My Saturday May 21 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday May 19, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra program with guest conductor Ludovic Morlot in music of Dutilleux, Jolivet, Tomasi, and Roussel, with CSO principal trumpet Christopher Martin.
Christopher Martin
Morlot's an idiomatic hand and Martin's a trumpet marvel in CSO's mixed 20th-century French program
Solo playing better than the pieces themselves
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. and Tuesday, May 24 at 7:30 p.m.
Although there’s only one printed program and onstage sequence at Orchestra Hall this week, there are essentially two Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts going on in parallel time and space.
One consists of two brief concertos performed with finesse, daring, and imagination by the CSO’s nonpareil principal trumpet, Christopher Martin. These are just about unmissable events.
The other is more problematic -- a survey of thirty years of 20th century French music by composers who ignored or rejected Modernism, all led with knowledgeable skill by guest conductor Ludovic Morlot, the young, French, music-director-designate of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and a reliable visitor to Chicago since fall of 2006.
The two concertos, each composed in 1948, are the weakest compositions of the four works which range from 1930 to 1959. André Jolivet (1905-74) started off as an experimentalist but later came to advocate music “for evasion and relaxation.” His nine-minute one-movement Concertino for Trumpet, String Orchestra, and Piano is a lively ride in this genre and Martin, wrapping up his seventh year with the CSO, handles every mute swap, seemingly impossible high note, and lightning-fast passage as if he need never breathe and has five tongues. Amy Briggs offered expert contributions in her similarly athletic keyboard part.
Henri Tomasi (1901-71) was not even on this level as a serious composer, and certainly not in his 16-minute concerto. “Jazz” riffs all but lifted from Gershwin tunes and orchestral works -- 20 years after An American in Paris and 10 years after the death of that genius -- with a cheap orchestration that must have been heard by the creators of driver’s ed films a decade or so later. If Pierre Boulez grinds his teeth, this was the perfect soundtrack for that activity. Martin’s expert and truly musical contributions to both mellow and animated sections made you want to hear him blow some real jazz soon.
The Second Symphony (“Le double”) of Henri Dutilleux (b. 1916) from 1958-59 stands among the best works of French composers who went their own way despite modern tides. A half-hour piece, it interweaves a 12-member ensemble as “soloist” with the full orchestra “doubling” over three unusual and unpredictable movements filled with French “color.” As in the bumptious 1936 Second Suite from the 1930 ballet Bacchus et Ariane, Op. 43 of Albert Roussel (1869-1937), assistant principal viola Li-Kuo Chang set the high standard for all solo lines and Morlot made each work sound as its composer would have wanted.
Comments