Muti -- CSO -- Verdi Requiem -- what more is there to say?

Here is my Friday January 16 suntimes.com and Saturday January 17 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday January 15, 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert performance of Verdi's Requiem with Riccardo Muti.

Riccardo Muti finds right forum in Verdi's Requiem

Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

Verdi's Requiem Mass

with Riccardo Muti

and vocal soloists

Repeated Saturday Jan. 17 at 8 p.m.

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

In his first concerts as the official music director designate of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti wanted to make his many and varied qualities clear to both audience and orchestra.  By programming the great Requiem Mass of Verdi, Muti offered his soon to be orchestral home base a work he has been identified with for more than 30 years but also one that makes some of the greatest demands on an orchestra, large chorus, and a quartet of vocal soloists.

In speaking of great conductors there are those singled out for their great technique, others for their musicological knowledge, emotional weight, discipline, spontaneity, humanism, or personal magnetism and authority.  Each of these is a rare commodity and any one of them can bring fine musical results.  But how many times do we see all of them coming together in one performance and one set of rehearsals from one conductor?  From the moment he walked out onto the stage of Orchestra Hall until the last notes of the Verdi sounded just over 90 minutes later, Muti showed us the summary of nearly every possible positive quality a great conductor can possess.  With four decades on the podium behind him, Muti, at 67, has entered a phase of his career where, whether working with his Italian Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra or on limited rehearsal time with one of the great orchestras of the world, he inspires musicians to play even better than they thought was their best.

Add to this both Muti’s experience with the Requiem and his deep understanding of it and you are reminded that you are listening to the composer’s work and not some sort of showboating display by a conductor, athletic exercise by performers, or an ego presentation by operatic soloists.  Muti sees the 1874 masterwork as a distillation of everything Verdi knew about the Italian character and spirit as much as what he had gained as the re-inventor of Italian opera.  The Requiem, for Muti, as for Verdi, is not simply an opera in the guise of a sacred work.  Rather it is a marriage of everything from Etruscan paganism to Neapolitan superstition to human psychology with the ancient rites of the Latin church.

So, yes, the Dies irae thrills and scares and envelops us with its massive force.  But it is ever of a part with the singing of the strings (yes, for Muti the strings must sing, like human voices), the eerie quiet of the opening passages, the lyricism of the tenor’s Ingemisco, the poignancy of the soprano-mezzo duets of the Recordare and the Agnus Dei.  A cappella passages are as important as tutti, four “f” fortissimos meaningless without four “p” pianissimos.  

The CSO played on the edge of its collective seat throughout.  Concertmaster Robert Chen leading the violins from tender melodies through impossible tremolos.  Winds all shone and the brass played not only with its customary power but with a full range of volume and emotion.  And percussionist Cynthia Yeh and her bass drums and timpanist Vadim Karpinos offered visual as well as musical excitement.

When has the CSO Chorus sounded like this?  Not since founder Margaret Hillis at her peak.  Some 170 voices singing as one, powered from the bottom ranges, standing and delivering on cue with equal parts passion and precision and investing the softest passages with the greatest musicality.  Muti hand-picked his quartet of a Milanese, a Greek and two Russians.  Each of them, from the formidable mezzo Olga Borodina to the up and coming tenor Mario Zeffiri and bass Ildar Abdrazakov to Muti favorite soprano Barbara Frittoli was there only for the music -- solos were for Verdi, not the rafters, and I have never heard such a conversational, meditative, and balanced quartet.

Muti may not be able to top this ne plus ultra in the coming years, but we know now for sure what his standards are and how he is able to meet them.