Here is my Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday October 22 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus concert with Riccardo Muti and vocalists Elin Rombo and Russell Braun.
Muti's Brahms 'Requiem' sticks to text yet digs deep
Conductor leads CSO in glorious, meditative reading
Repeats: Saturday October 24 at 8 p.m. and Tuesday October 27 at 7:30 p.m.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
BY ANDREW PATNER
For his two weeks this season as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s music director designate, Riccardo Muti is offering programs of works that were already on his plate before he agreed to take up full leadership of the CSO beginning in September 2010.
In some ways this has made these concerts more fascinating for they give an idea of what Muti has been wanting to play in recent years, the first and only time in his professional life where he was fully a free lance, not in charge of a major orchestra and its programming.
Last week’s elegant and lyrical performances of Bruckner’s Second Symphony showed that Muti could play a too-neglected work of this Austrian master without seeming just to bring coals to the CSO’s Bruckner-rich Newcastle.
Thursday night was another example of the unexpected with the much-loved Brahms A German Requiem, Op. 45 (1865-1868), a work that the Italian conductor had added to his repertoire only last year, at the age of 67, for concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival.
Muti not only loves music, he loves studying it and it was remarkable to hear what a conductor with more than 40 years of experience with both symphonic and operatic works brought to a concert-hall staple. Here was the same level of razor-sharp analysis of every measure and phrase, the attention to balance and interplay of sections, and the support for and implicit understanding of choral singing that marked his offerings last season of his countryman Verdi’s own Requiem, a work Muti could probably conduct in his sleep.
Under the late Sir Georg Solti, the Brahms could be a set of sonic explosions, for James Levine at Ravinia a display of polished beauty, and for Daniel Barenboim a roller coaster of psychic peaks and valleys. Muti for his part starts and stays with the score. The young Brahms chose the scriptural passages he did, those from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament dealing with consolation and peace for the most part, to make a very humane response to death, not one that followed any traditional religious ritual or tradition. Every musical passage, in Muti’s view, is tied into and relates and responds to these texts.
So brasses were muted but not silenced. Strings were foremost, always meditative. And wind lines ran through each section like threads of gold. Urgency was applied where the score demanded it and the timpani rolls of assistant principal Vadim Karpinos and the choruses that do deal with fear or dread appeared in proper measure making the whole work cohere as a philosophical statement.
The Chicago Symphony Chorus, prepared by Duain Wolfe and Muti himself, sounded as it hasn’t since last year’s Verdi, gentle and commanding in equal measure and in appropriate turn. Canadian baritone Russell Braun and Swedish soprano Elin Rombo seemed still to be settling in on Thursday but their contributions remained of a piece with a performance that was all about not only the audience listening to Brahms but every member of the orchestra and chorus listening to each other. As the baritone soloist sings, “Behold, I tell you a mystery.”
And a wholly beautiful and moving one at that.
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