Chicago Sun-Times, Monday October 3, 2011
Chicago Symphony Orchestra re-creates 1911 homage to Liszt
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
◆ 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
◆ Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan
◆ $29-$209
◆ (312) 294-3000; cso.org
BY ANDREW PATNER
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Europe and Britain can be anniversary-mad in their concert programming. The Bach Year, the Beethoven Year, the Wagner Year, the Britten Year: 50th, 100th, 150th, 200th commemorations of composers’ birthdays and that rather creepy German formulation “deathdays” can swallow up a season and actually diminish in-depth reflection, as has just happened with the double marking of 150 years since the birth of Gustav Mahler and a century since the great symphonist’s death.
Ever doing things his own way, and fond of bridging European and American traditions, Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti has come up with unusual and attractive solutions to note historic figures and events. For the last week of his fall residency, beginning Thursday night, he will re-create Mahler’s last concert as a conductor -- with the New York Philharmonic, as it happened -- before his untimely death in 1911.
Before that, Muti has found a rather ingenious way to mark the 200th birthday of a composer who mattered much more to audiences a century and more ago. For Franz Liszt, Muti is leading the very program that his CSO predecessor Frederick Stock gave with Chicago pianist and pedagogue Rudolph Ganz in 1911 at Orchestra Hall for the Hungarian composer-pianist’s centennial. In doing so, Muti, players and soloists took us into the whole idea of commemorations and of classical fandom.
Liszt (1811-1886) is often held up as an experimentalist and visionary against his friend and son-in-law Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Stock and Muti honored the connection with Wagner’s bombastic and mercifully brief 1864 “Huldigungsmarsch” (Homage March), which Wagner himself never even orchestrated. But this underscored the concept of “Great Men” putting their stamp on each other.
The more serious works on the program were actually tied to another Liszt influence and contemporary, Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). In 1865 the two men presented Liszt’s first piano concerto, with the composer at the keyboard, and Liszt’s 1854-57 A Faust Symphony grew directly out of Berlioz’s friendship and Goethe-inspired music.
Muti invited his close Italian colleague and Liszt devotee Michele Campanella to make a rare U.S. appearance in the 20-minute piano concerto. Campanella, whose only previous CSO outing was 25 years ago in a real rarity, Ferrucio Busoni’s concerto, is something of a fanatic: he is playing only Liszt this year in his many international engagements. But he’s the sort of a fanatic who takes you somewhere near what the composer might have intended rather than into the extremes of personal or stylized passion.
Campanella had some very uncharacteristic wrong notes in some of the piece’s mighty runs, perhaps because he was debuting the new Yamaha concert grand with the very unmusical name of CFX, but otherwise he made this overplayed, too often manipulated piece attractive and brought out its unusual structure of continuous development.
In addition to his very legitimate musical pioneering, so much of Liszt is about taste, or the lack thereof. Some regard his 75-minute Faust work, with its admittedly ingenious idea of having each movement sketch a different character from the poem -- Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopholes -- as his great orchestral accomplishment. I find it bloated and repetitive, especially in contrast to Berlioz’s parallel creations.
The men of the CSO Chorus, drilled effectively by Duain Wolfe, and a slightly overreaching Eric Cutler in the brief but crucial tenor solo made a notable contribution. And as he always does with Liszt, Muti came as close as anyone can to finding the work’s heart, inspiring brilliant wind solos, and making it sound like real music.
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