Here is my Friday July 17 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Wednesday July 15, 2009, Grant Park Music Festival concert with guest conductor Gilbert Varga. The program is repeated this Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Tonight holds a one-time program of music of composers from the former Soviet Union including Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto with young Japanese-Canadian soloist Karen Gomyo.
Varga treads light and heavy in Grant Park
Conductor shows range in debut with orchestra
The Grant Park Music Festival continues to show that it can do heavy-duty (Bruckner, with guest conductor Hans Graf, last week) and lighthearted (Gilbert & Sullivan, with chorus director Christopher Bell conducting, last weekend) in top form. In an all-French program to be repeated on Saturday, the Swiss-based Gilbert Varga (above, left) led works that moved somewhere down the middle.
Varga, the London-born son of the great Hungarian violinist Tibor Varga, leads orchestras around the world and has slowly been making an advance on American ensembles. For his Grant Park debut, he offered an hourlong, intermissionless concert with a much-loved masterwork by Ravel; the overture for Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, rarely played, although its themes, notably the "French can-can," are well-known, and two out-of-fashion works by César Franck and Albert Roussel (above, right).
GRANT PARK ORCHESTRA
The four works were played chronologically, which reminded listeners that French music did not necessarily "progress" in the ways that Austro-German works did. French sound worlds did not always change in the seven-decade span surveyed here, or at least did not change in a particular order or direction.
From the overture to Offenbach's 1858 opera to Franck's 1882 Le chasseur maudit ("The Accursed Huntsman") to Roussel's 1930 Second Suite from his ballet Bacchus and Ariadne, the pieces display a devotion to certain ideas of classicism, "neo-" and otherwise, and musical storytelling. In the hands of Ravel, here in his 1908 Mother Goose Suite, these tendencies are taken to the highest level.
Varga gave each piece its due, and in the 20-minute ballet suite, reminded us why former Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Jean Martinon championed Roussel's music and why CSO principal conductor Bernard Haitink includes the composer's energetic Third Symphony in his repertoire.
Friday night at Grant Park brings another debut conductor, Kirill Karabits, a young Ukrainian who is taking over the reins of England's Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in the fall, with a similarly intriguing program of music written by Ukrainian, Russian, and Armenian composers of the former Soviet Union.
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