the underground movement. After the war he was censured by the communist regime because he chose to be a modernist without party affiliation....

When it comes to programming, Concertante di Chicago, arguably one of the country’s best and least heralded chamber orchestras, shows a great deall of savvy in making unlikely yet totally logical connections. Most recently, it’s come up with this music-theater double bill. Written more than a century apart, Mozart’s one-act opera The Impresario and Stravinsky’s 1918 stage work The Soldier’s Tale are both minor masterpieces about obsessions and temptations–even though one is a comedy, the other a cautionary tale....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now the school reform says that the union may waive parts of the contract to implement local school reform. I have two suggestions to change the law on this point. One is that the vote to make local school changes remove any possibility of a veto by the higher union bureaucracy. Further, the state’s collective bargaining law be amended to allow individual schools to strike over local work rules and working conditions....

In the 19th century Eastern Europe provided some of classical music’s biggest guns, but its record is less remarkable this century–especially in the three decades after the end of World War II, during which musicians behind the Iron Curtain found themselves more or less toeing the party lines. Now that the cold war is over, there are strong signs of creative fervor and individualistic music-making in the region. In this recital the performance collective Cube will present recent chamber works by some of the Young Turks....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In re your story “Is Nothing Sacred?” [June 9], the issue for the so-called “conservatives” is not language but rather theology. It has to do with God’s relationship to human beings and our relationship, one to another. In the American psyche there run ugly and stubborn strains of individualism and fascism. These ideas inform the conservative approach to human relationships–i....

SCANDAL With John Hurt, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Bridget Fonda, Ian McKellen, Leslie Phillips, Britt Ekland, Daniel Massey, Roland Gift, and Jeroen Krabbe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As far as the press was concerned, what happened in 1963 was that Christine Keeler sold a story to the Sunday Pictorial for 1,000 pounds stating that she had been sleeping with John Profumo, the British war secretary, as well as Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet naval attache who was revealed as a possible spy....

Listening to a Happy Mondays record (their first LP, Bummed, or an extraordinary new single called “Step On”) is like having your dance partner knock your hat off, slap your face, rip off your shirt pockets, and shake you violently–you object to it in principle, but in the end you find yourself bopping along disconcertedly. The band is an amusingly amoral bunch of Manchester, England, hoodlums who by means of a dizzy mix of acid house beats and good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll excess have found themselves the unlikely kingpins of the Manchester Sound....

I, FIGARO That’s about half of I, Figaro, and if it’s all there was, the show might still be worth the trip to Curious Theatre Branch’s cramped new quarters in Wicker Park. Beaumarchais the man, of course, was a brilliant playwright and a still more brilliant controversialist, a master of invective, who fought and won his private quarrels in the court of public opinion through pamphlets that are still read as literature....

“I can be a bastard; I can be a son of a bitch. I just stand there and say, ‘Are you going to keep this or throw it out?’” says Jeffrey Mayer. For a thousand bucks he’ll stand at your work space–be it lavish or humble–and hand you papers, letters, memos, piece by piece: he’ll go through all the clutter on your desk, and sadistically demand to know exactly what you’re going to do with it....

Lead Story Thomas N. Eichler and his wife were arrested in Virginia Beach, Virginia, in May and charged with burglary and other crimes related to their stalking a Middletown, Pennsylvania, woman for more than two years. Allegedly Eichler had stolen a key to the woman’s apartment and had taken various belongings, including items of her underwear, and then neatly packaged them in plastic and labeled them with the date taken. Eichler also had more than 1,000 photographs of the woman....

In 1890, a group of American Shakespeare lovers gathered in New York’s Central Park intent upon releasing all the species of birds mentioned in the Bard’s plays that were not already native to America. Since Shakespeare mentions ostriches and peacocks, among over 50 other species, it must have been quite a sight. One of the birds introduced to this country was the ravenous English starling, which quickly deposed the New York state bird, the eastern bluebird, from its nesting places....

