Below is the full version of my review from Saturday's Chicago Sun-Times. Monday night, I also aired the first part of an hour-long interview I had with Boulez on Friday at Orchestra Hall on 98.7WFMT Radio in Chicago and online at wfmt.com. That program will be available online later this week.
I love the concurrence of the three most frequently mixed-up names in classical music in the concert under review.
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Just when you thought that there was nothing more to add to the superlatives that customarily characterize reviews of the concerts of Pierre Boulez with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the highly-respected elder statesmen turned wily magician and pulled two astonishing new rabbits out of his hat last week.
Thursday night in his first Chicago appearance of the season, the CSO's oddly titled "conductor emeritus" offered a new suite of four stunning brief works by his late contemporary Luciano Berio and, with mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, one of our greatest singers, the finest, most revealing performance of the Berlioz 1840-1856 song-cycle Les nuits d'été, this listener has ever heard.
Berio and Boulez were both born in 1925 (Boulez will turn 83 next month, Berio died in 2003) and while their composition careers often intersected -- in Germany in the 1950s, in more recent years in performances Boulez has given with his Ensemble Intercontemporain -- they mostly ran parallel, with Berio focusing on operatic and theatre pieces, highly challenging works for solo instruments, and fascinating reworkings of historic masterworks.
But here Boulez has assembled four occasional pieces from 1978 to 1989 that were rescued by Berio's assistant Brian Roberts and they reveal a strong resonance with Boulez's own venture into large-scale orchestration in his ongoing Notations series. Under the rubric Quatre dédicaces ("Four Dedications"), the suite contains rich and knotty piles of winds brass and strings with unusual subdivisions between solo players and sections and within sections themselves. Festive works of about three minutes each, written for Rome ("Fanfara"), San Francisco ("Entrata"), Dallas ("Festum"), and Rotterdam ("Encore"), they are shots-in-the-arm for the repertoire, collectively and individually.
Berlioz is credited with inventing the orchestral song cycle and his Nuits d'été ("Summer Nights"), Op. 7 has been a part of the standard fare of both orchestras and female vocalists for a century or more. Great artists have sung the six romantic texts of Theophile Gautier at Orchestra Hall and at Ravinia -- Price, Norman, Bartoli, and Graham herself. What made this outing different was Boulez's focus on Berlioz's intent of delicate scoring for a reduced orchestra. From the throbbing of the winds and the quiet layering of the cellos in the opening "Villanelle" through the final measures of the closing "L'île inconnue" ("The Unknown Isle") the work was revealed as both more complex and more ravishing than many might have thought. By having this carefully thought-out context around her, Graham, who can do no wrong, was able further to caress each poem and to hold notes, even the quietest, long enough to create haunting sonorities.
Boulez takes a different approach from most with Stravinsky's great 1911 ballet Petrushka, trying to dial down the hysteria in this story of an ill-starred carnival puppet and let the tensions arise simply from the notes on the page. It's a hard task to carry out and I heard from many reliable sources that it gelled by Saturday night. But this slight dip on Thursday hardly mattered given the miracles of concerts first half.
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