My Monday April 18 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the April 15 and 16, 2011 Verdi and Berlioz Chicago Symphony Orchestra programs at Carnegie Hall in New York with music director Riccardo Muti.
Carnegie Hall crowd shows love for Riccardo Muti, CSO, chorus
Verdi's 'Otello' scores big, Berlioz double bill is focused
BY ANDREW PATNER
In this photo provided by Carnegie Hall, soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, center left, tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko, center, and baritone Carlo Guelfi, center right, perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Riccardo Muti, in a performance of Verdi's Otello, Friday, April 15, 2011 at Carnegie Hall in New York. (AP Photo/Carnegie Hall, Richard Termine)
NEW YORK — The first Carnegie Hall concerts of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with its music director Riccardo Muti showed both of the happy sides of this newly minted cultural coin.
Carnegie Hall is . . well, Carnegie Hall, an international pinnacle, an American showcase, an acoustical temple. To it come the boldface names, especially when another boldface name is also on the podium. There in the first tier Friday night for a concert performance of Verdi’s Otello was Francis Ford Coppola with Cristina Muti, the conductor’s wife and herself an opera stage director. A few boxes away: Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a funder of this production and tour. Legendary mezzo Marilyn Horne. Pianist Emanuel Ax. (Both are Carnegie trustees.) Ravinia’s James Conlon. Chicago patrons and CSO trustees.
Down the aisle from us on the main floor parquet: bass-baritone superstar Bryn Terfel. Music biographer and Muti confidant Harvey Sachs. And critics . . . in numbers you wouldn’t believe.
But to it also come the true connoisseurs, the music teachers and students, the European and Asian immigrants and refugees, “the children of the paradise” who fill the back of the upper balcony. And when the program at this showcase for symphony orchestras and solo recitals holds an opera -- and a Verdi opera led by the greatest Verdi conductor active today at that -- you can add the vocal coaches and singers, the opera fanatics, and the kind of people who shout “Viva Muti!” as if they were at La Scala in Milan or the Rome Opera. New Yorkers are a bit starved for Muti in opera: He has conducted only once at the Metropolitan here, a year ago. But even with a rare and much lesser Verdi work, Attila, audiences and critics alike thought he raised the bar there by a league. When he headed up the Philadelphia Orchestra he brought a series of Verdi operas in concert to Carnegie in the 1980s. People today get teary-eyed telling you about them. Muti + CSO + Carnegie + Verdi = You’re at an “event.”
Muti, who has at least two sides himself, is happy to have the musical and other celebrities there. But it’s the latter group he plays to: the people who carry scores or mouth the lyrics along with the soloists, or the children, lucky enough to be brought by their parents or by Grandma, hearing their first concert, their first opera, their first “event.”
A man who, other than the time spent with his family and working in rehearsal, is happiest, literally, alone on an island somewhere, studying scores, Muti is going for the closest a human being can get to perfection and driving his orchestral and vocal colleagues along with him.
Chicagoans heard over the last two weeks at Orchestra Hall how exciting, how dramatic, how personal, how musical Muti’s Otello is. How the orchestra itself tells the story. They heard a vocal ensemble largely made up of debuting and younger singers from Latvia, Bulgaria, Argentina, and the United States come together for a final hour that sent chills up the spine. They heard the CSO Chorus, already the standard setter, set a new standard for depth and breadth. And New Yorkers on Friday heard the additional payoff of forces who’d given three performances already and had another rehearsal on the stage here at Muti’s insistence as well as that little fire that says “Carnegie Hall.”
Tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko was announced as suffering a stomach ailment and being on medication before launching into the title role. As Abraham Lincoln might have said, find out what medication and send a case to all tenors. It was his finest performance in the role to date and the first that made you think this is a fellow who really could be going places. Soprano Krassimira Stoyanova proved again that she is today’s Desdemona. And Italian veteran baritone Carlo Guelfi, though still limited vocally, has the theatrical side of the villain Iago down cold, ice cold.
Vocal and instrumental soloists got lots of love from all tiers of the audience. The orchestra and chorus received roars. Terfel appeared almost hypnotized by the 30-member contingent of the Chicago Children’s Choir and gave them a one-man (but what a one man) standing ovation at the end of Act 2. At the end of the full concert, Muti, chorus director Duain Wolfe, and CCC director Josephine Lee probably had to ask the house manager to stop the 10-minute ovation.
Saturday night was calmer. An unusual pairing of works by Hector Berlioz -- one, the Symphonie fantastique, regarded by many as overplayed, the other, Lélio, or The Return to Life, unknown to almost anyone -- is not going to match an Italian opera spectacle. But here it was, another sold-out house, and there on stage was Gerard Dépardieu, the French film icon who has declaimed the narration of Lélio with Muti in Salzburg, Paris, and, in September, Chicago. His leg problems behind him and some weight lost, the grand middle-aged man was downright spry by the curtain.
The text of this hourlong 1832 hodgepodge of a sequel to the 50-minute 1830 symphony (there was an internission) reminds you why it is dear to Muti’s heart. Music, Depardieu/Berlioz emphasized, is much more than entertainment. Trying is not enough unless you are giving everything. And if a passage is marked mezzo forte (“a bit loud”) do not play it fortissimo (“very loud”).
Greek tenor Mario Zeffiri and Midwest bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen again sang their haunting ballads and songs. The chorus and orchestra worked their magic again, the latter in both works and this time with acting principal clarinet John Bruce Yeh getting and earning the solo and ovation honors. A Sunday matinee awaiting, Muti, vigorous and happy despite his recent, and recently repaired, health problems, gave his “by-bye” wave after five minutes this time. The crowd would probably still be there if he had not.
Comments