Tired of a century when satirical absurdities are routinely outclassed by the next morning’s headlines? Well, here’s your chance to see if you can still tell the difference. Twelve of the statements below are true–one is a ringer. If you can spot the false item, we’ll award you a free year’s subscription to the Reader (you pick it up at your favorite location every Friday). Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“Is that her real name? Sugar?” asked a young woman on her way into the ladies’ room at Gordon restaurant. “I had a dog named Sugar.” “We’re Sugar’s Chicago bookseller,” said Bill Rickman, president of Kroch’s. He looked around the tony party room, which was something like a cross between the old Stork Club in New York and Brennan’s restaurant in New Orleans. “We call this catering,” he said, pointing to a huge stack of sexy red books on a table covered by a starched white cloth....

Those lucky enough to have seen Jane Campion’s eccentric and engaging shorts (such as Passionless Moments and A Girl’s Own Story) have reason enough to expect her first feature to be a breakthrough for the Australian cinema. But nothing quite prepares one for the astonishing freshness and sheer weirdness of this black comedy about two sisters (Genevieve Lemon and Karen Colston) locked into a deadly struggle. Practically every shot is unorthodox, unexpected, and poetically right, and the swerves of the plot are simultaneously smooth, logical, and so bizarre you’ll probably wind up pondering them days later....

THE CHRIS HOGAN SHOW at Kill the Poets Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Watching Chris Hogan and John Lehr’s fully improvised hour-long show the other night, I was reminded of those wonderfully giddy afternoons–and not just because Hogan and Lehr, in the great tradition of buddy comedy teams, seem as natural together onstage as best pals. These two go about the business of improvising scenes with such joy and playfulness, and such unworried disregard for the established rules of improvisation, that they seem less like professional performers (though they’re both members of a group called Ed) than like kids having a blast pulling characters and dialogue out of thin air....

THE DUCK VARIATIONS And yet 18 years ago, that dialogue was an irritant. Then we weren’t accustomed to his characters’ stop-and-start exchanges, which sounded like a blowhard conversation you overheard on a bus whether you wanted to or not (the more scatological stuff was clearly dredged up on a late-Saturday-night ride). American Buffalo was crammed with characters you’d cross the street to avoid; their dead-end dialogue was just what they deserved and we didn’t....

How should health care be provided to the poor of Cook County? The debate is an old one, and it’s being heard again in current arguments over the future of Cook County Hospital. A bit of historical perspective may be in order. The Illinois “poor laws” of 1833 established the county as the political unit responsible for assisting the state’s poor and indigent. After all possible family resources were exhausted, a “pauper” was eligible to “receive such relief as his or her case may require, out of the county treasury....

The Return of Classics Illustrated “In trying to visualize them, I suddenly understood I didn’t know the full imagery of them. In ‘Eldorado,’ would you believe it, I didn’t understand that in the last illustration of the thing, the knight and his horse will be moldering bones, and the sort of glowing ghost of the two of them will be going up and away. The quest for Eldorado continues on after death and anybody who wants to get there has to keep going....

What’s the straight dope on speed reading? Evelyn Wood commercials in the late 70s showed people casually zipping through impressive-looking tomes, apparently having benefited from one of Evy’s speed-reading courses. The concept, as I recall it, was that one learned to read not word-by-word but line-by-line and eventually paragraph-by-paragraph. It was claimed that in spite of the breakneck speeds you would “achieve a higher level of comprehension.” It all seemed a bit implausible at the time....

Presidential election years generally cough up more than their share of political atrocities, but we would have to scour the history books to top televangelist Pat Robertson’s letter opposing an equal rights amendment in the state of Iowa. But these national atrocity-meisters have nothing on us. This is Chicago, the city where bridges break down by springing up. We produce a whole special kind of atrocity. Take, for example: One of the flippers was that champion of the oppressed, Alderman Luis Gutierrez, who was then rewarded by the mayor with the support of the white ethnic voting majority in the newly created “Hispanic” Fourth Congressional District, permitting the alderman to win his primary, which he would have lost if he’d had to rely on the Hispanic vote....