Here is my Saturday April 23 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday April 21, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor James Conlon and violinist Leonidas Kavakos in works by Golijov, Sibelius, and Shostakovich (arr. Conlon).
Leonidas Kavakos (file photo)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra tries to piece it together
A commission, a concerto, and a suite from an opera don't always mesh.
BY ANDREW PATNER
SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED
Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m
Several circumstances combine to make unusual combinations in this week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts.
The orchestra abruptly shifts from stellar performances in Chicago and New York with its new music director, Riccardo Muti, whom the players revere and love, to Ravinia music director James Conlon, who is at another artistic level and with whom they have a cooler relationship. A nationwide commission with an important purpose found its place on the schedule. A major soloist offered a concerto. And Conlon presented the downtown première of the large suite he extracted some years ago from Shostakovich’s history-making opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
The parts did not fit together, but each was given a go and had its own strengths and weaknesses.
To commemorate a lifetime of service to the cause and health of American orchestras, 35 of these ensembles commissioned a work in honor of former CSO president Henry Fogel when he stepped down as head of the League of American Orchestras in 2008. They turned to Osvaldo Golijov, a former CSO Mead composer-in-residence, who created a moody, lightly flowing eight-minute work that had its première in October in Memphis and is now making the rounds of its commissioners: Sidereus, Overture for Small Orchestra, takes its title from Galileo’s 1610 Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal, or Starry, Messenger) recording the astronomer's first telescope observations of the moon. A snatch of a melody, based on a scale fragment Golijov and a colleague devised for another piece, floats pleasantly among and around the sections of the ensemble.
Fogel, now dean of Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of the Performing Arts and still an active advisor to orchestras, deserves a much more substantive musical honor, but the gesture, by the consortium and the composer, is a touching one.
Leonidas Kavakos, 43, is one of the great -- and busiest -- violinists we have. The Greek musician has a remarkable intellect, seemingly effortless technique, and an unusual ability to deliver both deep and quiet introspection and the most explosive and bravura works with equal ability and grace. He won the Sibelius Competition in Helsinki in 1985 and in 1991 was the first and only performer to be allowed to perform and record the initial 1902-04 version of the Sibelius Violin Concerto. Here he played the standard and beloved 1905 revised version and made it his own — or rather he made it Sibelius’s. Thanks to the classic 1959 Heifetz/CSO recording, we so often hear this piece as an extension of the 19th century virtuoso concerto rather than the work with threads of odd originality that Sibelius wrote.
Kavakos brought us quiet meditations and dark, fluctuating moods, all the time connecting with the composer’s unusual harmonies and rhythms, which he had connected with his native, Nordic land. Conlon, too, made the orchestra much more than mere accompaniment and delineated hypnotic and unusual passages of bassoons and basses, 'cello tremolos, and the sense that even the fast sections are more about rocking moves than rollicking. Yet Conlon and Kavakos still seemed to be moving in different worlds with Conlon providing artistic but not technical support.
Most at home in the opera house, Conlon is a longtime advocate of the tragic 1930-32 Shostakovich opera that cost the Soviet composer so much when Stalin turned on it and him in 1936. He gave the much-belated first Metropolitan Opera performance in 1994 and fashioned a suite of 40-plus minutes at that time so that symphonic orchestras and audiences could have experiences with this important and, in the proper hands, chilling and moving work.
To my ears, Conlon has undercut his well-intentioned mission with this piece. The excerpts seem just that, excerpts, pushed up against one another with no apparent logic or flow. In lengthy podium remarks before the performance, Conlon said he had tried to create a sort of symphony out of these snatches. I did not hear that and what I heard was often vulgar, chaotic, unidiomatic, and exhausting. There were passages, too, where the percussion especially was unbearably and inexcusably loud.
There are better ways to express one’s passion for a work. In this case, presenting the opera as an opera makes much more sense.
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