Here is the full version of my Saturday February 20 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday February 18, 2010, all-Stravinsky concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, vocalists including mezzo Michelle DeYoung, and the men of the Chicago Symphony Chorus.
Igor Stravinsky, designer Ewald Dülberg, and conductor Otto Klemperer at the 1928 Kroll Opera production of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex in Berlin.
Michael Tilson Thomas takes up thorny Stravinsky with CSO
Works from the 1920s rarely heard
Almost 40 years after his death at 88 in New York City, Igor Stravinsky remains one of the most beloved 20th century composers and also one of the hardest to comprehend completely. His early Russian ballets, The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, are still simultaneously revolutionary and crowd pleasers. Although he actively wrote music almost until the end, the works of his last two decades are little known and rarely played. And the works of the middle years of his professional life, his “Neoclassical” period, remain hotly contested with some calling them ingenious and others -- from Pierre Boulez to "mainstream" concertgoers finding them deadly dull.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Michael Tilson Thomas, now music director of the San Francisco Symphony, knew Stravinsky, and he has remained devoted to the exiled eminence and his music, including those pieces of the 1920s, between the popular 1920 Pulcinella and the sublime 1930 Symphony of Psalms, that make up the weight of Tilson Thomas’s concerts as guest conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this week.
His program moves in reverse chronological order, opening with the slight 1943 Ode whose bouncy middle movement comes from a hunting scene from a score by Stravinsky for an abandoned Jane Eyre film project, moving on to the 1927-28 ballet Apollon musagète and closing with the grand 1926-27 “opera-oratorio” Oedipus rex, complete with vocal soloists, the men of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, and a certain Patrick Stewart as narrator.
The Ode had never been played by the CSO at Orchestra Hall and only once at Ravinia, in 1962, with Aaron Copland conducting; the Apollo, well known in the theatre as an important Balanchine ballet, only once before as well, with Tilson Thomas as it turns out, in 1983. The problem here was that even slighter Stravinsky requires careful preparation and focus and the choppy hash that Tilson Thomas made of the Apollo rarely allowed the piece to soar and gave the sense that the work -- new to virtually all of the orchestra -- had never been played through in rehearsal.
Oedipus rex has been criticized for being distant, stagey, and self-indulgently archaic. Thursday it was all red meat. Given by the CSO over the years by Sir Georg Solti, Claudio Abbado, and James Levine, with excellent, disciplined opera soloists and with Duain Wolfe’s male choristers especially well prepared, the work moved forcefully with its own strange logic over its 51 minutes. Stewart was almost too helpful to the audience in his English narration (the sung text is in Latin) in a role that is meant to add to the artistic distance.
But tenor William Burden as the doomed king, bass-baritone Ryan McKinny in three roles, and tenor Stanford Olsen in one had just the right sense of a piece that hovers between genres. Mezzo Michelle DeYoung, tremendous in Bluebeard’s Castle here just last month, was a searing Jocasta in her 10-minute scene. With or without proper direction, the CSO played superbly throughout the program.
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