Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday January 27, 2012 3:50PM CST
Carl Orff and Riccardo Muti, at rehearsals of Carmina Burana at the Berlin Philharmonie, June 1980
Riccardo Muti returns for a perplexing program with the CSO
The problematic 'Carmina' outclassed by Schubert; Russian overture fizzles
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BY ANDREW PATNER
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Riccardo Muti’s return to the podium Thursday night with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a three-week residency and a California tour was cause for both excitement and bewilderment. The first downtown CSO performance in 17 years of Carl Orff’s popular and populist Carmina Burana assured a sold-out house and an attentive audience. A world première of a new overture by an ex-Soviet composer piqued curiosity. And a too-neglected early Schubert symphony promised a showcase of the orchestra in an important focus of Muti’s repertoire.
That the 1815 Schubert D Major Symphony No. 3, D. 200, was the evening’s highlight was instructive. When Muti’s intense focus on every measure of a score and his gift for lyricism meet a work of the first order, listeners -- and players -- are in for a treat. The CSO’s top-flight wind principals seem to go even an extra mile for the music director; their solos and interplay here had listeners floating on air.
Take this same care and respect, and apply it to a trifle, such as Dmitri Nikolaevich Smirnov’s 2008-2011 Space Odyssey, derivative in style as well as title, and you get -- not much. But at least it’s the not much that was created by the composer.
Smirnov, 63, a prolific creator of some 160 numbered works and a close associate of CSO artistic programing adviser Gerard McBurney, supplied these seven minutes of impressions of space flight for the CSO’s upcoming tour to Russia. Simultaneously sprawling and episodic, and certainly coming near no new ground let alone breaking any, it rarely rose to the level of movie music. Smirnov is a brave survivor of both communism and post-Soviet cultural politics. But an admirable character does not ensure compositional quality.
Nor, necessarily, does a repugnant character make for poor artistic achievement, although in the case of Carl Orff, it certainly does not help. Perhaps the basest musical opportunist of the 20th century, the Bavarian Orff, whose only ideology was self-advancement, thrived under Nazism, surfing the success of his 1937 Carmina Burana to fame, fortune, commissions for “Aryan” works, and protection from service on the Russian front. At war’s end, he engaged in some of the tallest tale-telling about his life during Nazism, falsely claiming not only to have been anti-Nazi, but even to have been a resistance founder.
None of this background is mentioned in Phillip Huscher’s otherwise fine and contextual program notes on the score and this is a shame. And while Muti and many others have discussed how the “O Fortuna” chorus and other sections of the hour-long Carmina have been used to promote products and sporting events, it was Joseph Goebbels who first recognized the oratorio's empty passion for passion’s sake.
Muti’s performance focus is, thoughtfully, on the texts, secular and often profane poems by 13th-century theology students in a monastery near Munich. (Hence the title, “Songs from Beuern,” the village of the Benedictine monastery.) Muti’s sense of their tragic nature and his special care with the score led Orff, then 84, to write the younger Muti that his 1980 Berlin performances of the work constituted “a second première.”
Certainly, Muti does not overdo things with this piece that has blasted through dorm rooms for decades. With 50 members of the Chicago Children’s Choir for the sexually charged “Courts of Love” section, Muti gets the precision and the jarring effects he seeks. But except for the intricate “Veni, veni, venias” double chorus, the Chicago Symphony Chorus itself appeared disengaged and not at its expected level; orchestral sections sometimes seemed manic.
I’m not sure why Muti chose to use a countertenor for the work’s “roasted swan” poem, when the sound of a strained natural tenor voice is what Orff intended. However, Croatian-born Max Emanuel Cencic was also underpowered, and Neapolitan soprano Maria Grazia Schiavo lacked the hypnotic quality necessary for her solos to be most effective. French baritone Stéphane Degout, a charming Papageno in The Magic Flute at Lyric Opera this winter, was the strongest of the trio, though a bit uniform across his many changing roles. The audience gave the performance a five-minute ovation.
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Note: For reasons of space and flow within the review, I condensed the following section which appears above as the fifth paragraph:
Nor, necessarily, does a repugnant character make for poor artistic achievement, although in the case of Carl Orff it certainly does not help. Perhaps the basest musical opportunist of the 20th century, the Bavarian Orff, whose only ideology was self-advancement, thrived under Nazism, surfing the success of his 1937 Carmina Burana to cash prizes, commissions, and even protection from wartime service through the fall of the Third Reich. He aggressively pursued the chance to write a substitute for Felix Mendelssohn’s “non-Aryan” score to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and then relentlessly promoted the now forgotten work throughout the war. And at war’s end he engaged in some of the tallest tale-telling about his life during Nazism, falsely claiming not only to have been in the resistance, but to have been an actual founder of the White Rose movement for which his friend Karl Huber was guillotined in 1943.
