Here is my Wednesday July 7 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Tuesday July 6, 2010 Grant Park Chorus program at the Grant Park Music Festival. The concert was repeated on Thursday July 8, apologies for technical problems that prevented the review from being posted earlier.
A Bell-wether performance, courtesy of conductor and chorus
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
While Ravinia has essentially jettisoned the Chicago Symphony Chorus again this summer, the Grant Park Music Festival is using another of the city's three great professional choruses throughout the season. (Lyric Opera's is the other for those doing classical pub quizzes.)
This week, Taste of Chicago makes possible an annual indoor unaccompanied program at the Harris Theater by the Grant Park Chorus and its gifted and ever-upbeat, Belfast, Northern Ireland-born director Christopher Bell. This year's entry, heard Tuesday evening and to be repeated Thursday, is all French and ranges from the near-contemporary back to the Renaissance in a sensual whirlwind that lasts exactly an hour without a break but with a brilliant encore.
With diction and other additional coaching from Chicago-area perfectionist Richard Boldrey, the chorus moved without a hitch from sacred texts (some in Latin) to torrents of (intentional) nonsense to intimate love poems and even some early 16th century "adult content." Bell saw to it that musical matches were exquisite and idiomatic; his always wacky (a good wacky) stage introductions both allowed the choristers a few seconds to breathe between numbers and gave the large audience things to listen for in overwhelmingly unfamiliar repertoire.
The opening fin-de-siècle Two Choruses, Op. 68, by Camille Saint-Saëns were real finds. Beautiful paeans to nature and the artist's relation to it (the composer wrote the poems himself), they allowed Bell to show off his nine years of stellar work with this group. The chorus displayed a grasp of the works' full dynamic range, and Bell quipped: "It's great fun to sing so quietly when the score is marked ppp'or pppp.' We know loud. We know fortissimos. We usually have to sing behind an orchestra!" The application of this control to match the mood and language of each work and passage inspired pin-drop attention from the large audience.
Sacred pieces from 1960 by Maurice Duruflé left me cold with their lack of originality, but Olivier Messiaen's 1937 "O sacrum convivium" made you wonder why the organ and modern master didn't write more for chorus. Whatever one's own posture toward religion, Messiaen brought his mystical Catholicism to idiosyncratic life here with his haunting harmonies and melodic lines.
The same question can be asked of a great secular Frenchman, Debussy. His three settings of witty 15th century texts by Charles d'Orléans are too rarely heard. Alto Sarah Ponder was the deeply expressive soloist in the middle work.
Identified with delight, settings by Poulenc and Ravel did not disappoint, even if the Poulenc works were four unseasonal Christmas settings. Susan Nelson was the characterful soprano soloist in Ravel's "Trois beaux oiseaux de Paradis." Two settings by Pierre Passereau closed the program with humor and intimacy.
Bell also scored a point on a too-common occurrence of audience rudeness. After someone's electronic ringer went off at the end of a selection, Bell looked toward the offender as if he were watching the World Cup football pitch: "That was nice with the 'phone. Well done."
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