Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday January 13, 2012 2:32PM CST
Elder’s CSO salute to the Bard goes off the rails
Actor Greg Vinkler captures Falstaff, but musical direction misses
Repeats at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday
Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue
Tickets: (312) 294-3000 and cso.org
BY ANDREW PATNER
SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED
In boxing, you could call it a split decision.
This week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts offer unusual programming: a neglected masterwork, an all-time audience favorite and two rarities, Russian and English musical takes on the Bard, with gifted actors from Chicago Shakespeare Theater animating the textual sources.
But much was undercut Thursday night by slipshod execution by guest conductor Mark Elder, who organized this week’s program as well as last week’s more successful all-Berlioz with Shakespeare venture.
The work that came off best, a Thomas Beecham extraction from Frederick Delius’ English opera A Village Rome and Juliet (1906), was also the slightest. The eight-minute excerpt, “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” (the destination the name of an inn) is the sort of “light music” still enjoyed by some in Britain and once the province of several now-defunct local commercial classical radio stations.
What followed, however, was not limited to paradise. As beloved as some works by Edward Elgar are, his later Falstaff, Symphonic Study, Op. 68 remains a rarity in concert. Daniel Barenboim, then just 29, was stunned that the CSO had never played this deeply insightful 1912-13 portrait of Shakespeare’s merry (and fat) knight until he led it here in 1972. Barenboim was responsible for its most recent Chicago performances in the mid-1990s as well.
Barenboim’s performances emphasized the 35-minute work’s harmonic development -- albeit still well within Elgar’s tonal world -- and complexity, and he showed a love for every skipping eighth note and every sighing or smiling cadence. Elder instead took a bulldozer approach, stating in stage comments beforehand that this is “a brisk” work and chiefly a clever bit of program music.
If there had been any measure-by-measure or harmonic analysis, Elder did not communicate his discoveries to the players. The decision to project written signposts of the work’s “plot” similarly distracted from the musical depth and originality, parallel in accomplishment to the tone poems of Strauss. The music should tell the stories. That’s the composer’s achievement here.
For his part, Chicago actor and Door County, Wisc., Peninsula Players Theatre artistic director Greg Vinkler knows the part of Sir John Falstaff as one of the great humane works of art. His boasts, his postures, and his ultimate deflation by his onetime charge when the boy becomes the man and king, Henry V, were in turn hilarious and devastating. As Prince Hal/Henry, Jürgen Hooper was a perfect foil. (This week, unlike last, the amplification for the spoken-word scenes was just right.)
Four selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Musical Pictures from The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (1903-04) opened the second half, presumably as a lead-in for Tchaikovsky’s late 19th-century Romeo and Juliet, with three of the four “Kitezh” selections having CSO premières Thursday night. The wholly unidiomatic direction seemed to connect these Russian fantasies more with Delius than with the two unidentified but colorfully costumed balalaika players at the stage’s front.
It was brave to conduct Tchaikovsky’s “Fantasy-Overture after Shakespeare” just over a year after CSO music director used it as a triumphant calling card for his new post at his free concert in Millennium Park. In the event it was foolhardy, too. This was the biggest train wreck at a CSO concert in almost 15 years. An increasing lack of coordination from the podium left sections and solo players wrongly exposed; by the final sections of the tightly knit 20-minute piece, the leadership and playing were wholly out of phase. There’s a big difference between having great ideas and making them work in reality.
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