Here is my Saturday November 27 suntimes.com and Monday November 29 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday November 26, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez and concertmaster Robert Chen.
Boulez's passion shines in launch of two-week CSO series
Concertmaster Chen is remarkable soloist in Ligeti concerto
Pierre Boulez has become such a familiar part of Chicago's musical life over the past 20 years that some might have taken for granted his flying to Chicago last month from Europe to step in with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for an ailing Riccardo Muti.
As those concerts of Mahler's Seventh Symphony -- subsequently televised on PBS's Great Performances -- made clear, even at 85 Boulez is never about merely filling time or adding a check mark to his conducting catalogue. And after spending several weeks here working on his own projects and attending an unusual range of CSO programs as a listener, Friday night he launched the two-week series of major concerts that he was actually scheduled to lead this season.
Boulez and his contemporary György Ligeti, a Romanian-born Hungarian Jew, led parallel lives as compositional investigators that crossed with some regularity from the early 1990s until Ligeti's death at 83 in 2006. A key work in their late-career collaboration was Ligeti's sole Violin Concerto written from 1990 to 1992, with Boulez leading his Ensemble Contemporain and its dedicatee Saschko Gawriloff in the first recording just after its première. While Ligeti had opposed the formal nature of Boulez's structural idea of composing, the two men each greatly admired the originality and integrity of the other's work. If Chicago had to wait almost two decades to hear this half-hour masterpiece, at least we are hearing it with Boulez at the helm.
And with the CSO's own concertmaster, Robert Chen, as the remarkable soloist. The five-movement work is unlike any other in the repertoire, and the solo part rises from and falls back into the chamber-sized orchestra sometimes in ways that are initially indiscernible. One could even argue that the soloist should be an ensemble's leader as his or her role is to push both audience and musicians to hear music in an entirely different way: Odd sounds from a strangely tuned violin and viola. Ocarinas and slide whistles and instruments reaching for the extremes of their range. Rhythms derived from the chants of African Pygmies and cross-ticking clocks. And a real or imagined folk melody that made its way into works throughout Ligeti's lifetime. Ligeti usually shunned electronics but was fascinated with the ways people heard things simultaneously and in layers in computer and digital eras, and the beautiful and lyrical Violin Concerto and Chen's total and never show-boating involvement brings this fascination to life.
Boulez placed the Ligeti in the midst of French works that also questioned accepted forms and ideas about sound of their time. The four haunting Symphonic Fragments from Debussy's 1911 music for a very strange stage spectacle, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by the poet-provocateur Gabriele d'Annunzio, opened the concert sounding almost like a space exploration. Ravel's own 1911 Mother Goose Suite and Debussy's 1903-05 classic La mer made up the second half in performances that seemed subdued only in the sense that they were never overwrought. Boulez, a connoisseur of visual art, particularly modern prints and works on paper, guided everything with an eye for subtlety that only brought out the richness and careful assembly of these four remarkable creations. That Chen returned to his concertmaster's chair after intermission only underscored the committed playing by the orchestra. English horn Scott Hostetler was most prominent among numerous fine section leader solos.
Note: The originally announced 1993-94 In Cauda II by the late Italian composer Franco Donatoni will be rescheduled due to the delayed delivery of the score. The Ravel proved an unexpectedly moving and effective replacement.
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