Here's my Tuesday, February 24 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Saturday, February 21, 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with special guest, James Earl Jones.
Lincoln's words pack mighty wallop in CSO tribute
Lincoln resists cheap commercialization and even pushes past platitudes. The uniqueness of our 16th president lies not only in his greatness as a political leader and philosophical figure but also in his essential humanity. Somehow, the more we know or know about Lincoln, the more we are both astonished at his brilliance and successes against so many odds and amazed at his down-to-earth, sensitive, even melancholy humanity.
You could feel these things physically Saturday night at Orchestra Hall when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its special guest, living legend James Earl Jones, launched the first of two performances of a Lincoln tribute program.
Hearing excerpts of the the words of Walt Whitman's elegy to the slain president, "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd," from Jones and then from Lincoln's own Second Inaugural Address, read by Chicago actor Kevin Gudahl, a hush fell over the sold-out hall that had nothing to do with celebrity or enforced piety. The faces in the audience seemed to ask: How was it that one person could write and speak so clearly, so poetically, and inspire such poetry from others?
Using a suite of music drawn from the mid-19th century, including "Home, Sweet Home," as well as the first movement, "Awakening," from Roy Harris's 1944 Sixth Symphony, Gettysburg, and two movements from Robert Russell Bennett's 1929 Abraham Lincoln (A Likeness in Symphony Form), narrator Gerard McBurney, Gudahl, and Jones wove in and out of the music with readings before reaching the closing climax, Aaron Copland's unrivaled Lincoln Portrait of 1942.
Copland understood music and America in a way that rose to almost Lincolnian heights; he could stir, with wholly invented sounds, "the mystic chords of memory" of the country's early days and settlement. His ability to distill and pare down made and makes his joining of selected words of Lincoln with inspirational scoring that always stays this side of hokum one of the great achievements in program music.
Jones knows the legacy of Lincoln well from his own experiences and struggles and those of his family. Born 78 years ago in Arkabutla, Mississippi, Jones is the son of a sharecropper who fled North and became an actor as well. Growing up, Jones had great understanding of his Black, whit, and Native American Southern ancestry. Saturday, he seemed to pick a deliberately low-key approach to his readings, although he also could have been settling into the role. But if we leaned in to hear "what Abe Lincoln said," we were surely rewarded by the actor's thoughtful recitations.
James Gaffigan, the associate conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, led the music ably and handled the incongruously programmed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony decently after intermission. Why he was brought in for these concerts instead of any of a number of excellent young Chicago-based conductors is one of those CSO puzzles that not even a Lincoln could solve.
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