My Saturday July 16 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Friday July 15, 2011 Grant Park Music Festival concert of the Grant Park Orchestra with guest conductor Krzysztof Penderecki and three cello soloists.
Composer-conductor Krzysztof Penderecki backstage at the Pritzker Pavilion. | Jean Lachat~Sun-Times
Penderecki respectful, pleasant at Grant Park in his own work and Beethoven
Grant Park Orchestra with Krzysztof Penderecki
and three cello soloists
♦7;30 p.m. Saturday
♦Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park
♦Free admission
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
Comparing this weekend’s programs on paper, the Grant Park Music Festival had Ravinia beat: a much-admired senior composer, with a strong additional following from Chicago’s large Polish population, conducting one of his own works as well as Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, vs. a stern, elder statesman German conductor and a beloved American pianist in more standard-appearing, all-Brahms programs in Highland Park.
But a paper program can tell you what’s on the schedule, not how it will go over. Thursday night at Ravinia, Christoph von Dohnányi and Emanuel Ax played the first Brahms Piano Concerto together brilliantly and then Dohnányi, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra topped the performance with a deep and rolling Second Symphony. Multiple reports of Friday’s program, with the Second Concerto and the Third Symphony, had it even better.
I won’t object to “too many” concerts on Chicago’s summer schedule. I also certainly think that thousands of people turning out to salute and listen to a composer, Krzysztof Penderecki, 77, whose most famous works, earlier in his career, are initially tough and challenging to many listeners is a wonderful thing.
But the repeat of Penderecki’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 for Three Cellos and Orchestra (2000), given just this March by the CSO with Charles Dutoit and its own cellists John Sharp, Kenneth Olsen, and Katinka Kleijn, did not reveal much new about the work and made it no more interesting to this listener.
At Grant Park, three young international guest performers, Julie Albers (American), Kira Kraftzoff (Russian), and Amit Peled (Israeli) -- international in given names, too: both Kraftzoff and Peled are male -- played the repetitive and interwoven passages of the 35-minute pause-free piece with passion and skill; Albers especially was someone I’d like to hear more from. But little happens in this work, and there is neither thrill nor peace.
Many composers, even major figures of High Modernism such as Pierre Boulez and the late Ralph Shapey, put Beethoven in a unique position of authority and perfection. Penderecki also holds this view. So one was very curious to hear what he would have to say with or to the Eroica. Again, alas, not too much. Respectful, straightforward, pleasant, but neither very striking nor individual, perhaps because of that sense of Beethoven’s untouchability, perhaps because of limited rehearsal time? There were times when certain rhythmic cells -- and there are many in this piece -- seemed to grab the composer-conductor’s additional attention.
Penderecki also has one of the most unusual conducting styles I’ve ever seen: A rare left-hander in the podium world, he uses no baton and gives the appearance, at least, that he conducts with one arm alone until he gives that arm a break and then uses the other one for a similar amount of time before starting the alternation again.
A pre-concert onstage salute to Poland, a free country now for only a little more than 20 years, as it takes the six-month Presidency of the Council of the European Union, was moving to the audience’s Poles and non-Poles alike.
Comments