Here is my Sunday July 12 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Friday July 10, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Ravinia concert of Mendelssohn and Mahler with James Conlon conducting, mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, and tenor Stuart Skelton.
Conlon and CSO show lifeless, lively sides
RAVINIA | Mendelssohn flat, but symphony of songs soars
BY ANDREW PATNER
There are some conductors who seem to need 100 people standing on top of their heads in order to really come alive. And I mean that almost literally.
For whatever reasons -- a need for some narrative? a connection to the human voice stronger than to purely instrumental music? a different sense of structure and balance? -- a number of orchestra leaders make a much stronger impression when in the pit of an opera house than on a stage podium before a symphony orchestra. Zubin Mehta, Cleveland Orchestra music director Franz Welser-Möst, even Lyric Opera of Chicago's excellent orchestra builder Sir Andrew Davis all achieve levels in opera that they rarely approach in the concert hall.
Ravinia's music director, James Conlon, would seem to fall into this category. In my experience, including visits to Conlon-led performances in Cologne, at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, and the Cincinnati May Festival, I have heard a sensitivity to singers and been moved by afternoons and evenings in the theatre that I have never found in his work with orchestras and instrumental soloists.
And that's how things played out Friday night in Highland Park when Conlon offered the second Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert of the season, starting with an account of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90, that was so lifeless and insipid that you simply could not understand Conlon's claims to adore the German prodigy born two centuries ago this year. A good student performance would have had more bite and character
And then, after intermission, came one of the most serious and seriously challenging works in the repertoire, Mahler's 1908-09 Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth"), and Conlon was fully there displaying passion and intelligence throughout this hourlong symphony of songs. Working closely with American mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, Conlon paced each of the set of six German translation-adaptations of contemplative ancient Chinese poetry just right and found a similar line and set of references to make the whole work cohere.
DeYoung, an alumna of Ravinia's Steans Institute for Young Artists, has made this work her own in recent years . Her ability to be both commanding and gently understanding, especially in the final half-hour "Der Abscheid" ("The Farewell"), was magical and Conlon was with her every step of the way, as he was with each of the many brief but essential solos from the orchestral ranks. Australian tenor Stuart Skelton started off with an inviting presence in his first "Drinking Song" but got caught up in excessive physical acting out in his two later sections.
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